I don't think I've ever bought anything based on the e-mails that Amazon.com sends along suggesting stuff based on my purchase activities. (Sometimes their recommendations are of no interest whatsover; other times, they're so dead-on I've already bought the item in question...from someone else.)
But I know for sure I'm not going I won't buy the Spanish-language edition of a Dummies book I recently bought in English:
Microsoft's Alex Kochis has blogged an explanation of the glitch behind last weekend's Windows Genuine Advantage screwup that left users being told their copies of Windows were pirated, and Vista users having features like Aero and ReadyBoost disabled. In short, buggy preproduction code accidentally got rolled out to the production servers that verify whether a copy of Windows is legit or not. Oops!
Kochis's post is pretty detailed, humble, and up-front. But I hope it's only the start of Microsoft's response to the weekend mess. If a copy protection scheme can leave thousands of paying customers with their copies of Windows disabling functionality and accusing them of using pirated copies of the OS, it's simply too fragile to trust. Even if this particular problem never crops up again. (And this recent unpleasantness is far from the first time that WGA has caused trouble.)
One way to ensure that WGA would never again waste the time of a Microsoft customer would be to do away with it. I don't believe that's an unthinkable option given that most of the world's software developers seem to fare well without making their customers jump though WGA-like hoops. (And hey, Bill Gates managed to become the world's richest man back when WGA didn't exist.) Intuit's abandonment of product activation in 2003 provides an admirable precedent. I concede that it's very unlikely that Microsoft will cave on WGA, though--at least not at this point.
As I've said before, I have no basic issue with Microsoft taking steps to thwart pirates, as long as it doesn't punish paying customers in multiple ways...which is what WGA has a track record of doing. So here are a few ideas on how it can make its copy protection more tolerable:
1. Reset it, don't tweak it. I don't think minor adjustments to WGA's functionality will resolve the basic issues it has. If we're going to have WGA at all, we need an anti-piracy technology based on a fundamentally different, less intrusive approach.
2. Make it simple. Among the problems with WGA is that it's so frickin' complicated. (Reading this document about "Reduced Functionality Mode," which is only one aspect of the scheme, makes my head spin.) What WGA does, and how it does it, should be straightforward and predictable--no nasty surprises.
3. Make it less punitive. Microsoft's responses to complaints over the last few days have included somewhat defensive comments about how the WGA glitch didn't actually disable anyone's copy of Windows. But it did shut off features that Microsoft has touted as major reasons to give it hundreds of dollars for Windows Vista based on its inability to accurately tell a real copy of Windows from a fake. Unless Microsoft can assure that paying customers will never, ever be penalized by WGA, it needs to make the damage that WGA does far less sweeping. How about a week-long grace period before it does anything at all?
4. Make it less accusatory. Kochis's post today says that the glitch resulted in customers being told their copies of Windows weren't genuine. I've seen that message myself, and I'm pretty sure in that case that the copy of Windows was real--it was one that Microsoft had sent me. "We kind of think there's a chance that your copy of Windows might be fake, but there's really no way to know for sure--our apologies if we're wrong" would be a message more in line with WGA's current capabilities.
5. Stop the constant need for revalidation. The way that Microsoft makes you revalidate your copy of Windows as genuine most every time you download from its site may help foil pirates. But its a shabby way to treat paying customers, and it's not particularly clear why hundreds of millions of people whose copies of the OS are unquestionably legit need to be put through the rigmarole. (Microsoft pitches WGA as a customer benefit given that it'll tell you if someone has sold you a counterfeit copy of Windows; if you bought your PC from HP, Dell, Gateway, Sony, Best Buy, Circuit City, CompUSA, or any of dozens of other companies, there's no reason on earth why you would want to be put through ongoing anti-piracy checks on a copy of the OS which Microsoft surely got paid for.)
6. Make the marketing less patronizing. No more happy shiny people endorsing WGA, please. No more selling of it as a customer benefit. Just explain that it's an inconvenience that Microsoft puts customers through in order to make life difficult for software pirates.
7. Change the name. Normally, I'd be the last one to suggest that Microsoft change the name of something. But there's nothing advantageous about Windows Genuine Advantage, and it's hard to take it very seriously as long as its very name insults your intelligence. How about calling it Windows Anti-Piracy Validation?
For years, Microsoft's monopolistic position in operating systems has allowed it to treat its customers like they couldn't take their business elsewhere. I believe we're at the beginning of an era in which the company will have to work much, much harder to keep our business. Rethinking WGA from the ground up would be a good start...
Most annoying to me is having to run WGA to obtain a validation number before I can download certain "updates"-read "repairs" to a faulty OS. If my OS was genuine last month, I assume that it is still genuine this month. If MS can send updates to my machine on AUG 24 when auto-updates is always turned off, their intruisive, and maybe illegal,probes should also be able to read my last validation number which I assume is hiding someplace on my hard drive.
L D Taylor
Microsoft is a train wreck waiting to happen. They are treating their customers like thieves at exactly the moment in time viable alternatives exist. And, for the real thieves, the Chinese, they cut the price to $60. That says it all, no?
If only Macs had as wide software support like MS does, then the end of MS would be closer.
It's been a pretty busy news day-we know for sure that Apple will announce new iPods next Wednesday, and rumors about a Googlephone are reaching fever pitch. I may get around to blogging about this stuff. But right this very moment, I'm sitting in my living room, staring at my TV--and its picture, which is little more than a thin horizontal line of color surrounded by blackness.
My set--a 27-inch Panasonic tube I bought around a decade ago--is dead, dead, dead...or at least its tube is. That means I need to get a new TV, which means I'll finally step into the world of HDTV. I'm excited, but intimidated, too, by the gazillion things I need to do to get there.
For one thing, I need to decide what kind of TV to buy. I'm so early in that decision process that I'm still conidering both cheap little 26-inch 720p LCDs and relatively pricey 56-inch 1080p DLP monsters. My guess is that I'll kinda split the different and wind up buying a 40- or 42-inch 1080p LCD or plasma, but you never know.)
For another thing, as I stare at the jumble of devices sitting on and near my Panasonic, I'm a little daunted by how many things I'll need to do to get HDTV content into whatever new TV I buy. I'm going to have to replace both my DirecTV satellite dish and its set-top box. My TiVo, which I upgraded with a 300GB hard drive, and which carries no monthly fee, only does standard def. Same thing for my DVD player/burner, and my game console (a Wii). Unless I upgrade most all of these devices--which may cost more than I'll spend on the TV itself--my entertainment center will remain decidedly SD, not HD.
I'm still looking forward to this journey, though. I always told myself I'd go high-definition all at once, but now I'm thinking that I'll get the TV in the next few days, and replace the other components one-by-one. Right now, I'm stuck with a TV that can't even display standard definition TV, so just about anything would be a step in the right direction,
(Side note: I have and love a Slingbox, and it'll really come in handy while I'm TV-less: I can watch all the DirecTV and TiVo stuff I want on my notebook and desktop PC's displays.)
I'm usually not much of a fan of mergers in the technology industry. More players means more competition, and that usually means better products at lower prices. And in the PC market in particular, there are so few major companies that any merger means major consolidation, almost by definition.
But today's news that Acer will acquire Gateway is...okay. Maybe even a positive development for consumers.
For one thing, it's not a melding of behemoths along the lines the HP-Compaq merger. Gateway is still the third-largest seller of PCs in the U.S., but it's struggled for years--not a situation that benefits its customers--and Taiwan-based Acer, a major brand in much of the world, is still in the process of rebuilding its presence in the U.S. There's relatively little overlap between the two--Gateway made its name selling PCs direct, for instance, while Acer has intentionally focused on marketing through resellers. Assuming the merger goes through, it should result in one solid company that will still have to work hard to lure customers from Dell and HP, which dominate the U.S. market.
Moreover, Dell and HP will have to work hard, too--I'll bet they're at least a little paranoid over today's news. This merger unquestionably shows that Acer will take on the American market in a big way, and I think there's a good chance that everybody involved will end up under pressure to cut prices more aggressively than they would have if Acer and Gateway had remained separate.
The merger will leave Acer in control of the Acer, Gateway, and eMachines names, and part of today's news is that the company also plans to acquire Packard Bell. (I'm assuming/hoping it won't attempt to revive that battered brand in the U.S., where it's associated with troublesome PCs backed by poor tech support, but it's still a major player in Europe and elsewhere.)
Four brand names may be two or three too many in the long run; it'll be interesting to see how Acer will sort this all out. It says that it won't scale back the Gateway name, and that makes sense: The brand is a big part of what it's paying $710 million for. On the other hand, the Acer name surely won't be going anywhere, either: It's better known in most of the world than Gateway is. I suspect that Gateway will remain the brand for direct PCs, and that both Gateways and Acers will show up at retail.
This story by my IDG News Service colleague Ben Ames says that Acer says it'll sell off Gateway's professional business group; I'm not sure if that means that the Gateway brand will target only consumers, and it's hard to know whether that's good news or bad news for Gateway's corporate customers until we know who the buyer is. But I can't imagine that Acer will abandon business buyers altogether, at least in small and medium-sized companies where both the Gateway and Acer brands have competed.
My guess is that the eMachines name is vulnerable; perhaps Acer will rededicate that nameplate to its original focus on very cheap PCs, or start to wind it down. But that's just idle speculation.
One way or another, I hope that Acer does a better job of rationalizing the continued existence of its brands than HP has done; I'm still confused by the fact that there are HP computers, Compaq computers, and HP Compaq computers, all targeting different customers in ways that are hard to make sense of if you're not a Hewlett-Packard employee. (At least there are no Compaq HP systems...)
I started this post out by saying that I think the merger may turn out to be good news for consumers. Emotionally, though, it leaves me a little bummed out, at least temporarily--it signals the end of the scrappy little company that Ted Waitt founded in Sioux City, Iowa in 1985. From here on out, Gateway is a nameplate on PCs produced by a large Taiwanese manufacturer. Even if the boxes still have cow spots on them.
Of course, Gateway has had trouble figuring out what it is for awhile now. (Remember when it owned a sizable chain of Gateway Country stores? When it tried to reinvent itself into a consumer electronics powerhouse?) Acer's a smart company--maybe it'll do a better job of charting a future for the Gateway brand than Gateway's current proprietors have. I hope so. And if you're a Gateway fan, past or present, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts.
...or a $2200 keyboard, or a million dollar laptop? If so, have I got the story for you...
Word from Microsoft as of 1:27 this afternoon is that the Windows Genuine Advantage glitch that was treating users as if they had stolen copies of the software has been fixed. The immediate problem may hav been solved; we still don't know why it happened, or how many people were impacted. (Gregg Keizer's story over at our sister site Computerworld has some more details about what we do seem to know so far.)
Microsoft will, presumably, patch up whatever technical snafu was responsible for the outage. But the fact this could happen at all shows that Windows Genuine Advantage is fundamentally flawed. I think Microsoft owes its customers more than an explanation: I think it owes them a copy-protection scheme that doesn't uneccesarily inconvenience them, never accuses them of having pirated software when they don't, cannot disable functionality on a legimate copy of the operating system, and isn't marketed with a patronizing campaign that tells us it exists for our benefit, not Microsoft's.
In other words, "We're sorry and it won't happen again" is not going to be an adequate response this time around. If Microsoft can't make WGA work, it needs to eliminate it.
To think of it another way, if Windows were a department store, it would be one that insisted on periodically rifling through the possessions of every paying customer on their way into and out of the store, and which, through its own incompetence, accused a small but meaningful percentage of them of being thieves on a regular basis. Would you want to give that store your money if there were other viable options?
Ars Technica is reporting that Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage "feature" is having server problems that are resulting in PCs around the world flunking the validation test that's often required to download stuff from Microsoft. And yup, the official WGA forum is bursting at the seams with posts from unhappy people who have been told that their legit copies of Windows are questionable or fake. Something significant is going badly wrong.
Ars Technica reasonably advises that folks not do anything that might force a WGA validation check (such as trying to download software from Microsoft) until this has been resolved. Me, I'm a sucker for punishment, so I immediately tried to validate my copy of Vista just to see what might happen--and it passed. So the problem doesn't seem to be universal, at least.
Microsoft's Phil Liu says in a forum post that the company's working on fixing the problem as quickly as possible, and then figuring out what happened. One can only hope.
Curiously enough, Microsoft.com's pages about Windows Genuine Advantage don't mention what's going on. Actually, they're still plastered with photos of smiling people and testimonials from users explaining how much they love WGA.
As I've blogged before, I think Microsoft has the right to protect its intellectual property, and I'm not an apologist for people who steal software. But Windows copy protection, which has existed in increasingly invasive forms for several years now, has always had major problems. Even before this current outrage outage, it's made honest Microsoft customers jump through too many hoops. It's used spyware-like practices. It's accidentally told too many of them--including me, on two occasions--that they're using stolen software when they aren't. It patronizes us with claims that it exists to make us happy, when it's really there to protect Microsoft's profits.
We've known that WGA was embarrassingly fragile for a long time. Whatever's happening at the moment would seem to indicate that the technology has a fundamental flaw that even Microsoft didn't know about. And even if only a tiny fraction of Windows users are affected, it's apparently creating hassles for lots of honest people who have given Microsoft large amounts of money. At one point do enough of those paying customers become irritated enough that they're less inclined to buy products from Microsoft? (Note: There's no such thing as Apple Genuine Advantage or Linux Genuine Advantage.)
I'd like to think that this weekend will be prove to be a come-to-Jesus moment for Microsoft--one that causes the company to step back and ask itself whether the headaches WGA causes for its paying customers are worth whatever preventive effect it has against piracy.
But I'm not holding my breath...
That's what happens when you run a critical app on a Windows server.
We're working on a feature on rare and collectible PCs, and it's no shocker that it'll include the Apple-1--the obscure 1976 machine from an obscure outfit run by two guys named Steve. (A year later, they'd release the Apple II and their company would start to go places.)
As part of our research, I talked via e-mail with Paul Terrell, the founder of The Byte Shop--one of the very first computer stores on the planet. (I never visited a Byte Shop, but I remember hearing about them when I was hanging out in similar stores in Boston back in the late 1970s.)
Terrell holds the distinction of being the first retailer to sell Apple computers, and his recounting of the experience is too good not to share in more detail than we'll be able to do in the story.
Terrell, who opened the first Byte Shop in Mountain View, California in 1975, had been selling early microcomputers such as MITS' pioneering Altair. He was a member of Silicon Valley's Homebrew Computer Club, eventually to become legendary as the epicenter of the personal computer revolution, and whose other members included Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
The two Steves demonstrated a prototype of their Apple computer at a Homebrew meeting in 1976, but it was far from a ready-to-use personal computer. Actually, it was a naked circuit board--the idea was that customers would solder their own chips into place.
"They were trying to get club members to buy the blank boards with little success, so the next day Steve Jobs came into my Byte Shop in Mountain View and tried to sell me a kit which included the printed circuit board and all the components to put it together," Terrell rememers. "The problem was I had computer kits coming at me from everywhere and my partner and I had a sales rep company that represented MITS with their Altair 8800--so I didn't need another kit."
Terrell continues:
"I needed an assembled and tested microcomputer that I could sell to all the programmers who were storming my stores for a taste of the hobby computer. In those days, if you didn't have an electronic technician buddy that could solder and troubleshoot the computer kits that were out there, you were out of luck. It took MITS 4 months to deliver me an assembled Altair and I paid cash in advance.
Steve was hungry for an order, and knew he could get Woz and some of their buddies to put this order together in their garage...and I knew where they lived. So we did the deal [for 50 Apple-1 units] and that got Apple Computer started.
I don't think Steve ever got enough credit for how clever he was with this transaction, though. He had me give him a purchase order from Byte Shop for the 50 units at the magic price of $666 payable COD. He then took that purchase order to Kramer Electronics and told their controller that Byte Shop would stand behind their component purchases, because if Byte Shop paid him COD and if Kramer would sell him components on 30 terms, he and his friends would have 30 days to build the 50 units and collect the money from Byte Shop to pay Kramer Electronics. I got the call from the Kramer accountant so I knew what was going on and confirmed to Kramer that I was all right with that arrangement. Little did the world know that we were providing Apple with their first financing.
The Apple-1 arrived on schedule and Steve got paid and the rest is history. And even Steve with his enormous ego credits me with forcing him to build those kits and giving [Apple] an edge in the marketplace. It wasn't long after that that all kits were going to have to be assembled and the price point for an assembled computer was going to be around $1000.
The Apple II [came] hot on the heels for the Apple 1 because Apple wasn't supplying a case, keyboard or power transformer with the unit. It was just the assembled board and it wasn't long before the retailers were tired of sourcing separate components. We found a guy locally that made a wooden case with a nice walnut stain that we could mount the mother board and transformer in, and put a Key Tronic keyboard in the keyboard cut out. It had a flat top behind the keyboard and above the motherboard where you could set a 12 inch B&W Hitachi TV.
Also, both Steves realized the importance of color. The Byte Shop became the testing ground for the Apple II because color monitors were too expensive for the average individual but standard demo equipment in a computer store. The Kaleidoscope program for the Cromemco Dazzler S-100 board [the first color graphics card] was written in the Byte Shop showroom for the same reason.
Back to the Apple-1: Another reason the Apple-1 had a niche in the market was because of the choice of processor chip. Chuck Peddle of Commodore fame was working for MOS Technology at the time and had just introduced their processor design the 6502 Processor at WESCON in San Francisco at a trial price of $35. Every hobbyst in Silicon Valley left that show with one. Most of the computer kits at the time were Intel designs, and of course Bill Gates and Paul Allen had written a BASIC language program for MITS that would work with the Intel processor. Apple had another challenge with the Apple-1 in having to have a higher level language for its customers other than the assembler language provided by the chip manufacturer.
Steve [Wozniak] was unhappy with the performance of the cassette interface at the time of introduction because of speed and reliability and fortunately had designed it with microcode in a prom so he could tweak the design to get the performance he wanted. I believe his final design was about 1200 baud and 4 times faster than the 300 baud designs of the S-100 buss in the Altair and IMSAI.
It became obvious to Apple that a more reliable storage media was going to be needed in the Apple II design. The other problem with cassette storage was the variety of recorders from Asia and the uncertainty of what worked and what didn't. Tandy provided their own design with the TRS-80 and Commodore built their own design into the Pet computer. Thank God for Shugart and the 5-1/4 inch floppy, which Apple introduced with the Apple II and got away from cassette forever.
The Apple-1 was a great machine for the technically savvy [users] of the time in learning about the personal computer from both a hardware and software standpoint, and to learn about the shortcomings and demands required to become proficient in the use of PCs. [And it] was the perfect first step for Apple Computer Corp. in defining what the market needed and wanted and got with the Apple II. It wasn't a runaway success that the Apple II was, which gave the two Steves the opportunity to get their act together. They got the opportunity to find out exactly what the market needed without costing the company anything except sweat equity, and they got enough recognition that when they needed the serious investment and seasoned management it would be available for them.
The Apple-1 probably had more significance for the company than the customer. It was the right product at the right time, and Apple II did the same for Mac."
Interesting stuff. If you were to compile a list of the most significant moments in computer history--hey, good idea for a story!--Terrell telling Steve Jobs that he needed fully-assembled PCs, not kits, would surely deserve to be on it. And that order for 50 Apple-1 units was what gave Apple the financial wherewithal to bootstrap itself into business.
Considering Steve Wozniak's technical brilliance and Steve Jobs's marketing genius, you gotta think that Apple probably would have turned into Apple--sooner or later--even if Paul Terrell hadn't placed that order. But you never know. Without the Byte Shop, the Apple-1 might have flopped. Without the Apple-1, there wouldn't have been an Apple II; without the II, there wouldn't have been a Mac. No Mac, no iPod; no iPod, no iPhone. It's all possible.
Anyhow, the next time I stroll into a gleaming Apple Store here in the Bay Area, I'll certainly be thinking about Paul Terrell, his Mountain View shop, and the vision he showed when he decided he might be able to sell as many as fifty computers from an unknown company named after a piece of fruit...
Pete Rojas of Engadget has written an open letter to Palm that's blunt, harshly critical, and full of good advice--and must reading if you (like me) are a longtime Palm fan who hopes that the company only prospers in the years to come, and puts out products as cool as the best ones its produced in the past.
Meanwhile, the streets of San Francisco are thick with billboards that play up the Palm brand (tying into this Palm Thing Web site) and scarcely have evidence that the company's current phones all carry the Treo moniker. The company's last round of ads were far more Treo-centric, and it seems like most folks who own its handsets talk about "my Treo" rather than "my Palm."
Word on the street is that the company's next phone will be known as the Centro, so perhaps this is part of an intentional strategy to downplay the Treo brand...
Yesterday, I kvetched here about the fact that Google told people who had "bought" videos from the company that those videos would be rendered inaccessible, and that refunds would be provided in the form of Google Checkout coupons. Last evening, Google revised its shutdown of Google Video's purchase and rental options, and the news is somewhat better for people (like me!) who had plunked down money.
Details are here: Google will give real credit-card refunds to compensate for the service's disappearance; the Google Checkout coupons stand, too, so folks will get both cash and a coupon. And while videos that Google had supposedly "sold" us will still be rendered unplayable, the company's going to terminate them in six months (originally, August 15th was the cut-off date).
This is still a good example of the gotchas that are inherent with Web services--if you buy an automobile from Chrysler, the company can't announce later that it's discontinuing the model, and, oh, by the way, computers embedded in all existing examples of the car have been programmed to disable their engines permanently. But props to Google for revising its shutdown policy and making it at least a tad more consumer-friendly....
TechCrunch is reporting that some users of the GrandCentral phone number-aggregation service, which was bought by Google back in July, are getting e-mails from Google informing them that there are quality problems with their GrandCentral phone numbers. In response, their current GrandCentral numbers will go away, and they'll be assigned new ones.
The e-mails say that this switch affects only a small number of GrandCentral users, but it flies in the face of the original idea of the service--which is that your GrandCentral number would never, ever change. (The current GrandCentral site seems to downplay the "One Number...For Life" notion, but it's still there in some places.)
I dunno about the specific technical issues involved, but this snafu is a useful reminder of one of the basic facts about Web services, especially free ones: If anybody guarantees you anything about them, the best response is healthy skepticism. Everything about 'em is subject to change; even ones with a good track record of reliability and lots of resources behind them may go dead without warning.
For the record, I have a GrandCentral number, but haven't received any word that there are problems with it.
This GrandCentral move comes on the heels of Google's recent decision to shut down Google Video's purchase and rental options. People who'd purchased videos from Google--including me--got e-mails that said "After August 15, 2007, you will no longer be able to view your purchased
or rented videos." The money we'd paid was refunded in the form of e-coupons which can be spent only at Web stores that use Google Checkout.
Which means, of course, that we hadn't "bought" anything at all--when Google decided to shut down its Digital Rights Management system, we lost access to our "purchases." I'd call that more of a flat-fee rental system, subject to cancellation at Google's whim...
Every time this kind of stuff happens--and as Web services become more and more core to our personal and professional lives, it'll happen more and more--I'm reminded of what Pogo's friend Porkypine said about life: "Don't take [it] so serious, son, it ain't nohow permanent."
UPDATE: GrandCentral co-founder Vincent Paquet e-mailed Om Malik with the number of GrandCentral users whose numbers are being switched: 434. Not completely minuscule, but the vast majority of GrandCentral users will be unaffected.
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User Centric brought in twenty owners of other phones--half who had ones with QWERTY keyboards, and half who had ordinary numeric phone keypads. None were familiar with the iPhone. The research involved having the test subjects enter six sample text messages with the phones they already had, and six with an iPhone.
Logical end result: These iPhone newbies took twice as long to enter text with an iPhone as they did with their own phones, and made lots more typos.
But given that they were being confronted with an iPhone for the first time, I'm actually startled that they fared as well as they did. And just about any text-entry system is confounding at first, including other phone-based options like T9, Graffiti, and even the relatively straightforward physical keyboards on a BlackBerry or Treo. (Even a full-sized, typewriter-style PC keyboard is a major challenge to learn--it's just that most of us did so long enough ago that we've forgotten the angst.)
Me, when I first tried an iPhone, I couldn't type more than about five characters without a typo. (It gave me a headache just to type in the WEP code for PC World's Wi-Fi network.) But I stuck with it. And while my experience didn't quite live up to Apple's claim that a week of iPhone use would leave me typing faster than I'd ever done with a small keyboard, I did get pretty fast and pretty accurate. I'm not using an iPhone as my primary handset, but the keyboard isn't one of the issues keeping me from doing so.
But like all input methods, it's hard to say definitively whether the iPhone keyboard is good, bad, or indifferent--a lot of it boils down to issues like personal preference, hand size, and even how long your fingernails are. (I chatted with one friend yesterday who bought an iPhone on day one and is, six weeks later, still very unhappy with the keyboard.)
What would be useful would be to poll a few dozen or a few hundred iPhone users after a few weeks, to see if there was any real consensus on whether the keyboard was a joy or a pain. In our own recent iPhone survey, we didn't ask specifically about the keyboard. But less than a quarter of respondents said they'd had trouble with the touchscreen, and about as many mentioned the keyboard as a plus as complained about it.
Maybe the keyboard is neither a big pro (as Apple would want us to believe) or a significant con (as many people fear, and the User Centric survey might suggest), but simply a different way of doing things with advantages and disadvantages that ultimately balance out.
Anyhow, if any of you reading this happen to own iPhones: Here's a quick-and-dirty poll that may or may not get enough responses to tell us anything at all:
If you read a bit more carefully into the study, you'll notice that the study is about initial adoption of the iPhone keyboard compared to users' current phones. Also, it isn't a survey, it was a study with one on one interviews where users typed and were timed.
The multitap (Non-QWERTY) users did the same or better with the iPhone than their current method, which suggests that multitappers may have an easier time adopting the iPhone's keyboard than QWERTY users. Which to me is interesting.
The study does not at any time attempt to say that QWERTY users will be twice as slow on the iPhone for as long as they use the iPhone, but it does say they may have more difficulty than multitap users initially. Which to me is interesting.
It would be interesting to see ia study some expert iPhone texters and have them switch to a QWERTY phone to see if there is a similar difference in typing efficiency.
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Truveo's new version has a number of things going for it. Such as...
Timeliness. The Truveo folks told me that their engine finds new content on the Web quickly, and pushes it to the top of search results. And in my experimentations, that seemed to be true. For instance, when I searched for videos about the president's daughter, Jenna Bush, Truveo mostly came up with ones about today's news that she's become engaged. Google Video skewed towards older stuff, and Yahoo Video's first result is about a different Jenna altogether.
It skews towards legit stuff. I guess that can be considered a pro or a con--and it makes sense considering this site is owned by Time Warner--but if you do a search for, say, Daily Show, you'll mostly get video that's sanctioned by copyright owners (including both free stuff and for-pay downloads), not pirated clips. Unauthorized clips on YouTube and elsewhere are there in the results, but they're not as prominent.
It goes wide. Not everything is available on YouTube. Actually, there's video all over the Net, and Truveo finds a lot of it at sites large and small. (At the moment, though, it's not finding PC World's video section--we're working on fixing that.)
You can often watch videos without leaving Truveo. If the site where a video's hosted allows it, Truveo embeds the video in its own page. If not, you're forced to click one more time to get to the site with the video. (Truveo will also give you a snippet of HTML that lets you embed the videos it finds on your own site, although I'm not entirely sure why you'd use Truveo's embed option instead of the one at the originating site.)
It divvies stuff up into categories. Tabs across the top of the page let you browse News, Sports, Music, and other topics; there's a tab for TV Shows, although it doesn't let you navigate to all the shows you can get to on Truveo.
I'm still deciding how I feel about Truveo's user interface, which divides up tabbed pages and search results into lots and lots of boxes. I did a search for "Batman," for instance, and got the following subsections:
Top Viewed
Most Viewed Now
Most Viewed Today
Most Viewed This Week
Most Viewed This Month
Most Viewed of All Time
Highest Rated
Most Recent
Most Relevant
Videos For Sale
Featured Channels: Veoh
Featured Channels: Blip.tv
Featured Channels: iFilm
More Channels, with 26 links
Featured Categories: Entertainment
Featured Categories: Home Video
Featured Categories: Comedy
More Categories, with 21 links
Featured Tags: Batman
Featured Tags: Dark
Featured Tags: Knight
More Tags, with 26 links
Whew. That's a lot of choice--arguably too much choice. And it's kinda confusing--at least to me--that videos sometimes show up in more than one subsection. (Why Truveo's results for "Batman" have one section for "Dark" and one for "Knight," with the same videos, I don't know.)
Overall, though, I like Truveo. If the goal of a video search engine is to lead you quickly to stuff you're interested in and might otherwise not know about, it works better than any competitor I've tried.
And hey, let's end with a video I found--a user review of a cool magazine over at ExpoTV.com:
And the good news is that they have 45,000 plus porn vids from PornoTube -- how nice just what we need more of on the net.
Mike
If you watch this site really, really carefully, it's possible you've already noticed a new feature which went live yesterday. We're working with a company called Inform to add more links to many of the articles on the site. These links take you to pages with links to more stories on whatever topic you clicked on--including both stuff on PCWorld.com and on other sites around the Web.
F'rinstance, click on the hyperlinked reference to eBay in this article, and you can check out other stories about the planet's biggest auction site, on a page that looks like this:
Incidentally, the links within stories that lead to these topic pages don't look any different from standard hyperlinks. We thought about giving them a different look, but decided that it might be more confusing than simply keeping all hyperlinks consistent visually, with some leading directly to other PCWorld.com content, some leading to other sites, and some leading to these new topic pages.
If you've got any feedback on this new feature--be it pro or con--please chime in...
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Back when PC World was young (we're now--gasp--almost a quarter-century old), a monthly magazine might be the first place you learned about breaking news involving computer stuff. In the age of the Web, that's almost never true, and virtually every reader of PC World in print form also relies heavily on the Internet for technology information.
Fortunately for us, though, there are still lots and lots of smart, sophisticated technology users who love our magazine and happily pay for it. When we talked to some of these folks as part of the redesign process, they told us that they liked the fact that a magazine can serve as a monthly snapshot of what's most important in tech at the moment. They also said that they want to use PCW's paper and online incarnations as an integrated whole, with the magazine being a highly filtered, concise information source, and the Web providing everything all the time.
So one of our principal goals with this redesign was to ensure that PCW in print form remains a relevant, useful product that focuses on the things magazines do well, and which complements the Web site you're reading right now. Here are some of the most notable changes we made:
PCW Forum. Our letters section has morphed into paper-based counterpart to PCWorld.com's forums, where members of the PCW community can share their opinions and expertise. Which is why we asked our Online Community Manager, Kellie Parker, to edit this section.
Forward. For the first time ever, PCW print doesn't have a traditional news section--it just makes a lot more sense to focus our news resources on PCWorld.com rather than a monthly magazine. Trends, however, are something that a magazine can do just as well as a site--and readers tell us that PCW should be about what's next as well as what's new. Forward, which is edited by Senior Editor Eric Dahl, is a new section that focuses on technology and product trends that will impact your digital life in the months and years to come.
Business Center. For as long as there's been a PCW, a healthy percentage of our readers have helped to run small and medium-sized businesses. And information on technology for companies of those sizes is surprisingly hard to find. Business Center is a new section focused on business tech, tying into the PCWorld.com section of the same name (which--pssst--is going to get a major makeover of its own in the coming weeks).
Security Alert. Security has been the single most popular topic in PCW (which is kind of depressing--but it goes with the territory when most of your readers use Windows). For the first time, we now have a monthly section on the topic, incorporating two very popular columns: Stuart Johnston's Bugs and Fixes and Erik Larkin's Privacy Watch.
Here's How. Magazines still do how-to information at least as well as the Web, and our reader research consistently shows that tips are among the most popular things in the magazine. So we've expanded the Here's How section, and packed more advice on a broader range of topics into it.
We also added a bunch of new columns--some of which are new to print but longtime online favorites, such as Laura Blackwell's Download This and Tom Mainelli's GeekTech. We've increased the number of pointers to related content on our site. And last but hardly least, we've given the whole magazine a fresh new look that's a bit more informal than our old skin. (We also gave ourselves a new logo, albeit one that has much in common with the old one.)
The new design is the result of months of collaboration between PCW Creative Director Robert Kanes, Art Director Barbara Adamson, and Don Morris Design, a New York-based studio which also worked on our last two redesigns. And the entire editorial team has been busily working on a myriad of details relating to this project since last October, when we first asked ourselves the question "What should PC World magazine be in 2007 and beyond?"
We're starting to get feedback from readers on the new format, and so far most of the comments have been very favorable. We're anxious to hear more--and criticisms are at least as helpful as compliments--so if you check out the issue, please let us know what you think...
"One of our most brilliant video engineers went on vacation, a well deserved vacation," said Steve Jobs at Tuesday's Apple press event. "He went to the Cayman Islands [and] shot a bunch of underwater footage with one of the new high-def little camcorders." Jobs went on to explain how the engineer had trouble creating a simple Web video with any existing Apple video-editing application, and invented his own program to solve the problem--""When we saw it, we were blown away." The program was so good that it became iMovie '08.
"I think our brilliant video engineer who invented this is mighty happy," concluded Jobs after demoing the new application. (Here, by the way, is the entire event in QuickTime form.) He had said every nice thing he could about the man and his application. But he left out one thing...
...the brilliant engineer's name.
This wasn't exactly a shock. Once upon a time, Apple was a company famous for glorifying its hardware engineers and software developers. The Woz himself may have been the first famous computer engineer, and members of the original Mac team such as Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld were nearly as famous as Jobs himself. (This post at Hertzfeld's wonderful Folklore.org site explains how and why the Mac team got credit for their work; Bill Atkinson's name was even displayed each time you launched MacPaint.) Even Susan Kare, who designed icons and fonts for the original Mac user interface, was a celeb.
Somewhere along the way, though, Apple stopped treating its techies like rock stars. In Steve Jobs' second tour of duty as Apple CEO, Jobs himself has only become more and more famous, but very few other Apple employees are ever singled out for credit. (Two exceptions have been Jonathan Ive, the industrial designer behind the Apple look, and software engineer Avie Tevanian; Tevanian, however, left Apple in 2006.)
These days, the highest-profile Apple employee other than Steve Jobs may be Phil Schiller, the marketing senior vice president best known for playing Jim Fowler to Jobs' Marlin Perkins during product demos. I don't have anything against Schiller, but his prominence is a far cry from the era when the extraordinarily inventive people who designed Apple products got their fair share of glory.
And I also don't mean to bash Jobs alone. It's not as if Microsoft or Hewlett-Packard puts engineers in the spotlight very often. (Web-focused companies are a bit different: Even Google, which remains in some ways a pretty secretive outfit, lets some of its legions of smart geeks talk to the press and get credit for their work.) It's also true that today's tech products are usually the result of collaboration between dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of people--you could argue that singling out certain individuals might be unfair or misleading.
But Steve Jobs, more than anyone else in technology, is famous for likening engineers to artists and products to works of art. For the best engineers and products, it's an apt comparison. And by spending so much time on Tuesday lavishing praise on this one engineer who reinvented iMovie, Jobs was acknowledging that one person deserved a huge share of the credit for the new version.
Painters get to sign their work; magazines have mastheads; movie credits now go on for ten minutes, so that even the people who process the payroll get credit. Wouldn't it be nice if we knew the name of iMovie '08's inventor--and of more hardware and software engineers in general?
I'm contacting Apple to see if they'll tell me the name of the iMovie video engineer, and will let you know what I hear...
(BREAKING NEWS: That was quick--I asked one of our Apple contacts via e-mail, then stepped away from my desk for a moment. When I got back, I had a polite response saying that Apple won't disclose the engineer's name.)
I'm here in Cupertino at Apple headquarters for a press event. Steve Jobs has arrived onstage--and is saying that Mac sales are growing at 3X the industry average. And he's saying that today's event is about the iMac.
He's making fun of messy PC desktops in Jobsian fashion, and explaining how the iMac's neat-and-tidy one-piece design has made it successful.
Now he's saying that Apple will turn to stuff from its professional products--aluminum and glass--to make the iMac better.
Aluminum is cool and environmentally friendly. So is glass. They're used in products like the Mac Pro and MacBook Pro and iPhone.
And now they'll be used in the new iMac. "It's just stunning...it's just gorgeous."
Audio in and out, Firewire (including 800), and more ports. Removing one screw lets you add memory.
Two sizes: 20-inch display and 24-inch display. (The 17-inch one goes away.) The displays are glossy, like that of the MacBook.
There's a new aluminum keyboard with two USB 2.0 ports. "It's dramatically lower in the front than our prior keyboard." There are screen-dimming and brightening buttons and media playback controls. There's also a wireless, Bluetooth version.
The new iMacs are Inel Core 2 Duo--and rhe 24-inch version has a 2.8-GHz option. Up to 4GB of RAM, ATI Radeon graphics, Airport Extreme...
Prices: 24-inch starts at $1799 (down $200 from before) and 20-inch starts at $1199 (down $300, and the same price as the 17-inch model).
"We think these models are all going to be pretty popular." Both consumers and pros will like them, and they're eco-friendly.
More news iLife '08, a new version of Apple's digital media suite. "We're dramatically enhancing" some of the apps and completely replacing one of them."
iPhoto: Much better. New feature called Events organizes your pictures by the event where you took them by default.
What's an event? All photos taken in one day are an event. If you went to more than one event in one day, you can split them. What if you went to a multi-day event like a ski trip? You can merge them.
You can hide photos which you like enough to save, but don't love, then show them again. There's unified search, and more powerful editing tools, such as the ability to cut a set of edits you did to one photo and apply them to another.
Printing "looks gorgeous" with new borders and themes. "They're much nicer." The books and calendars you can order from Apple are better (the books have dustjackets). "They're really quite nice." Calendars are 70 percent bigger at the same price.
Jobs sits down at an aluminum iMac to demo iPhoto.
You can browse through Events quickly--"skimming" lets you zip through all the photos in an Event from the main window. He's showing how to split one batch of photos into two events. Now he's merging events by dragging and dropping.
He's choosing which photos are keepers, and which ones are good enough to hide for possible later use. He's searching for all his 5-star photos. "That's a little bit of an overview of iPhoto '08--pretty cool, huh?"
On to more iLife. There are more than 1.7 million .Mac subscribers, and Jobs says he thinks it's going to grow, in part thanks to a new feature caled .Mac Web Gallery. It gives you one-button photo publishing to the Web, with "a real Web 2.0 experience" in IE, Firefox, and Safari.
If you choose, other people can upload photos to your gallery, and they'll show up there. And the gallery and iPhoto are synched, so those photos will come back to your Mac.
You can also send photos directly from an iPhone to a Web Gallery, and look at galleries from an iPhone.
Jobs is demoing a Web Gallery, which does indeed have a slick, iPhoto-like look right inside the browser. He's browsing through photos in various ways, including a "carousel" (similar to Cover Flow in iTunes) and as a slideshow.
Apple exec Phil Schiller taks a photo with an iPhone and sends it instantly to the Web Gallery which Jobs has onscreen.
Jobs moves on to iMovie. It's been hard to quickly make a great five-minute moview for sharing on the Web. An Apple engineer invented a way to accomplish it--and his invention is an all-new iMovie. iMovie '08.
You have one library for your videos, not unlike how iTunes manages all your music. "You're going to rediscover and enjoy your video you've shot."
iMovie takes video from a variety of sources, including AVCHD high-def camcorders. (Jobs praises a $799 Panasonic AVCHD camera.)
You can scrub video clips--"zoomzoomzoom!"--to see what's in them. You can "select video like you select text...and build a movie almost instantly...you can add polish quickly."
You can make a version of a movie to send to iTunes, which then lets you put it on an iPod, stream it via Apple TV, etc. Videos can exist in multiple versions, including a Web format that's higher-res than a DVD. A menu item lets you send videos directly to YouTube.
Jobs is demoing iMovie, scrubbing through videos quickly using a view that shows thumbnails of every clip. An audience member's phone rings. "You might want to answer that."
He's capturing bits and pieces of clips of people playing in the snow at Mount Hood, and creating a title. Now he's adding a Red Hot Chili Peppers song as a soundtrack.
Now back to the .Mac Web Gallery: It can include videos, too. He's showing a cool undersea video at "super high-resolution" inside Safari. "There's going to be no more sending DVDs to grandma."
Jobs is saying that someone asked him why they're making best-of-class products obsolete with these new versions. For the same reason Apple made the products in the first place.
Another iLife app: The iWeb site-creation tool. You can grab Google Maps and drag them into an iWeb page, along with hundreds of other widgets from the Web. You can also use the Google AdSense service to put ads in an iWeb page.
The "Media Index Page" creates an online index of all the media in your iWeb site.
iWeb now supports personal domain names, and you can change themes on the fly after you've created a site.
On to iDVD: "There are some people who still want to create DVDs." Jobs briefly mentions new iDVD features, and new features in the Garage Band app, including "Magic GarageBand," which lets you create music in different styles with almost no work.
That's iLife '08: "The biggest advance to iLife since we invented it many, many years ago." It's $79. "I think it's one of the best bargains on the planet." Also included with all new Macs, starting today.
How about .Mac? It has the new Web Gallery, and the storage capacity is now at 10GB, up from 1GB. It's still $99.95, and is available starting today.
On to iWorks, Apple's productivity sort-of-a-suite. 1.7 million copies have been sold, and iWorks '08 is here.
Keynote, the presentation app, has features such as fancy new text effects and slick animations. "Smart builds" let "mere morals" do A-B animations of objects. "It's very, very easy to do this stuff." We're seeing slides showing off the new features.
"Let's move on to Pages," Apple's word processor/desktop publishing program. Now it has distinct modes for processing words and for laying out pages. A contextual format bar gives you tools related to whatever you've selected. Change tracking keeps track of edits. And there are 140 Apple-designed templates. "That's Pages...and those are just some of the new features..."
Bigger news: iLife will get Numbers, "the spreadsheet for the rest of us."
Numbers has English-languarge formulas, checkblocks, slides, and "a flexible canvas" that lets you "format one part without screwing up the other." In other words, one sheet can have multiple, differently-formatted mini-spreadsheets within it. "I can make just gorgeous-looking spreadsheets very, very quickly."
"Interactive printing" is a print-preview mode that lets you drag-and-drop elements before you print. There are customizable templates. "And of course you can import and export almost all Excel documents."
Jobs is demoing Numbers. You can use sliders to change numbers in a spreadsheet, and graphs linked to them update automatically. Numbers "completes our productivity suite." It's $79--"another wonder of the universe"--and is available today.
That's today's news. Now, since this is "a more intimate setting," Jobs and Apple execs Phil Schiller and Tim Cook are taking questions from the audience.
I missed the gist of the first question, but the second one asks why Apple doesn't participate in the "Intel Inside" branding program. "We like our own stickers better...everybody knows we're using Intel processors...we'd rather tell them about the product inside the box." Schiller says that other PCs are covered with stickers and littered with junkware. Apple gives you a "great product you're going to love, and you don't have to peel stuff off of it."
Leslie Ayres of MacLife asks a question about the iMacs: "How thin are they?" Jobs: "They're really thin...appreciably thinner, which wasn't easy."
Tom Krazit of CNET: As people get more mobile, what does that mean for a desktop like the iMac? Jobs says that laptops represent most of Apple's sales, but desktops are important, and can offer advanced features at a lower price, since miniaturization isn't as big a deal. Schiller: "The desktop still has a lot of life in front of it." Jobs notes that nobody wants a 24-inch notebook.
Someone asks about the future of the Mac Mini. Apparently there's a "refreshed" version of that today, too.
Someone asks if Apple and Google are working closely. "We are working closer with Google," says Jobs, talking about the new AdSense and Google Maps features. "They like our products, too--you'll see a lot of iPhones over at Google," he says.
Someone asks if the iPhone was overhyped. "We think the iPhone is a pretty strong success...most of the world sees it that way, too," says Jobs. "There's always some outliers."
Robert Scoble asks about Apple TV. "We're really here to talk about the Mac business today, and the apps." Jobs refuses comment on Apple TV.
Another question: What about AMD? "We just use Intel chips," says Jobs.
Dan Farber of ZDNET asks about Macs in a business setting. Tim Cook says that Apple sees Mac market share growing everywhere. "A part of that is business," although consumer and education remain bigger. Jobs says not to discount the fact that communications is a more and more significant part of business, and people are even using movies to sell ideas internally.
Danielle Levitas of IDC asks if you can upload photos to a .Mac Web Gallery from an iPhone via either EDGE or Wi-Fi. Yes. And she asks about putting HD videos on the Web from iMovie, not just "higher than DVD" resolution ones. Jobs is saying that consumer camcorders use a "close to HD" resolution, and that's what Apple uses. "We think that's probably the way to go right now."
A question about rights issues with copyrighted music you use in your iMovie videos. Jobs says that more than anyone else, Apple discourages music theft.
Another question: The new iMovie looks like it might be better than Final Cut Express for some people. Does that change things? Jobs: "We think that iMovie '08 will be very desirable...if some people choose to use it instead of Final Cut Express, so be it."
Jason Snell of Macworld asks about Excel macro support in Numbers. Is there any? Jobs: "No."
A question about multi-touch technology as seen in the iPhone. Will it show up in the Mac? "I would classify that as a research project at this point" says Jobs.
Analyst Tim Bajarin asks about Apple's strategy for the Mac as a digital media hub, as articulated a few years ago. Jobs says Apple saw the digital lifestyle as being the next big thing for PCs, thanks to digital cameras, the Web, and other trends. Most people agree "they're dramatically beyond" Windows counterparts. "We take this very seriously...we're just topping ourselves at this point...we're obsoleting ourselves...a lot of Windows customers are going to switch because of this stuff."
Molly Wood of CNET: People say that Apple's pricing and design results in Macs appealing to an elite. Does Apple want to overtake the PC in market share? Jobs says the company's goal is to make the best PCs, ones they can recommend to anyone, and sell them at the best price they can. But "we just can't ship junk...there are thresholds we can't cross because of who we are." Feature-for-feature, Apple products aren't premium-priced, he says. "We compare pretty favorably."
And that's the morning's news. More thoughts later...
Dell is a company that rarely buys other companies--its 2006 acquisition of Alienware is a notable exception to that rule--and it's been remarkably unsuccessful with handheld gadgets, having launched the Axim line of PDAs and several models of MP3 player, then killed them both. And it's not a company that tends to be associated with unique and innovative technology platforms, which is exactly what Zing's stock in trade is.
So I actually have no idea whatsoever what Dell plans to do with its purchase--its press release on the buyout is mum on that topic--but I'm certainly curious to learn more...
(Full disclosure: One of Zing's investors is IDG Ventures, a sister company of PC World.)
At the moment, I'm sitting in JFK airport in New York waiting for a flight home to SF that's really late. Tomorrow morning, I should be at Apple in Cupertino for a press event. All we know for sure is that it's Mac-related. But the rumors and speculation are coming fast and furious:
* Think Secret has declared flat-out that there will be three new iMacs tomorrow, and is even quoting prices for them.
* MacRumors has noticed that Apple's .Mac services will be down during the press event, and is guessing, reasonably enough, that that means that a .Mac upgrade is in the offing.
* DigiTimes is saying there's word that Apple may release a 16GB iPod in late September. (One or more new iPod in the next coupla months seems like a good bet, but it looks like they probably won't arrive tomorrow.)
Other possibilities? Well, an upgrade to iLife is very much overdue at this point. There's still buzz out there about a possible MacBook subnotebook, and people are still wondering whether the Mac Mini will be reinvented at some point, or just plain discontinued. In other words, there are plenty of things that could happen at the event--including, of course, things that nobody has predicted as of yet.
We'll have news from the Apple event just as soon as we possibly can. Meanwhile, if you've got any guesses or wishes, feel free to make them known here...
It had to happen sooner or later, and it has: The identity of Fake Steve Jobs--the proprietor of the hottest, funniest blog in technology--is no longer a well-guarded secret. Fake Steve isn't Andy Ihnatko or Leander Kahney or Harry Shearer or any of the other people who previous muckrakers thought they'd identified as the blog's true author. The New York Times figured out that he's Daniel Lyons, a reporter for Forbes who has also blogged under his own name.
I'm sort of sorry that the suspense is over, but you can't blame the Times for digging (a reporter named Brad Stone made the ID). Lyons does work in the Boston area--FSJ had been the subject of an IP-capturing sting operation that suggested he was in Beantown--but he's not, as speculation convincingly had it, based on some of the phrases he used, a Brit.
Fake Steve--er, I mean Lyons--has fessed up, and Forbes has announced that FSJ's blog will become a Forbes.com feature. I'd like to think it'll be a successful one, but it's not entirely clear whether a FSJ who's been robbed of his mystique will attract nearly as much attention or manage to be nearly so entertaining. It's easier to say nasty things about important people when nobody knows who you are, and while I don't know Lyons, it seems inevitable that he'll consciously or unconsciously self-censor future posts at least a little.
On the other hand, being unmasked as Anonymous didn't seem to hurt Joe Klein's writing career. Maybe Lyons--who we now know is a funny guy, and who has a book coming out as Fake Steve--should simply retire his alter ego at the height of its fame and blog at Forbes.com as the real Daniel Lyons. I'd sure read whatever he had to say, and so would a lotta other people--at least for awhile.
Full disclosure Fake Steve has blogged about me and linked to this blog, and I had my own theories about who he might be. Which, I now know, were utterly wrong. And no, I won't tell you what they were...
As my colleague Erik Larkin (along with half the Web) has reported, Friday wasn't a great day for Dateline NBC associate producer Michelle Madigan--her secret videotaping at hacker conference DEF CON in Las Vegas went really, really badly, and she was forced to flee the event. I'm on vacation at the moment, but I've been fascinated by the story, and feeling kind of personally invested in it. That's in part because Madigan did some reporting for PC World back in 2002, when she was a reporter for the Medill News Service of Northwestern University. But it's also because I've done undercover camera work for Dateline NBC myself.
Back in 2000, PC World and NBC's news program collaborated on an investigation into the PC repair business. We broke a bunch of PCs in exactly the same way--with a problem that could be fixed by replacing a cheap cable--and took them to both national PC retailers and mom and pop shops to get them fixed. Our goal was to see if they'd diagnose the issue accurately and fix it at a reasonable price. (Here's PC World's report on what we found, much of which wasn't pretty.)
When we went into stores, we carried hidden cameras to document our interactions--some of the footage was used in Dateline's TV report--and I was one of the guys doing the carrying and documenting. It was a remarkable experience which resulted in an important story for consumers, and we took lots of care to make sure that what we did was both fair and legal. It was one of the hardest things I've ever done as a journalist, and I wouldn't have missed it for the world.
All I know about Madigan's mishap is what I've read in the blogosphere, so I'm hesitant to express any definitive opinion it it. It does sound like everything that could have gone wrong for her did go wrong--and that she may have made multiple mistakes that led to her own fiasco. (If reports of some of her actions are accurate, some of them were at odds with the practices we followed when I worked with Dateline producers in 2000.)
Most of the coverage of all this is in dogpile-on-the-rabbit mode--I haven't seen a single account (including Erik's) that was even semi-sympathetic to Madigan's overarching goal or specific actions.
Like I say I'm reserving judgment. But I do think that one of the interesting things about this case is that it involved a reporter being sneaky (albeit unsuccessfully so) at a conference where sneakiness of various kinds was very much on the agenda. I'd tend to take that into account when figuring out what the appropriate reaction is, and when considering the opinions of the various people who are weighing in.
If the response of the conference's organizers is as reported, I like it--they encouraged the attendees to figure out who the mole in the audience was--fair enough, since they were certainly under no obligation to help her investigation. And then, after she'd been uncovered, they offered her a press pass so she could cover the show openly if she wanted to. Apparently, she didn't. (Gee, I wonder why not?)
I do kinda wonder how much of the outrage is on moral/ethical grounds, and how much of it is a reaction to her abject failure. To put it another way: What would the reaction have been like if she'd gotten her footage and done her story? We'll never know--and we'll also never know exactly what sort of story she'd done...
Great, thoughtful commentary on the situation, Harry.
In the era of shock-media where bombastic opinion is far more important than critical thinking and thorough, even-handed analyisis, it is nice to read someone say "[I only have biased, reactionary data on the situation]...so I'm hesitant to express any definitive opinion..."
Moreover, I think your dog-pile analogy is spot on.
That is not to say that I disagree with the actions of the DEF CON organizers nor think she was in the right. Rather, if she was indeed going to out federal agents as proposed (amongst other things), such actions were absolutely mandatory.
However, I am bemused by the sheer amount of critical, reactionary coverage it has received without thoughtful, meaty discussion of the subject matter (why what she did was wrong and/or the ironic balance of journalistic integrity and goals versus the immediate well-being of the subject matter, which is more important (and why), etc.)
damn, I'd almost forgotten that story. I am also one of the pcw reporters who went along with the dateline folks back in 2000. I remember the hidden camera in the bag trick, and thinking we were walking a fine ethical line when we did it.
but judging from the first-hand accounts coming out of defcon, it seems like michelle crossed that ethical line. for one thing, this was an event where press were clearly invited; in the shopping story, knowing that we were press would have changed the store's behavior, so being undercover was essential to the reporting. in this case, you can watch video of michelle's outing on youtube -- clearly somebody was taping openly.
for another, her apparent goal was to out an undercover federal agent talking to hackers on national tv. I think that's a few orders of magnitude beyond outing repair stores with questionable policies.
I don't know michelle, and I feel bad for her. but she really brought this on herself. she should have taken the press pass.
dt
"Gee, I wonder why not?" - What is that supposed to mean? People were very good natured about the whole thing, they would have joked a little but plenty of people would still have been happy to talk to her.
As for "sneakiness of various kinds" - the whole point of the convention is openness between hackers and other groups. The whole event is about education and demonstration. In what was is this "sneaky"?
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It was a joy to accept the award on behalf of the editors and writers, Test Center analysts, designers, and other PC Worlders whose hard work, creativity, and dedication to service journalism make it all hapen.
Not only that, but we were one of ten finalists for Magazine of the Year in the 80,000 and over circulation category, and we won twelve other awards--including gold ones for this Tech.gov column by Anush Yegyazarian and for our Top-Rated Products reviews charts.
The Azbees are the biggest competition for trade publications--this year's contest attracted 2400 entries--and it's quite an honor that our editorial peers bestowed multiple honors on the work we do. We were in good company: Several of our sister publications from our parent company, IDG, also received one or more awards, including CIO, Computerworld, CSO, Infoworld, Macworld, and Network World.
You can read more about the ASBPE and the Azbees here.
The plot thickens. Earlier this week, ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley reported that a Microsoft exec had told her the company was already offering a free version of Microsoft Works. Then the company refused to comment.
Now it's fessing up. I got a note from a Microsoft representative today saying that there is going to be an ad-supported edition of Works--Microsoft Works SE 9--but it's only going to be rolled out in "a very small pilot program" via a "select group of participating OEMs." (Which means that the free version will be preinstalled on new PCs and probably not something you can just choose to acquire and use.)
So there you go. This isn't a bold response to Google Apps--although I remain convinced that Microsoft will have no choice but to react, and probably soon--so much as a low-profile experiment. More details when we have 'em...
A couple of months ago when I blogged about Microsoft's touch-sensitive computer-table hybrid, I mentioned that it's going to show up in Starwood's hotel properties and that the existing kiosks I've seen in Starwood hotels, such as Sheratons, often don't work.
Well, I made the trek from San Francisco to New York yesterday (I'm here for the annual conference of the American Society of Business Publication Editors), and when I arrived at the Sheraton New York, one of the check-in kiosks had an "out of order" sign . But the other looked to be working...
...until I tapped the screen to begin, whereupon it displayed one of the most grandiose error messages I've ever seen--real This is Broken stuff...
(Yes, I decided to document all this--lucky I had my camera with me.)
So I ended up talking to a friendly real human being at the front desk, who had me checked in in about four minutes. Real people may be expensive to hire, train, and employ, but at their best, they're awfully good at what they do.
And I remain skeptical about even a public-place computer as potentially cool as Microsoft's Surface actually working reliably in actual public places...
