The iPad has just launched in the UK, queues are long, stock is short, and it is yet another successful new product from Apple. The iPad has frustrations, like no Adobe Flash support for web browsing, no Java, no printing, and the general sense that you do things the Apple way or not at all. Still, users love it and are willing to pay for it, and in the end that is what matters.

Does this shiny gadget have any relevance to the more humdrum world of business IT? I think it does, especially when taken together with other factors. Here's a remark from Apple CEO Steve Jobs from an informal email conversation with Ryan Tate:

The times they are a changin', and some traditional PC folks feel like their world is slipping away. It is.

Yes, it's a Bob Dylan reference; read the entire thread to see why. Jobs is marketing his company's stuff, of course, but a few days later the stock market put some solid evidence behind his claim. Apple's market capitalisation surpassed that of Microsoft for the first time since 1989. Microsoft remains more profitable; but the figures reflect the market's judgment that Apple has better prospects for growth.

Another sign of change comes from one of Microsoft's most important partners, HP. At the end of April it acquired Palm, and with it the WebOS operating system for mobile devices. Whether HP can make a success of WebOS is uncertain; it will not be easy going up against Apple and Google Android. What is more significant is the implication that HP has finally lost faith in Microsoft's ability to get it right in mobile.

Despite some positive buzz around Windows Phone 7, Microsoft did not help its case when it announced a major reshuffle in its Entertainment and Devices division on May 25th. This follows the bewildering launch of the Kin phone - bewildering because it seems right out on its own in terms of strategy - complete with typical Microsoft flaws according to this thoughtful review:

But the obtuseness of this user experience doesn't stop with the Spot -- it permeates the entire interface as though decisions about how things should work were made almost arbitrarily, without anyone stopping to test them in the real world. The Twitter implementation is a great example of that. You can add your Twitter account to the phone and see updates from people you follow, and you can update your status from the top of the Loop... but that's all you can do. You can't retweet something, you can't send a direct message, you can't go to single person's feed to see all their updates, and you can't even open a link in a Twitter message from the Loop!

Windows Phone 7 will have to be much, much better if Microsoft is to claw back any ground in mobile.

I digress. All that matters is that the world is changing, and looking less Microsoft-shaped with each passing day.

In saying that, I don't mean to diminish the excellent work which I see coming out of some parts of Microsoft - Visual Studio 2010, for example - or to ignore the continuing dominance of the company in many areas of business IT. Many companies still standardise on Windows, and Microsoft Office remains the only productivity suite I come across in work.

All true, but the two great IT trends of today are not centred on Windows and Office. One is mobile, the other is cloud computing; and of course there is synergy between them. Apple's iPad is a further advance for mobile, and will drive increasing mobile data usage and increasing demand both for iPad/iPhone applications and for web applications that work well on those devices.

 

 

 

Well, Apple's iPad was something of a letdown, wasn't it? The most anticipated product since the iPhone launched onto the global stage not with a bang, nor with a whimper, but with what can only be described as an embarrassed shuffle.

You could tell that things were starting to go awry even as Steve Jobs sat down in the comfy chair onstage to carry out the demo. He was scrolling happily through several web pages, blissfully ignoring the fact that the first one he went to - the New York Times - simply didn't work as it was intended. Why? Because apparently, just like its smaller brother, the iPad doesn't support Adobe Flash.



Tim Anderson wrote recently about the need to develop for the mobile Internet. Mobile search and location-based services will drive the mobile web. Mobile advertising has been growing slower than expected -- recently, research firm EMarketer anticipated a $1.1 billion spend by 2012. The financial downturn has slowed developments, but the potential for mobile Internet revenues is staring us in the face, nevertheless.

This is why Jobs' demo last Wednesday is so significant. The iPad is flawed in many respects. It has no camera. There are no standard ports on the thing. It costs more than many net books, and yet its operating system is locked down. But one of the biggest flaws is that without Flash, many of the sites that we would like to visit are not available.

Such is Adobe's chagrin that its platform evangelist Lee Brimelow published a list of websites including Google Finance, Disney, CNN, popular American media streaming site Hulu, and Facebook application Farmville. None of them were without Flash, meaning that none of them will work on the iPad.

Apple's decision to eschew Flash on the iPhone was irritating enough for Adobe, but to do it on a tablet device that Apple hopes will replace the laptop for many consumers sitting on the couch in the evenings is no less than a declaration of war. Adobe needs to promote itself in new markets like this one, where everything is at stake, and Apple is making it very difficult.

Adobe definitely has cause to worry. Apple's share of the mobile market is only 2.7%, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. On the other hand, it sold 99.4% of all mobile applications last year. People buying Apple's mobile devices use them in ways that users of other mobile platforms do not, and Adobe will be well aware of this, as will Microsoft, which offers the competing Silverlight technology.

And looming on the horizon is a potential game changer: HTML 5. This as-yet unratified technology is nevertheless being supported in its unratified perform in many browsers. It is vastly more functional than HTML 4. Web developers can display video using it, without having to resort to Flash. They can produce HTML-only pages that enable you to drag and drop anything, and edit any content. This is why Google Wave, the search engine giant's revolutionary new online messaging system, was built in HTML 5. It looks and feels like a desktop application.

HTML 5 cannot claim to do as much as Flash can, but it may do enough. Apple, which itself likes to dominate all aspects of its business, doesn't like it when other companies like Adobe dominate a single part of the online experience. What Jobs may have been imagining when he scrawled through that broken site last week was a world in which it used HTML 5 -- and in which Adobe was increasingly irrelevant.

What does that mean for IT professionals and web developers today? It means that understanding HTML 5 as it develops, and honing your skills in this exciting new technology, might not be a bad bet. As this new decade rolls on, you will find it looking more and more attractive on your CV.

Mobile devices are today's development battleground. Timing is everything: I recall Borland's 2003 conference when it introduced an extensive mobile development strategy based on the ill-fated C++ BuilderX, with SDKs from Nokia and Symbian. The sessions drew sparse attendance and Borland later abandoned the product, returning to the Windows-oriented C++ Builder.

So what changed? In part, devices have become more powerful and mobile internet access faster and more pervasive, making the platform more attractive. A bigger factor though is Apple's iPhone. In hindsight, the mobile vendors and operators made mobile development too difficult, with fragmented platforms and locked-down devices. Microsoft has had some success extending Windows to mobile devices, for enterprise development in either C++ or .NET, but its market share is too small, the devices insufficiently well liked, and the deployment obstacles too great. Java had some success too, but write-once, run anywhere never really worked for mobile.

Enter iPhone, with a single platform and easy deployment through the App Store. The "easy deployment" part has to be qualified, since developers have been confronted with limited access to the device, restrictions on what they can develop, and an opaque approval process; but it has worked, and the potential of the mobile platform - about which we have known for years - is now being unlocked.

Other vendors are belatedly rising to the challenge. I'm just back from Nokia's Qt Developer Days, and saw the energy the company is putting into creating a cross-platform, open source mobile development framework. Windows Mobile, Maemo and Symbian are on the immediate roadmap. On the deployment side, Nokia has the Ovi store. I've also been at Adobe's MAX in Los Angeles, where broad mobile support for the Flash runtime was the big story. The Flash runtime is not coming to iPhone yet, but Adobe has a native compiler for Flash applications which targets iPhone. Adobe also has app store plans. Google Android is another platform where all the pieces are in place, and Palm Web OS a new hopeful on the scene.

This means developers now have numerous choices for mobile development, as well as more pressure to create or extend applications to embrace mobile clients. It is not an easy choice. An AJAX application will work on the iPhone and elsewhere, but there is no offline support or access to device features, and the capabilities of mobile browsers vary greatly - though Webkit is becoming a standard on non-Windows devices. Native iPhone works great on Apple's device, but nowhere else. Flash is becoming interesting, but devices with 10.1 will not be around until next year and it is an unproven platform in a mobile context. Windows Mobile will trudge on, though Microsoft's mobile story seems particularly incoherent at present and I expect declining market share. Java on mobile has not gone away either; and Google Android is pretty much a Java platform. C++ will always be attractive for lean, fast applications.

It is fun to pick winners and losers, but impossible to tell how all this will shake out. Here's two safe bets. The first is that mobile, internet-connected applications are in many ways the future of the client. The second is that focusing on a strong web services API (of whatever flavour) is the right place to start. What's your mobile strategy?

The Apple Mac's OS X is a gorgeous operating system, beloved by its users, but outside the niche world of designers and musicians it is generally not the one used in business. It's an odd situation that puts pressure on system administrators to accommodate Macs into their systems, either from the aforementioned designers, or from eager home Mac users who want to enjoy it at work as well.

Last week Apple released OS X Snow Leopard, also known as OS 10.6. I was at Apple's flagship store in Regent St, London following a press briefing, and watching throngs of people line up to purchase their upgrades left me in no doubt about the Mac's continuing success. Nevertheless, because of its high price and lack of business penetration the Mac remains a minority choice. The figures are slippery, but it may be around 10% of the US market by units, 20% by value (the difference showing how expensive they are), while worldwide it is much smaller.

Now Apple has introduced native support for Exchange as a key feature of Snow Leopard, apparently giving admins one less reason to deny would-be corporate Mac users. Is it enough?

Unfortunately the Exchange support still falls short. I've spent several days working almost exclusively in the new OS, and explored the new Exchange support in Snow Leopard. Although there is a lot to like, such as deep integration with Mail, iCal and tasks, there are snags. For a start, you need Exchange 2007 SP1, and earlier versions remain common. Even if that is in place, Snow Leopard's Exchange support still falls short of Outlook on Windows. The new feature is based on Exchange Web Services (EWS), which do not expose all the features of Exchange.

I found myself missing features like the ability to send on behalf of another user, and access to public folders. Another practical problem is that unless Exchange is configured with EWS in mind, it might not work at all, especially when trying to connect over the public internet. Outlook has its problems, but its ability to use RPC over HTTP, avoiding the need for a VPN connection, is a brilliant feature. It is also strong at seamless online/offline support, stronger than Apple Mail. I'm also not convinced that Mail's new Exchange support is quite done, as evidenced by several crashes like this one:

The real issues are broader than this. Macs still fit awkwardly into Windows-based networks. System administrators like standardisation: standard application deployments, standard operating system builds that can be zapped and re-imaged; standard configurations that can be enforced using Windows group policy. The presence of Macs adds unwelcome complication.

There's also the matter of application compatibility. If your business depends on some little application written in Visual Basic 6 or Microsoft Access, for example, you have to figure out a way for Mac users to run it, by emulation, or terminal services, or some other route.

In the short term then, Snow Leopard will not transform Enterprise Mac adoption. Nevertheless, the Mac is a huge influence, beyond what its market share implies. Further, if a significant number of users are using Windows grudgingly, wishing they were not, that is not good for productivity.

Here's three suggestions. The first is to think cross-platform. The past is the past; but for new applications it is short-sighted to target only Windows. I suspect this lesson has largely been learned, but it still bears repeating. Have a cross-platform client - Silverlight may help for .NET developers, or there is Adobe Flash/Flex, or Java, or pure Web applications, to mention a few solutions.

Second, learn from Apple. Microsoft is doing so, and Windows 7 is the evidence. An interview I did with Bill Buxton last year gives further background.

Third, is it really so hard to accommodate Macs? Yes, there are still issues, and different factors apply in every organization, but few problems are insurmountable.

Incidentally, I am no Mac Zealot. I actually like Windows, and although I'm currently immersed in OS 10.6, I intend to go back to using a PC most of the time. Some things are better on the Mac, some things are not, and most things are more expensive. It does pay though to have users working in the environment they prefer; and where that is possible, it makes sense to allow it.

There is a kind of Windows 7 fever sweeping the Web right now. Some observers are getting carried away:

As a person who performs almost every computing task on a Mac and tells anyone who will listen that at this point, the average consumer should be using a Mac instead of a Windows machine because of security and usability, I'm starting to prep myself for the single moment that I thought would never come: I'll be using a Windows 7 machine as my main computer and telling anyone who will listen that, believe it or not, using the latest Microsoft operating system really is worth it. [Don Reisinger]

I've spent a lot of time in Windows 7 these last few weeks, and in some ways I see what he means. It has a smoothness and elegance that is lacking in Vista, though it is there to some extent in Server 2008. But let's be clear: the popular view that Vista is rubbish and Windows 7 is great does not stand up to close analysis, for one simple reason. It is just not sufficiently different. Microsoft actually makes a positive of this characteristic, explaining how preserving the core architecture of Vista ensures good application and driver compatibility and therefore a smooth upgrade.

What about Windows 7 versus the Mac? I agree that Windows 7 is superficially more Mac-like; and more important, that the factors that made Vista such an unpleasant experience for some (not all) early adopters will not apply. I'm thinking of things like laptops that were underspecified, or had buggy drivers, or barely adequate graphics hardware, or that were weighed down with so much foistware that Windows would hardly run. However, other factors that make users prefer Macs will not have changed. There is the control Apple exerts over both hardware and software; its design excellence; the fact that Apple is less tolerant of legacy software, whereas Microsoft has Windows jump through hoops to keep it running,adding complexity and inconsistency; and there is the absence on the Mac of the culture of chaos that afflicts Windows. I'll leave aside religious arguments about Unix vs Windows, though it is a matter of record that OS X has to date proven far more secure, for whatever reason.

Let's ask some awkward questions. Will a substantial number of Windows 7 machines fall victim to viruses, worms, trojans and botnets? Almost certainly. Will Windows 7 from time to time flummox users with obscure errors like "the system could not find the file specified"? Almost certainly. Will some Windows 7 machines be built down to a price and be sold with obvious design flaws and insufficent attention to quality? Almost certainly. Will some vendors wreck the sweet install experience Microsoft has created by imposing their own clunky utilities and third-party trialware on top? Almost certainly. Will the Windows 7 event log become populated with perplexing entries like "The Workstation service terminated with the following error: The redirector is in use and cannot be unloaded." (plucked from my Windows 7 beta 1 laptop)? Almost certainly.

Let me add that I realise how smooth and reliable a well-managed Windows machine can be. Further, while I have had some frustrations with Vista it has always been stable for me and I have never wanted to go back to XP. Vista, then, is better than its reputation; Windows 7 is better than Vista but will have trouble living up to the proclamations made by its more enthusiastic admirers.

"Developers, Developers, Developers" is the famous rant of Microsoft's Steve Ballmer. Maybe he picked the wrong word. I'm just back from the Remix 08 conference in Brighton, where the company's Principal Researcher Bill Buxton spoke on software design. He made a big impression, especially when he suggested in an interview that unless Microsoft changes its culture in a way that put design at the core of its software, the company would die.

Underlying this is the ascendancy of Apple, widely admired for its design, and the mixed fortunes of Windows Vista, which was meant to have great design but in practice has plenty of irritations many of which are design issues. There is a tendency to think of design as primarily about graphics and layout, but this view is too narrow. Design is about the user's experience, and encompasses all kinds of user interaction.

Few companies have the resources of Apple or Microsoft; but raised expectations of what constitutes good or even acceptable design affect the whole industry, including developers of internal applications as well as web site authors. Design failures are frustrating for users; and the consequence is that software is used less, and satisfaction is lower.

An example which comes to mind has no graphics at all. A certain telecom company with a colourful name has a telephone menu system which is unavoidable if you need to call support. Whenever I have to use it, I feel my blood pressure rising before dialling the number. I know I will have to go through numerous layers before being allowed to speak to a human. I know I will be given mandatory choices, none of which apply to me, forcing me to lie. I know each step will be ponderous, with a recorded messages I have heard before, and invitations to use the web site instead - if I thought that would do, why would I call? If you call outside working hours, you are taken through all the steps and told right at the end that the office is closed, goodbye. When I do eventually speak to someone, I am already in a bad temper.

This is the consequence of poor design. I could reel off countless further examples, such as Microsoft Outlook 2007, with its obscure dialogs - click Message Options to show email headers, very clear NOT - its habit of blaming the user for its own shortcomings, "The data file was not closed properly," and its slow performance with large mailboxes. Some of these are technical issues, but because they directly damage the user experience, they are also design problems.

Enough ranting. The interesting question is how developers and designers can work together to improve software design at every level. Buxton talks about continuous design, where designers participate in the development process throughout, rather than only at the beginning of a project, or even worse, only at the end. It is a good thought; but as the panel discussions at Remix demonstrated, there is no consensus about how the developer/designer relationship should work.

There are signs of change. Tools are appearing which have both developers and designers in mind, such as Microsoft's Expression Blend which can open Visual Studio solutions, or Adobe's product codename Thermo, which converts artwork into application code. That said, it is people rather than tools that hold the key. It is about developers ceding some of their power to designers; and about designers learning more about the constraints under which developers work; and about learning to treat poor user experience as a defect. It is not easy; but teams that get this right will gain a substantial commercial advantage.