Apple and Microsoft: an insider's perspective

The latest edition of MacAddict magazine (Dec. 2003, p. 20) includes an interesting quote from Steve Capps, a legendary Apple Computer software architect who crossed over and worked on products such as Internet Explorer at Microsoft from 1996 until 2001. (More background on that here.) Here's what the magazine quoted him as saying:

"I can tell you exactly why Apple products come out so good and Microsoft products come out so bad. At Apple, nobody sits down and says, 'This is what we're going to ship.' The product is the god to which we all pray. At Microsoft, the schedule and the plans are the god."

But if that has been the case at Microsoft in the past, will it be in the future? Consider what CEO Steve Ballmer wrote in a memo to employees earlier this year, responding rhetorically to those who might wonder why the company isn't pushing to get the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, on the market sooner. Publicly, at least, Microsoft hasn't formally announced a Longhorn release date, although many analysts and reporters are assuming it will come in 2006.

"[W]hile we are not taking a relaxed approach to Longhorn, we will do the work and take the time required to get it right, because it truly is the next quantum leap in computing, which will put us years ahead of any other product on the market," Ballmer wrote in the memo.

Going back to Capps, his comment came at AppleLore, a gathering of Apple enthusiasts and former employees in September at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., near Apple's headquarters. Here is the Wired News recap of the event and a related post on The Mac Observer site.

Tablet PC users emerge

In this post I mentioned that I had a hard time finding Tablet PC users among the non-Microsoft Comdex attendees. But there were definitely some there, as I'm now discovering. See, for example, this post by Peter Rysavy, who notes my experience and points out that some people, including him, had their Tablets in their bags, not in plain sight. Another person, who described himself as a die-hard Tablet PC fan, e-mailed to say he was at Comdex on Monday with his Tablet PC out, taking notes on things he wanted to remember.

'Lindows' trial delayed

The trial in the trademark suit between Microsoft and Lindows.com, which was set to begin next week, has been pushed back until March. See this P-I story from earlier in the year, about a previous delay in the case, for background about the dispute.

Microspeak defined

Mary Jo Foley points to a great glossary of Microsoft terms and adds a few of her own. I would add "BDM," one that stumped me during a recent interview with a Microsoft executive. What's that, you ask? A business decision maker, of course.

Gates on SmartScreen

Bill Gates explained more about the company's SmartScreen spam-filtering technology, unveiled last week, in a Washington Post op/ed piece published today:

"We are making progress with new software derived from advanced work in the field of machine learning -- the design of systems that learn from data and grow smarter over time. The software learns from a vast and continually growing archive of e-mail provided by nearly 200,000 of our e-mail customers who have volunteered to classify millions of messages as legitimate or not. This feedback enables us to identify spam with unprecedented precision based on key words, message structure, even the time it was sent -- more than 500,000 characteristics in all. Early reports have indicated that this Microsoft SmartScreen technology is blocking as much as 95 percent of spam, and we expect it to get even smarter as it learns from a continuing flow of feedback. Many other e-mail providers also are making great strides in creating technology that better protects people from spam."

Comdex final words

A grab-bag of items left over from the trip to Las Vegas last week:

• As I've mentioned here before, I like using the Web-based Factiva news service. It works great on the Windows-based laptop I use. However, it doesn't work well on either of the two Web browsers I've loaded, Safari and Mozilla, on the Mac laptop I also use. The frames and search boxes overlap, and it's pretty much unworkable. (I stopped using Internet Explorer on the Mac after Microsoft said it would no longer be making major upgrades to IE for the Apple platform.) During Comdex I noticed the Factiva booth in the Microsoft pavilion. I went up, introduced myself, explained the problem, and asked if there was anything I could do differently to make their product work. One of the men in the booth, who seemed like a very nice guy, smiled and pointed me to the nearby Dell booth. Now there's interoperability for you.

• There are a ton of stories out there about the state of Comdex this year, some of them wondering whether it will be back for another year:
  
  
  
  • Hi-tech convention reinvents itself
    
  • Comdex's future isn't a sure bet
    
  • Comdex lights up tech's future
    
  • Is Comdex still relevant?
    
  • Faulty conventioneer count leads to 'a mess'
    
  • At Comdex: More focus, less fun
    
  • Week in Review: Comdex Goes Corporate
    

• In this story last week I mentioned that it wasn't easy to find Tablet PCs in the hands of average people. I felt comfortable saying that because I spent some time every day at the trade show looking for ordinary computer users (non-Microsoft employees) using Tablet PCs so I could interview them for the story. They were hard to find, in my experience. In fact, I found exactly one, who I included in the story. Then, on the flight home, after the story ran, there was one person in my aisle using a Tablet PC, and another person directly in front of me using one. Later, when I got up to let the person next to me use the restroom, I saw another Tablet PC a few aisles up. I started to feel really guilty until I realized it was the last day of Comdex, on a flight to Seattle, and the plane was filled with Microsoft employees, who are given the option to use Tablet PCs as their portable computers.

• On a related note, see Lora Heiny's extensive look at Comdex from a Tablet PC perspective. (Link via Robert Scoble.) In addition, Paul Thurrott's latest WinInfo Short Takes column, focused on Comdex, includes an item in which he cites improving Tablet PC pricing and performance and concludes, "Tablet PCs will take off. Mark this down as one bet Microsoft got right." (Link via Tablet PC Buzz.)

• Some readers perceived my earlier post on ApacheCon as a negative comment on the conference. Just to clarify: that wasn't my intent. In fact, what I saw of the conference was interesting and enjoyable, and I thought that the posts by Blair Christensen, though a bit brutal, were refreshingly honest, not to mention funny. (Which, I imagine, may have been why Chris Pirillo brought the initial post to the attention of the audience.) This was especially noticeable having spent the previous two days at Comdex, where all the marketing on the show floor leaves a person numb. I wish I could have stayed at ApacheCon longer. I should have made that more clear in my original post. See related posts by Gregor Rothfuss, Doc Searls, Chris Pirillo, and Blair Christensen (also see Blair's comment on my original post.)

• On a related topic, check out Doc Searls' ApacheCon roundup, which includes links to posts about the conference and some interesting observations about the lead the open-source Apache Web Server is building over Microsoft's competing Internet Information Server, or IIS.

Show is over ...

That's it from Comdex this year. Check out this page for PC Magazine's Best of Show awards, in which Microsoft fared particularly well.

The conference's organizers called it the first year of the new Comdex, but for what it's worth, the cab drivers here are almost universally convinced it could be the last. One this morning said he hasn't seen a Comdex this quiet in the 20 years he's been driving.

More on open source

Attended an interesting panel discussion this morning on the "open-source paradigm shift" before leaving Comdex. Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly book publishing moderated, and the discussion touched on a lot of the themes we explored in this story earlier in the week. Before I head home, here are a few of the highlights -- by no means a complete account, just some of the more interesting excerpts.

Allan Vermeulen, Amazon.com's chief technology officer, who talked at a Microsoft conference last month about the ways the company envisions incorporating the new capabilities of the next Windows into its business, told the Comdex audience about the ways the company has taken advantage of open-source technologies:

"A lot of you maybe already know this story, I’m not sure, but around 1999, Amazon converted most of our internal applications from running on a 64-bit proprietary Unix based system to Linux, a 32-bit Linux system … The reason we did that was to save money. And in fact we saved a lot money … I can never remember the exact numbers, but many millions of dollars were saved in that process. So, we actually use Linux in-house for virtually everything. That is, virtually everything that’s running on our site, all of our production software. We also use a whole array of other open source technologies. We use Apache, we use Perl, we use Mason, we use a touch of MySQL. So we’re really a traditional user of open-source technologies in that way. We’re a pretty good example of the successes you can have using open source."

O'Reilly told the story of two Microsoft developers, Mark Anders and Scott Guthrie, who wanted to create a new version of Microsoft's ASP, or Active Server Pages, technology with capabilities for XML, a standardized format for the exchange of information on the Internet. Initially they were discouraged by others at the company, but they found themselves with some time between projects, so they went ahead and did it anyway.

"Then they went back to their new assignments, and one of the people inside Microsoft said, ‘Hey, I heard about your project, it sounds like it would be useful to me,’ and it spread, like an open-source project within Microsoft. And these guys were scratching their own itch -- that’s the original description of open source. The network community inside Microsoft heard about the project. Eight or nine months later they got a call from Bill Gates saying, ‘Hey, come show me your project.’ It was then anointed as the next generation of ASP. The point that I draw from that again is that a lot of open-source behavior can happen within a large organization if the organization is highly networked and if you start to separate this idea of how to get people collaborating and cooperating … from the licensing discussion, you can get much further down the path of taking the impact of open source -- which is really about making software more usable, more available, more powerful -- and really taking it to the enterprise."

Jason Matusow, program manager for Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, expanded on what O'Reilly said:

"A community isn’t just everybody in the world. A community can be a very small group of people … The successful open-source projects, just like the successful commercial software projects, tend to be the ones with passionate people, strong leadership, and a clear set of goals that they’re trying to tackle. … It’s important to mention that not all improvement in software is going to come just from open source. … You’re going to have proprietary software that’s going to drive innovation, as well. You’re going to have that mix … rather than the exclusion of one model over another."

Later, in response to a question from the audience, O'Reilly offered his opinion of the SCO Group's lawsuit against IBM over the origins of the code used in the open-source Linux operating system:

"I think it’s a joke. I’ll be very surprised if it doesn’t blow over. These guys have yet to show that they have anything. If it weren’t for the desire of certain segments of the industry for this to matter, it wouldn’t matter."

Brian Behlendorf, president of the open-source Apache Software Foundation, talked about how the open-source concept can apply to things outside software, such as publishing. He cited the example of Wikipedia, a collaborative online encyclopedia.

"It’s not something that’s classically thought of as part of the open-source community but what you’ll find there is essentially an encyclopedia built out of voluntary contributions by people who go to the site and say, I know something about this, maybe I’ve written an essay ... and I’d like to put information out there. My copyright is open, anyone can read it, I’m not interested in remuneration for that content. I’m interested in building a collective database about some part of the subject, and there’s references between things, etc. The interesting thing is it’s not just one person stepping up and saying, I’m going to create the wikipedia entry for the moon. Somebody puts it up, and if there’s a mistake in that, somebody else will comment who’s looking at that and fix that. Through this kind of organic growth of this encyclopedia now, there’s tens of thousands of entries on the site now. Sure, if it’s just one person talking about the moon, you might question, what’s the validity of what’s there? But if it’s 10 researchers from different universities who specialize in lunar technology or whatever, at some point, it’s going to approximate something that is probably pretty verifiable because of peer review, and probably fairly trustworthy. … I think this open-source model actually can apply to other forms of (intellectual property) while still rewarding and enriching everyone who participates."

Linux, Microsoft and Mac

At a panel discussion on the opening day of Comdex earlier this week, one of the questions was about Linux and its prospects for attaining even greater market acceptance. Patrick Ennis, managing director of Seattle venture capital firm Arch Venture Partners, was on the panel, and he had some interesting things to say:

"If you spend a lot of time walking the halls of universities and national labs, which I do, it's astounding -- sometimes it seems like everything is Linux. ... It's not even an issue. It's like, 'Oh, yeah, we'll do that on Linux.' "

We used that quote in this story today on the open source movement's implications for Microsoft, but I didn't have room to include some of the additional things Ennis said when I spoke to him afterward. In particular, he explained that such intensive use at the college level would tend to suggest that Linux will continue to gain momentum in the business world as those students move into the work force.

But that’s not necessarily going to happen, Ennis said, citing the case of Apple Computer, which was unable to leverage its strength in education to overcome Microsoft’s presence in the corporate sphere. The problem, he explained, is that those students are generally low-level employees upon entering the work force, not in a position to influence purchasing. Whether Linux can overcome that and accomplish what Apple hasn't in that regard remains an open question, at least on the corporate desktop.

ApacheCon: Brutal honesty

I ventured away from Comdex for a while this afternoon to visit ApacheCon, a convention staged by the Apache Software Foundation, the group that supports the open-source community responsible for such programs as the market-leading Apache Web server. I arrived in time to hear the second half of the keynote speech by Chris Pirillo, who runs the Lockergnome Web site and co-wrote "Online! The Book" with John C. Dvorak of PC Magazine.

Pirillo gave what I thought was an enjoyable speech, talking extensively about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds and news aggregators, the method of reading RSS feeds from weblogs and news sites. (By the way, you can get the RSS feed for this site by clicking on the XML logo on the right over there.) Toward the end he also showed off the capabilities of Feedster, a weblog search engine, by using it to search for recent posts related to ApacheCon.

In fact, Pirillo specifically searched Feedster for an ApacheCon post he had noticed previously. As it turned out, it wasn't exactly a public relations coup for the conference. This was the post he showed, by a blogger named Blair:

I cannot emphasize strongly enough how much I dislike Las Vegas and am bored with ApacheCon 2003. The biggest challenge so far has been keeping myself from packing up and heading back to the airport and then flying back to Chicago.

It could have been worse. Here is a subsequent post by the same blogger, under the heading, "ApacheCon Attendees":

No question. I hate these people far more than I hate Las Vegas. And considering the state that I have been in since arriving in Las Vegas, that is saying a lot.

Actually, for Pirillo, it could have been even worse than that. Here's a post someone made about his presentation:

who invited chris pirillo to keynote at apachecon? the first 21 minutes, he talked about himself, and finally reached his premise after 37 minutes even though it was immediately apparent. give me a break.

Lastly, I leave you with one word of advice: If ever you have a chance to attend an open-source software conference, don't introduce yourself to anyone as the Microsoft beat reporter for a Seattle paper. Doesn't exactly get the conversation off to a roaring start.

No Longhorn here

Microsoft's huge promotional signs at its Professional Developers Conference last month focused on future products, such as Longhorn, the next version of Windows -- as you would expect, given the focus of that conference. But Longhorn isn't expected to hit the market until 2005 or 2006. The signs here at Comdex this week are a reminder that the company has a different operating system it needs to sell for the next two or three years.

Technological time warp

P-I librarian Lytton Smith helped me with research on this story, digging up some great old newspaper stories that shed a lot of light on the state of computers and technology in 1983, around the time Bill Gates gave his first Comdex keynote.

Reading through them, I was impressed with how well some of the stories accurately anticipated the future, and how poorly others did. It also struck me how much certain passages now seem completely antiquated, going into great detail to explain things that today we take for granted. At the same time, parts of some of the stories could have been written today. For examples of all those scenarios, consider these excerpts:

InfoWorld, Aug. 29, 1983: Chris Christiansen, senior analyst for the Yankee Group market research group in Boston, Massachusetts, questions whether Microsoft's product line is broad enough to allow the firm to make a successful transition to retailing.

"The critical question is how Microsoft will fare in the next generation. I don't see how they can sell XENIX [a form of the Unix operating system that Microsoft was marketing] at the retail level. Their future depends on how well they can hold together all the diverse areas they're going into," he adds.

New York Times, Dec. 6, 1983: Windows is the current (or soon to be so) buzzword in user-friendliness. They allow your personal computer to become the ultimate messy desk, at least metaphorically. You can pile all the paperwork in your drawers, files and shoeboxes into layers and layers of electronic papers on your screen.

Washington Post, Nov. 29, 1983: But the success of the IBM machine underscores the importance of software in driving hardware sales, said Bill Gates, 28, president of Microsoft, the Belleview [sic], Wash., firm that helped design the basic software for IBM's personal computer.

He pointed out that IBM designed its machine as much around software capabilities as the actual hardware computer components. Software will be used to determine hardware design in the future rather than the current situation of software being shackled to the hardware design, he asserted.

In comments entitled "Software Ergonomics," Gates, a keynote speaker at the show, said that computer graphics will be "super-important" and that software will not just be user-friendly, but designed to emulate how people actually process information and make decisions. He did not elaborate.

New York Times, Dec. 1, 1983: [H]ere at Comdex, the trade show for the personal computer industry, there is a frenzy of new programs being promoted as "integrated" software, although with no clear definition of that term. "The word has lost meaning," said Alan Dziejma, president of Business Solutions Inc.

That one struck a chord with me because we talk frequently in the newsroom about the fact that many words and phrases used by companies are meaningless, or at least extremely difficult to decipher. The word integrated remains extremely popular in corporate technology circles to this day, although it's more likely now to be an integrated solution, whatever that is.

And finally, here's a classic passage from the March 1984 issue of Creative Computing, in which Ken Uston detailed his time attending Comdex the previous November.

I had the unusual experience of watching a Microsoft employee give a demonstration of the new Windows program with a Lotus executive standing next to me. She explained that Windows is an extension of an operating system that allows you to run several different programs all at the same time and to see the results on the screen simultaneously through separate windows.

With Windows, you can process words with WordStar, calculate with Multiplan, store information with dBaseII, and design graphics all at the same time. I asked whether we would be able to transfer data from one program to another.

The demonstrator hedged. "Not yet."

The Lotus executive watching with me said, "Windows allows co-existence, not true integration."

Just then a Microsoft executive, spotting my press badge, rushed over to contradict, quickly adding, "We'll have true integration."

Andy Rooney weighs in

Didja ever wonder who's to blame for the huge mess these crazy computers have gotten us into? "60 Minutes" curmudgeon Andy Rooney did, and he says in this commentary that he found the answer: Bill Gates. (Link via Mac Daily News.)

Microsoft Matrix revisited

Bill Gates' Comdex speeches traditionally include short, humorous films. Last year's was a take-off of VHI's "Behind the Music," renamed "Behind the Technology" for Microsoft's purposes. This year's was a take-off on "The Matrix," in which Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer donned the film's distinctive costumes and, among other things, did a little Matrix-style kung fu. It was at once as ridiculous and as funny as it sounds. You really would have to see it to fully appreciate it, but Reuters reporter Reed Stevenson, a "Matrix" fan himself, does a nice job of explaining it in this story.

The new buzz phrase

Posting from Las Vegas ... At his Comdex keynote two years ago, Bill Gates introduced a phrase that he now uses in almost every public speech -- "the digital decade," the idea that the next 10 years would deliver much of the promise of the digital age, even on the heels of the technology bust. (Actually, I found one other reference in the P-I archives in which Gates used that phrase during a smaller event earlier that year, but the 2001 Comdex appears to be one of the first times he focused on it in such a prominent way.)

Six months later the phrase was already a matter of routine for those following the company closely. Wrote my colleague, Dan Richman, in his May 2002 coverage of the company's CEO Summit:

Bill Gates, Microsoft chairman and chief software architect, kicked off the conference with what is becoming his standard speech. He described this as the "digital decade," when many tasks now done by hand will be automated, and extolled the virtues of Extensible Markup Language, or XML, a component of .NET that lets programs communicate even if they're running on disparate computers.

I bring this up because during the Comdex keynote tonight we heard another phrase, "seamless computing," the idea of connecting pockets of information otherwise isolated across computers, programs and devices -- for example, being able to search through a computer's files in one place, rather than in individual applications. This is one way Gates sees the digital decade achieving its full potential, and if it reminds you of what the company has said about Longhorn, the next version of Windows, it's no coincidence.

Gates has used the seamless computing phrase in the past, in smaller venues, but the way he focused on it tonight suggests we haven't heard the last of it for a while.

Reporting from Las Vegas

I'll be in Las Vegas next week reporting from Comdex, where Microsoft's Bill Gates will give his annual keynote address Sunday evening. Look for coverage of the conference in the P-I throughout the week, with additional information here on this weblog. There's also a good collection of news about Comdex on this weblog put together by the conference organizers. Here's Microsoft's Comdex page. Also see this site for a competing conference in Las Vegas next week, cdXpo, staged by Jupiter Media.

Favorite Microsoft links

This week we added a series of Microsoft-related links on the right side of this blog's main page, building in part on the links included in this post in late September. I'm always looking for good Microsoft and tech-related sites, and I'll try and add to the list as time goes on, so feel free to drop me a note or post a comment with suggested additions.

Latest from the EU

Microsoft finished its defense today before the European Commission, the European Union's antitrust arm, which alleges that the company has tried illegally to extend its desktop operating-system dominance into the markets for servers and media players. See the Associated Press story from Brussels. Microsoft competitors Sun Microsystems and RealNetworks are scheduled to take the stand tomorrow.

Patching: MSFT v. Linux

A report from the TechWorld news site in the United Kingdom today says Microsoft will criticize the open-source software community for taking too long to issue patches for known vulnerabilities in Linux software:

The strategy, called "Days of Risk," measures the number of days it takes programmers to release a public patch after a vulnerability is revealed. While high-profile holes in Linux and associated software tend to be swiftly dealt with, less prominent problems -- which could be just as potentially damaging -- can take weeks or even months to appear.

Microsoft's aim is to undermine critics and place a question mark over Linux's security by revealing that, on average, Windows poses less of a security risk. By turning attention away from its own software bugs while at the same time launching several security initiatives, it hopes to be able to tackle one of main worries business has with its proprietary operating system.

Note, however, that the TechWorld report cites no source, named or unnamed, to support its main premise. Separately, Microsoft today released the second of what will become regular monthly security bulletins, alerting computer users to known vulnerabilities in its software and offering patches to fix them. The alerts include three deemed critical.

Climbing Mt. Longhorn?

To clarify some information posted by a reader in the comments to an earlier post, Longhorn isn't a mountain in Washington state but rather a bar in British Columbia, as another reader correctly noted in a subsequent comment. During the recent Professional Developers Conference, I heard a Microsoft executive confirm that the operating system was named after the Longhorn Saloon & Grill, at the base of Whistler Mountain, a popular skiing destination.

At the bottom of this Longhorn faq page, Paul Thurrott explains how the next version of Windows got its code name from a bar:

[T]he Longhorn name wasn't chosen randomly. Remember that Windows XP was code-named Whistler and the next version of Windows, at the time, was code-named Blackcomb. Both of these names come from ski areas in British Columbia, close to Microsoft's headquarters. At the foot of Whistler Mountain, there is a saloon named Longhorn that serves the local skiing population. So if you're ever in the area and want to take in some local color, Longhorn is a nice stop … after you're done with Whistler.

The Vancouver Sun also published a story about how the Longhorn code name came about.

As one reader pointed out, a code name is not a final product name. (Some journalists, anticipating the release year, have taken to calling it Windows 2006.) But ironically enough, as another reader noted, the Longhorn Saloon Web site is apparently running not on Microsoft software but rather on Apache servers using the Linux operating system, according to the Netcraft service. Will be interesting to see how long that lasts. Perhaps it's time for Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to take another skiing trip, this time to Whistler -- taking time, of course, to stop by the company's favorite B.C. saloon for a little chat.

Fired blogger update

Got an e-mail over the weekend from Michael Hanscom, the Microsoft contract worker who was let go after posting on his personal weblog pictures he took of a shipment of Apple PowerMac G5s arriving on the Redmond campus. (While speaking to him for the story we published about the incident, I had asked him to keep me posted on his job search.) He wrote yesterday to say he landed a new job at a print/copy shop. See also his post on the subject.

While we're on the subject, most of the readers who e-mailed me after the story appeared said they believed Microsoft was well within its rights to do what it did in this case. Several pointed out that, at their places of work, merely snapping a photo of a loading dock or other sensitive area could get a person fired -- let alone posting the photo to a Web site. For the record, Hanscom acknowledged in a post to his blog that, while he might not have liked the way Microsoft handled the situation, what he did was a mistake.

Steve Jobs on Longhorn

As noted in the CNet News.com story referenced below, Apple's Steve Jobs spoke directly this week about Microsoft's Longhorn, the next version of Windows, due in a few years, and how it compares to what Apple has today in its Mac OS X operating system. His remarks touched on some of the issues raised in the comments to our post last week on this subject.

The CNet story intrigued me enough to go back and listen to the audio replay of the Apple conference call. Jobs' Longhorn comments came after he was asked if Apple investors should be worried that once the competition "gets it good enough," it would be able use the economies of scale of the Wintel (Windows operating system and Intel processor) architecture to outpace Apple's innovations in the long term. Here's what he said, in part:

No, because there's hardly anybody investing a lot of energy in engineering on the Wintel platform outside of Microsoft and Intel, right? Dell doesn't spend much on engineering. Gateway probably spends zero. These guys don't engineer anything anymore. What you're really asking is, can we out innovate Microsoft? And I would give you a resounding yes. I think we are, in almost every category of software that we're in. ... Way more now [than in the past] ...

Remember, who is the major beneficiary of OS X? ... Well, you'd have to ask, if OS X makes it a lot easier and quicker to write great applications, who has the most engineers writing applications for Mac OS? Apple! We are the major beneficiary of OS X, because we can innovate faster. The way it used to be with OS 9 and the way it is with Windows today -- which is why they have to make their big switch to their OS X, which is Longhorn -- it's going to be very difficult for them, it was very difficult for us, it's going to be even more difficult for them because they have more users and more applications.

With Mac OS 9 and the current Windows it's like you have a house that's eight stories and when you want to add on that ninth story, you spend 80 to 90 percent of your energy not working on the ninth story but shoring up the first eight stories, because if you put the ninth story on, it will collapse of its own weight. ... With OS X we don't have to do that any more. We can spend 90 percent of our time adding floors above the eighth floor, and so look at how much faster we can go.

We're seeing tremendous software innovation within Apple because of that, both in the operating system itself and the applications that go with it, as well as our applications division. Tremendous, tremendous innovation. I think we can out-innovate Microsoft. I think we have, I think we've proven that. I think we will continue to. We're on our fourth major release of Mac OS X within three years. Microsoft, they're looking like they're running four years between software releases, and we're roughly one a year right now. ... Their last release was in 2001, and Longhorn looks like it will get out in 2006, maybe. Maybe. That's five years! ...

They're hoping in 2006 to be where we were in Jaguar, basically. That's what they're hoping. Obviously we're going to have a few more releases before 2006 so we'd be way ahead of them by then. But that's what they're hoping for, and maybe they'll do that. They have a lot of people to work on it, but it's a rough row to hoe. You've got a lot of apps that have to change. It's taken us -- Jaguar was really the first release of Mac OS X that really took off and it was our third release, before we finally had all the developers on board, everybody had learned about the new stuff enough, rewritten their apps enough, enough apps were out, and I don't see that the laws of physics are going to be too different for them. It's going to be a long road. They have perseverance, and they'll make it, but it's not going to happen the year they release their operating system. It takes a while. But in any event, I have a lot of confidence that we can be the most innovative software company ... going forward.

For more on Mac OS X Panther, the newly released successor to Jaguar (which Jobs references above) see this story from last week. Also see this story on Longhorn from Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference last week.

Mac and XP Media Center

One company from which Microsoft's Windows XP Media Center Edition apparently won't see direct competition is Apple Computer, at least as far as video recording capabilities go, according to this story earlier this week by Ina Fried of CNet News.com. During a meeting with financial analysts, Apple CEO Steve Jobs joked that, rather than mixing elements of the TV and computer, his company was looking into combining elements of the computer and the toaster. He went on to say that he doesn't see computers with video-recording capabilities serving a huge market. Here's the relevant portion of the CNet story:

"We're not going to go that direction," Jobs said. "There is a small audience that likes this."

Jobs said there are several problems with the Media Center concept, in particular the wide divergence in the way people want to watch television as compared with how they use a computer. "Generally what they want to view on television has to do with turning their mind off," he said.

Jobs said that video recording is processor intensive and is best left to a device that is not doing other things such as playing games or running spreadsheets. "When I want to record 'The West Wing,' I want to make damn sure it records 'The West Wing,'" he said.

That doesn't mean personal video recording functions won't be available on the Mac operating system. In fact, they already are, through such products as Eye TV. For its part, Microsoft introduced the latest edition of the Windows Media Center Edition operating system, which comes with a built-in television-recording function, in late September.

Rights-management redux

Click here for a segment on National Public Radio's Morning Edition about Microsoft's new rights-management technology for business documents, although I can't vouch for the credibility of the guy they interview.

Following our story on this topic earlier this week, a few readers asked what happens if protected or expired documents are subpoenaed through court proceedings. Microsoft says the files don't disappear entirely from the system, so even though ordinary users might not be able to access, print or share them from their desktop computers, a person with permission could go in and retrieve the necessary documents from the system in situations such as that.

What price friendship?

Be sure to check out today's daily poll on the P-I's home page if you haven't already. As of late this morning, nearly 80 percent of respondents said that, for a $250,000 reward, they would turn in a friend for unleashing a computer virus. See this story on Microsoft's effort to that effect. (Addendum: The final poll results are now viewable via this permalink.)

Classifieds, Microsoft style

Wired News has an interesting story today about a service called MicroNews Ads, a classifieds site where you can find such items as a $129,000 Sea Ray Sundancer boat, waterfront homes, pet horses and yachts. But don't count on perusing these classifieds if you haven't got connections. They're only for Microsoft employees and their designated friends and family. As Wired points out, it's not exactly craigslist.

More about DRM

For further details about Microsoft's rights-management technology for business documents, the focus of this story in today's P-I, see this page on Microsoft's TechNet site explaining how it can be used within Microsoft Office 2003. For additional information about the larger implications of digital-rights management technology, see this extensive page of links compiled as part of a UC Berkeley conference on the topic earlier this year. Click here for the Electronic Privacy Information Center's page on the issue. Click here for a Microsoft Q&A on the subject with Mike Nash, chief of the company's security business unit, and click here for an "executive e-mail" from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last spring explaining the company's rights-management strategy for digital media and business documents.

Also see these stories by other publications and Web sites about Microsoft's rights management initiatives:

• Rights Management? Or Restriction? -- Microsoft Watch
  
• Showdown in the digital rights corral -- Forbes
  
• New Office locks down documents -- CNet News.com
  
• Microsoft prepares Office lock-in -- Slashdot
  
• Microsoft Rolls Out Rights Management Software -- eWeek
  
• Microsoft debuts rights management system -- vnunet.com
  

Bounty for virus arrests

Microsoft announced a $5 million fund that will be tapped to offer rewards to people with information leading to the arrest and conviction of people who unleash computer viruses. The first rewards, $250,000 each, will support efforts to find the people behind the main Blaster and Sobig viruses unleashed this past summer. See the Associated Press story and the webcast of the news conference this morning at the National Press Club.

A Microsoft fan site?

San Jose Mercury News columnist Dan Gillmor pointed earlier this week to this site launched by a group calling itself the Microsoft User Network, apparently an outgrowth of the Bill Gates Fan Network. Note especially the comments to Gillmor's post on the subject. Whether or not the site is real, what does it say about the state of Microsoft's public image that people assume it must be satire? Out of curiosity, I've submitted a message through the group's site seeking more information, and I'll let you know what I find out.

Addendum, 6 p.m. 11/5/03: Reader Nicole Hamilton, who should consider becoming an investigative journalist, did a little sleuthing on this subject and sent me this e-mail:

If you do a "whois microsoftusernetwork.com" at GoDaddy (or one of the other registrars), the administrative contact is listed as:

Bizi, Dimonika dbizi@yahoo.com
5 Hamstead Lane
Jamaica Plain, MA 02130
US
617-308-7007 Fax: 000-000-0000

If you then do a Google search on "Dimonika Bizi" you'll find several hits, including one to Dimonika's resume. That page isn't still up, but it is still in Google's cache.

From the evidence, I'd say the site is completely genuine and that the person behind is probably a young African immigrant who works days as a freelance web designer, and is quite sincere in his/her affection for Microsoft and admiration for Bill Gates. It may be as simple as Microsoft and Bill Gates symbolizing the opportunity he/she is hoping to find in a new homeland.

Evolution of security

Before leaving the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles last week, I was able to catch most of the security symposium that the company held on the last day of the event. One of the things the panelists discussed was the historical context -- how the broader industry got into the security problems it's facing today. These were a couple of their comments:

Carl Ellison, a cryptography expert who moderated the panel, spoke about the era of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANet, the Department of Defense computer network from which the Internet evolved: "The environment was all an environment of friends. ... This was an environment where we didn't have to worry about attacks. ... If we were to start over today knowing what the real environment is, we would probably design things differently. The question is, can we ever get from here to there? We have a ton of legacy. What's the path for correcting these initial false assumptions?"

One panelist, Howard Schmidt, was Microsoft's chief security officer before leaving the company to work in the Bush administration. He now works for eBay. Here's one thing he said on the topic Ellison raised above: "It's like the evolution of automobiles. In the very beginning, the only people who had cars were the ones who could fix them themselves. It's the same thing with the very begining the online world that we're now in today, with the Internet. We see this evolution. Basically, you can't get a car now that doesn't have a seat belt in it, that doesn't have some sort of ... braking system. And I see the legacy (computer security methods) eventually being replaced with things that are more robust."

Examples of that shift would presumably include Microsoft's decision to start shipping Windows XP with the firewall automatically enabled. See our Friday story for more information about that, as well as other security issues related to Longhorn, the company's code name for the next version of the Windows operating system, due in 2005 or 2006.

Truckloads of data

One running theme at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference last week was the idea that the amount of data stored on computers is growing at an incredible rate -- which leads in part to the company's contention that computer users will require a better method of storing, connecting and retrieving information and files on large hard drives.

To demonstrate the broader trend, here's an interesting study released by UC Berkeley last week. Among other findings, the researchers estimate that the "amount of new information stored on paper, film, magnetic, and optical media has about doubled in the last three years." (Link via Christoph C. Cemper. See also this BBC story on the study.)

Also, if you've ever tried to conceptualize the size of kilobytes, gigabytes and terabytes, be sure to check out Table 1.1 a little ways down on the study's Web page. Very helpful. A gigabyte, for example, is roughly equal to the amount of information in a pickup truck full of books, according to the table.