if connected

Everyone knows the biggest battles in technology are today being fought by a small number of large organizations. We intuitively know who these great powers are: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and maybe Microsoft. But we’re not so clear on what it is that makes those particular companies the key protagonists rather than other equally large digital companies — Samsung, Sony, Nokia and Yahoo! among them — who appear to be sidelined.

Calling this a battle, or “The Great Tech War of 2012″, misses the point. It’s far too negative a sentiment when these companies’ main focus is on long term strategy. They are aiming to construct a future in which their products and profits will prosper.

These great digital powers are now building Digital Civilizations, rather than a series of mere products, individual platforms or even ecosystems (around a platform). They are pursuing strategies that reach far beyond the confines of existing markets. They are causing widespread market collisions as they push industries to overlap, merge or cease to exist. They are outflanking and disrupting companies that follow less ambitious corporate strategies.

These new Digital Civilizations use identity to tie numerous disparate products, many devices, multiple platforms and product portfolios together into their long term strategy. Each Civilization has hundreds of millions of active users — often with credit cards attached — far more than even the largest telecom operators or media companies. They straddle industries rather than operating within legacy market sectors. They have an organizing ideology underlying their strategy that motivates and attracts talented employees, excites partners, and is the foundation for the marketing that entices users to become their customers.

What defines these Digital Civilizations? What makes them new and different? Many organizations, companies, industry consortiums, and companies have parts of this strategy in place within their current products. But the new Digital Civilizations have all of the following characteristics:  Read the rest of this entry »

This era is so much more than just a ‘Post PC’ age. Numerous other devices are being sidelined too as both their reasons to exist and their business models are disrupted.

Yes, we have switched from a unipolar PC world to a multipolar device era where smartphones, eReaders, tablets, connected TVs and many other smart connected devices are finally becoming viable. In this new digital era the PC remains extremely important. In every country, household PC penetration is rising, even in countries such as the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden where PC penetration is already 92%, 87% and 87% respectively. [Source: Eurobarometer 335, E-Communications Household Survey, European Union].

Yet despite this continued success, the PC is still being sidelined.

The most significant innovations are now happening outside of the PC market. Even at Microsoft, the major user experience innovations that will be incorporated into the upcoming PC OS, Windows 8, were pioneered on Microsoft’s smartphone OS, Windows Phone 7, or on the xBox360 games console.

For those companies that lost out in the PC era, like Apple, it’s useful to market this era as a ‘Post PC’ one as that re-defines the market battlefield in a way that favours the strengths of their products: around highly mobile iOS-powered iPhones and iPads, rather than Windows PCs. Steve Jobs successfully changed the battlefield in just this way with his speeches about the iPad in early 2010. Yet Apple continues to innovate with its traditional computer products with imminent launch of iCloud and Mac OS X Lion.

So, when Apple talks about ‘Post PC’ what Apple really means is that this will be a ‘Post Windows’ future.

But whether we call this Post Windows’ or ‘Post PC’ both terms are too narrow a view of the innovative disruption that is transforming the Internet, consumer electronics, media, advertising, navigation, retailing, and almost every aspect of life.

It’s not just the PC that’s being sidelined. Numerous devices are becoming obsolescent as they too are disrupted, so this new era is also:

• Post Phone — Mobile phones are now routinely smart and consumers often choose to buy a phone that is not the best phone but instead choose a mobile handset with the best apps, Facebook access and Internet browsing delivered with a great user experience. If call quality, signal reception, and battery life were the key factors for consumers buying phones then Nokia’s market position would not be in free fall.
• Post Print — Paper books, magazines and newspapers are being replaced by digital distribution and business models on PC-accessible websites, eReaders, smartphones and tablets.
• Post TV — The TV set is no longer the only way to watch TV. Increasingly, it’s not even the main way. Traditional broadcasters are offering live and recorded TV programmes on their own websites or through special services such as Netflix, Hulu, iPlayer or many others. People are choosing what device to watch TV on based upon whatever screen is most convenient. Old metrics such as the number of TV sets per household are irrelevant. Instead, the new metrics are how many TV-capable screens does each person have available, what size is that screen — from very small such as on a smartphone, to enormous living room projectors — and is it mobile and usable at any time of the day or night wherever that person is?
• Post disc — Music, TV, software and games used to be distributed on physical media. With the arrival of digital games distribution systems such as Valve’s Steam or OnLive, streaming video and music subscriptions, people no longer need optical disk drives. The latest generation of light laptop computers forego that drive. Games consoles and home music systems will go the same way soon.

Those that are talking about ‘Post PC’ are right that this is a new digital era. We’re long past ‘Web 2.0′ but the term ‘Post PC’ does not describe this new era adequately. It’s so much more. It’s post so many many devices, business models, and companies.

In a future post I will set out how to describe this new era.

A while ago I wrote about how to set up a modern Mac to boot into Windows (or Linux), as well as Mac OS, but using three hard drive partitions. As standard, the Mac OS Boot Camp utility only works with two (see Tips for setting up Bootcamp with three partitions)

Due to the amount of video and photos I’m creating now, I wanted to get rid of that third hard drive partition so as to make more space for Mac OS. But deleting the additional partitions caused Windows on the Boot Camp partition to stop working. If this happens to you here’s how to fix, or to avoid:

To avoid the problem – Instead of deleting the additional partition, resize it to be the smallest amount possible (in my case about 800MB) instead using Disk Utility. This third partition should be between the Mac partition and the Boot Camp partition on your disk.

To fix, if you’ve already deleted it and gone to two partitions:
- Resize the Mac OS partition to be about 900MB smaller.
- Create a new 3rd partition in the newly unused disk space and call it the same name as your original 3rd partition.
- That’s it!

Don’t touch the actual Boot Camp partition at any time with Disk Utility or the Boot Camp utility during the above steps, unless you feel braver than me.

After the pain of trying to download Windows 7 and failing repeatedly (you need to use Internet Explorer which installs an Akamai download manager), I’ve installed the beta on a Mac using Boot Camp. I’ve previously used Vista 32bit on the same machine. Win7 seems to be working fine.

So far, only had time for initial impressions:-

• Appearance – Looks very like Vista with the exception of the start bar and the system tray. I rather liked Vista’s look — especially the translucent window border — so this isn’t bad by me. But if Microsoft is trying to distance Windows 7 from Vista then they should try harder!
• Memory – Idle memory on start-up is lower than Vista. I’m not sure how much lower as I’m making a guesstimate by comparing this vanilla install with a Vista that had many applications set-up, some of which ran on start.
• Sleep/wake – Goes in and out faster than my old Vista install, but slower than XP or Mac OS.
• Functionality – It really doesn’t seem much different. The only enhancement I’ve noticed and liked is that the ‘tray’ icon for the current WiFi network shows signal strength. The hyped ‘jump’ menus from the application task bar icons seem a little pointless.
• Boot camp / running on a Mac – The Vista Apple boot camp hardware drivers installed just as they would on Vista and seem to be working. This appears to confirm that there is little under the bonnet difference. I will try running Windows 7 under VM Ware Fusion later this week.

Every time I set up a new computer it seems to take ages. I’ve wondered how much of that pain were subjective perceptions caused by the number of clicks / restarts vs the actual time taken.

This time I kept note.

The new laptop has both Windows XP and Mac OS installed. I can make comparisons as both Mac and Windows are using the same hardware.

Scorecard Windows XP, using bootcamp. (Note, this could have taken longer: I downloaded Windows updates on an above average speed connection (12Mbps), apps had been downloaded ahead):-

• Windows = 23 minutes for XP itself (SP2).
• Windows updates = 42 minutes. Included four reboots to install and update Windows.
• Drivers = 14m… another reboot
• Windows applications = 124 minutes, including a further two reboots.

Windows total = 203 minutes, or 23 minutes over three hours, with seven reboots. But I’ve not still not migrated across all my data yet or tweaked all the numerous application preferences. The worst of it was that I had to be present for every minute.

Mac OS = Unsure exactly, as I didn’t need to do much and left it running, probably about three hours in total.

The Mac ‘migration assistant’ is one of the Mac’s best kept secrets. It will transfer everything from either another Mac or a Time Machine backup. For me, it copied across all my applications (including third party ones, both paid and free), preferences and documents. I left it running which made it feel painless.

I fell of my chair when I realised what it had successfully done and how much effort it saved me.

Migrating to a Mac is about as painful as migrating from one PC to another. But migrating from an old Mac to a new one is absolutely simple, provided both run Leopard.

Doesn’t matter how fast a gadget or a PC’s components are on paper. All that matters is how fast something feels in use. Examples:

• Writing a letter on a PC is only faster if the user types faster than handwriting. Give someone an unfamiliar azerty keyboard and the same PC will feel slow.
• Crashes don’t just lose data, they slow users down even if no data is lost, as users have to re-launch apps or reboot.
• Same kit can behave at different speed. This laptop shuts down in between 30 seconds and two minutes in Vista. But in Mac OS it takes just 8-10 seconds.
• iPhone feels fast as it shows a stock image of each application while the app loads. There’s also no hourglass to remind the user that something is happening slowly.
• Having to slide out the qwerty keyboard on my Windows Mobile TyTn then typing an SMS, takes longer than tapping on the iPhone keypad to send a short SMS.
• Nintendo DS games automatically remember what stage a player is at; PSP games often don’t. Or on resuming, many PSP games force players to go back to a checkpoint. The gameplay repetition that results makes the PSP feel slow.
• Downloading a game in the latest PS3 OS software feels faster than it did. Why? It’s now possible to download in the background and for the console to auto-power off when the download finishes. Result: user doesn’t have to sit and wait before being able to turn off power. Download still takes the same length of time.

All users care about is how fast something feels. Not what the hardware specs say.

I’ve been struck by the amount of anti-Vista rhetoric around, which for the most part is at complete odds with my experiences with Vista to date.

I think one issue is that Vista simply isn’t a good fit with the mood of the times. Perhaps in part because of the long lag between goals being set/development starting and with the much later date Vista was released.
The new design for the Start menu provides a great example. For the most part, the new design is good. With XP, I always reverted to the ‘Classic’ layout in preference to its new look, but with Vista I’ve chosen to keep the standard Vista menu layout on my PC as I prefer it.

However, the way ‘shut down’ works in Vista is so completely against the energy saving, low carbon, mood of the times (at least in Europe) I’m astounded Microsoft has shipped Vista this way. I can only put it down to a bit of a version 1.0 thing with the completely re-worked interface.

Examples of the Zeitgeist: Today BT, the incumbent telco, press released ways for small businesses to lower their carbon footprint. Australia has announced it will be banning tungsten light bulbs in favour of low energy lighting; the UK and Europe are talking about following suit. Yesterday Al Gore launched, ‘Current TV’ in the UK, and was persistently quizzed about his climate change movie in interviews. Both major UK politcal parties are falling over themselves to make policy announcements about climate change…

Back to Vista: The main ‘off’ button on the menu actually activates a ‘sleep’ mode which continues to use a significant amount of power (and on my PC the main fan keeps going too, which according to the Microsoft site it shouldn’t). The real shut down is now hidden off a side menu that I suspect many novice users will not find.

I understand the benefits of ‘sleep’. But most of those benefits also apply to the much lower power usage ‘hibernate’ mode. Microsoft has simply made the wrong choice here. It doesn’t match today’s zeitgeist. Microsoft needs to be proactive in rectifying the behavior or the company’s critics will have another brick to throw.