Symphonious

It’s interesting to see the predictions that mobile phone content will take off really starting to come true in a big way.  The television is inundated with ads for all sorts of stupid gimmicks that can be sent to your mobile phone.  Want to know how to be a good kisser?  SMS this word to that number and the nice robot on the other end will give all the tips you need.  The ringtone craze has been going on for a while of course and there seems to be a subscription service being promoted for ringtones these days.  I haven’t seen an ad for mobile phone games yet so Mr Schwartz’s predictions still seem to be waiting in the wings a little (though mobile phone games are definitely pretty big business so I’d expect them to start showing up in TV ads here soon).

The best thing about these services is that they are an actual, real world example of micro-payments in action.  Frankly I never thought the idea of micro-payments would work because it’s too hard to keep track of a huge range of small payments you’ve made to people.  It turns out that that we’ve had micro-payments around for a long time already - everytime you dial a 1900 number (or your local equivalent, think 50c/minute billing rate) you’re essentially using micro-payments (though they are often very large micro-payments).  What makes it all work is the fact that they all just wind up on your phone bill which you were going to pay anyway.  It’s a trap for new players that these calls will cost substantially more than a normal SMS would so I can imagine a lot of teenagers getting some pretty hefty phone bills out of this.  Still, as a payment method it’s really very efficient and convenient.

David Jericho revisits his complaints about the airport express and ends with the comment:

To that end, try as I might, from borrowing and using my sisters 1.2GHz iBook for a month, to using Kirsten’s G4 machines at home exclusively I remain unconvinced. I fail to see a use for the hardware (and the price tag - although the laptops have come down), and I just can’t see what benefits the software offers anyone in an enterprise.

Of course, as always, I’m willing to be reeducated and ask those who can tell me why it is ready for the enterprise, or why exactly OS X is better than an appropriately setup Windows XP system to come forward and brain me.

Apple have never really targeted the enterprise.  The main reason you don’t see a big advantage to OS X in the enterprise is because there’s not a lot that makes a difference to enterprise desktops.  There are a lot of management tools and servers that make a big difference to administration costs, but reducing user frustration isn’t particularly important since you have professional system administrators taking care of that side of things.  Also, more and more enterprise software is becoming web-based so the actual OS doesn’t matter much for them.

The real benefits of OS X come through when you give it to your grandmother who’s never used a computer before - there tends to be far less maintenance and hassles with OS X than with Windows and a far simpler learning curve than with Linux.  In the enterprise though you just won’t notice much of that - particularly if you’re trying to integrate with an existing Windows network because you get all the hassles of a Windows network as well as the hassles of cross-platform compatibility.  Perhaps you’d find advantages to OS X in the enterprise if you built the entire infrastructure around OS X but it’s hard to say since I don’t know of any significant instances of doing that.  I suspect you’d probably find that Apple’s management tools and server offerings are a little immature anyway.

The other thing you’ll find is that using any new OS for a month doesn’t really give you an appreciation for what’s good about it if your skills are so highly developed in a different OS.  For instance, I have three machines on my desk at home, one Windows, one Linux and one OS X but I almost exclusively use the OS X box because a) it’s the laptop I carry around with me everywhere but b) that’s where my skillset is most highly developed (and I know about all the applications to install that make life so much more pleasant).

I suppose the big question though is, what requirements do you have that aren’t being met by your current Windows XP setup?  If there aren’t any major requirements being unfulfilled then there’s no possible way that any other setup could impress you.

pk commented on my last entry:

Wait a minute… where did you back up that it *could* have been written on another platform? Maybe yes, maybe no but let’s keep the playing field level.

Well firstly I based it on the fact that I’ve written a similar application on OS X myself which seems like pretty convincing evidence.  Secondly you could create a mathematical proof based around the fact that it would be possible to develop such an application on a Turing machine, however I’m on holidays and that’s a lot of work.  Finally it’s pretty easy to provide commercial examples of this being done on both Linux and Mac OS X as pb did in the comments on Scoble’s blog:

I’m not so sure "at a higher cost" is accurate. There are plenty of kiosk vendors on other platforms. Muze for instance is Linux-based. Even the Mac is represented by Touchstand. And think of the things like Tivo and Replay that would have been impossible on Windows.

(I disagree with him that things like the Tivo and Replay would be impossible on Windows - mostly because of the existence of Microsoft’s Tivo-like system.)

The cost benefit analysis we should be starting from was done by Amoeba Music. Why did they choose to develop it on Windows? Just because they own Microsoft stock? I doubt it. Most likely it was cheaper to develop and/or deploy.

How do you know that Amoeba Music did a cost benefit analysis?  Most likely the only computer they had in the shop was Windows based, their only experience was with Windows based computers and so they went out looking for a set of Windows kiosks.

Or perhaps they were already locked into Microsoft’s proprietary protocols because they already had a Windows based server?  Sure that would make it cheaper to develop a Windows based solution for them, but it definitely doesn’t make Microsoft cool - it makes them decidedly uncool.  Furthermore, had they done a long term cost benefit analysis before purchasing that Windows based server they may or may not have found it cheaper to go with a different solution.  At this stage we don’t know that they did a cost benefit analysis at all.

The reality is that it’s simply not possible to comment on cost of development when all we know about the system in question is that it’s a kiosk type thing in a music store that allows you to sample tracks and we have a pretty lousy picture of some people standing at terminals (which apparently are running this software, it’s hard to tell from the picture).  I certainly wouldn’t be prepared to offer advice on what the best development methodology or set of tools for the project are based on that information and anyone who is is obviously blindly towing the company line.  It very much makes me question the integrity and reliability of those who do make such claims.

Similarly, it’s crazy for the people in Scoble’s comments to be arguing over the cost and productivity benefits of Visual Studio compared with other development environments.  The requirements of the project need to be sorted out before you have any hope of determining which language is best suited to the project let alone which IDE is best.

I think perhaps the point of my original comment may have been misinterpreted.  When I said "So Scoble, care to back up that rhetoric?", I probably should have phrased it as "Scoble, you’re full of shit".  I phrased it as I did because I can’t entirely rule out the possibility that Robert took a few hours while he was there to sit down with the developers and discuss why Windows was used and what they went through.  It’s even possible that he walked out of there with a copy of the cost benefit analysis they did.  I find either of those situations exceptionally unlikely however since if he had he would have been crowing about it in his blog.  So in the interests of being polite and in the off chance that there was some actual factual content or even half decent logical explanation behind these claims, I asked for supporting material instead of just flatly rejecting the assertion.  It’s called being skeptical but open-minded.

So to sum up, there is currently no evidence known to me which shows that Microsoft played any significant part in or provided any significant benefit to the development of the "cool software".  As such, Microsoft do not deserve a "cool" badge because of this project.  I explicitly refrain from suggesting that Microsoft were detrimental to the development or that the development could have been done better on other platforms.  I do claim that it would have been possible on other platforms.

Scoble claimed Microsoft was cool because someone else developed an app that ran on it, I pointed out it could have been developed on any OS and then Scoble says:

Ahh, at a higher cost. Which is the whole point of why Windows is used so many places.

Got some figures to back that up?  For someone who doesn’t even know who wrote the software I find it rather surprising that you’ve done a cost benefit analysis of developing that application on different platforms.  Anyone can pull claims out of thin air but you’d have to be crazy to just believe it without figures to back it up.  So Scoble, care to back up that rhetoric?

Scoble thinks that Microsoft is cool because someone wrote a cool application that runs on Windows.  Sigh.  Talk about taking credit for other people’s work.  I’m certain the same application could be created on Linux, Solaris or Mac OS X.  Windows is the boring underlay that just happened to be there, not what makes the application cool.  Maybe Jonathan Schwartz will blog about how the store could have avoided being locked into Windows by writing the application in Java, or RMS might write an open letter about how the application should be opensourced so that the community could improve it and reduce development costs for the store.  None of that will matter in the end though because the RIAA will sue it into obvilion because people are just listening to the music on the in-store computers instead of buying the CDs.

Sigh, I’m not cynical, really…