There is an effort underway to have Google crippled by the EU authorities for being an anti-competitive monopoly. One of the main groups behind this effort is called “Fairsearch”.

Fairsearch themselves claim to be all about forcing transparency and innovation on search, but basically they appear to be an anti-google group made up primarily of Google competitors (Microsoft, Nokia and Oracle as well as other smaller competitors). What they appear to want to do, is force Google to link to them for services Google themselves offer. (for example, maps, shopping etc.)

They also seem to be fairly liberal with the truth, such as claiming that it’s impossible to have any other search than Google in Android despite the fact that at least half a dozen android devices have been released that have Bing or Yahoo as their default search. One of those phones was locked onto the alternative search and couldn’t be changed. So clearly those claims are untrue. Read up before you believe anything they say. They do after all have a vested interest.

Hiding behind trade groups and lobyists and trolls/shills so as to smear a competitor without smearing yourself should be illegal in all of its forms. Facebook were busted for this sort of thing recently too.

Some reading on the subject:

Google not required on Android.

Who is Fairsearch?

Who is Fairsearch and why do they hate Google so much

Why can’t Fairsearch get anyone to listen to their anti-Google tirades?

What is wrong with the Fairsearch complaint to the EU about Google.

Another smear on Google from Microsoft

So in summary, if you want to read an unbiased discussion about Google, asking their competitors is not the way to go about it. Likewise if you want to use a different search engine to Google, change the URL at the top of your browser to one of the others or go into the android settings and change it there too. Unlike Microsoft’s anti-competitive history, there is no lock in here, alternatives are just a web address away.

Of course since Microsoft are dead against locking competing products out of phones and browsers, I imagine they will add options for native Chrome to be installed in Windows Phone and RT? And they will change the Sky-drive integration in Windows 8 to allow Google Drive, Dropbox or one of the others? If that sort of thing is actually illegal, how have Apple gotten away with only allowing their users to access services that Apple themselves approve of? As far as I am concerned, if you change one you should change them all. So every change Microsoft wants made to Google should also have to be made to Microsoft search and phone products too. This post is to help people find out who is really pulling the strings against Google. Oracle have just been beaten in court by Google and are appealing it. Nokia is getting it’s behind handed to it in the smartphone arena by Google Android and are a very very close partner with Microsoft who are of course Googles biggest competitor.

The court case between Apple and Samsung just got more interesting. Apple are always touting their innovation and Samsung has just pointed out in court that the iPhone would not exist had it not been for Samsung Technology. I have covered the non Apple innovations that the iPhone takes for granted before, but it’s nice to see others have noticed too.

I badly want to see Apple lose this case big time, and I want to see Microsoft’s license agreement with Samsung come to light in this case too. I also want to see Microsoft lose their case against Motorola. I want all of this for the same reasons. Apple and Microsoft want to use Patents to hold back competition so people have to accept less impressive technology for more money just so these two companies can profit more. Samsung was developing phone technology before either of the others and shouldn’t have to pay now just because they didn’t think it made any sense to patent crazy and simplistic ideas and designs. (Samsung could have patented music playing phones had they wanted too.) My message to Microsoft and Apple is a simple one, compete on your products merits and stop gaming the court system to get ahead.

It seems pretty certain that our future is going to involve mobile internet devices if it doesn’t already. By that I mean tablets and smart phones. We already have phones with resolutions higher than the 800×600 that I used to code for back a few years, (the new Google Galaxy Nexus has 1280×720 resolution). Between Apple and Google, about a million of these devices is sold a day now, so if you are not already testing your site/webapps at smart phone resolutions, you’d best be starting.

Anyway, all that aside, I’ve been reading about how Steve Jobs from Apple was determined to destroy Google Android Linux because he viewed it as stolen product. He was also prepared to blow all of Apple’s money and kill himself to do it.
So I started wondering. What in Android was stolen product from Apple?
* Was iPhone the first touch screen phone? (Nope, IBM Simon did that in 94.) There were others too, like the Motorola Accompli 008.
* Was multitasking what Google stole from Apple? (Nope, the first Iphones had no multi tasking and it was added in much later than Androids arrival which had it from the start.)
* Was iPhone the first B/G/N wireless connected phone? (Nope, this Accton page shows they were already selling Mobile wireless chips in 2006 and PDA’s with wireless were already about.)
* Was iPhone the first phone with a browser? (Nope, that happened in 1997.)
* Was iPhone the first phone with an icon based layout? (Nope, lots of phones were doing that before the iphone)
* Was iPhone the first camera phone? (Nope, Phillipe Kahn did that back in 97)
* Was iPhone the first music playing phone? (Nope, that one goes to Samsung back in 1999)
* Was iPhone the first GPS phone? (Nope, people were doing that back in 1999.)
So, what did Apple “invent” that was so ground breaking? Pinch to zoom maybe? because it seems to me that all they did was combine the functionality of a touch screen PDA with a GSM phone. And they were not the first to do that either.

So, the “invention” that Apple made that was so worth defending, was actually taking everyone else’s ACTUAL inventions, and putting them in one device and marketing it really really well.
Doesn’t seem revolutionary enough to blow 40billion dollars trying to defend though, because if you removed all the shoulders that Apple were standing on to make the iphone, you’d be standing on the ground holding a Nokia candy bar phone from the 90’s.

Steve Jobs said he’d fight to his dying breath to destroy Android, and in the end he did exactly that. He is dead and Android has never been bigger than it is today. The shame is that if he’d innovated instead of litigated he may actually have gone down in history as an real inventor rather than just a marketing/stylist/CEO guru. As it is, they are no more revolutionary as innovators than Microsoft are, and that is precious little in this persons mind. So guys, forget what everyone else is doing, and concentrate on thinking of new things you could be doing. Then you can call yourself innovative inventors of revolutionary products. (A little humility with regards to mentioning the people who’s innovations you are using wouldn’t go astray either.)

Regardless of which company you give your loyalty, the mobile future is here. If you are not targeting them in your development, you are going to lose customers because this a growth industry that will very likely soon outweigh desktop browsers.

My average day has me logged in and working from about 6 different computers. Some are Linux, some are Windows and one is a Mac. Up until now, on all of these machines, I had separate different browser favourites\bookmarks, passwords, histories, preferences histories etcetera, and if I needed a bookmark or whatever on when computer when I was on another, I’d have to remote control or walk there to get it. Until now that is. Mozilla Weave has changed all that and now I have the same settings/history/bookmarks on all of my machine on all 3 operating systems. Best of all, it’s a free service!

What is Mozilla Weave I hear you ask? Well, think of it as an online service that stores your browser details in an encrypted state on one of Mozilla’s servers and you can access that data using the weave browser extension installed into as many different Firefox browsers as you like. In my case, my 6 different Firefox installs over Linux/Mac/Windows all have the weave extension installed and configured to use the same weave account, and as a result all of them now have the same browser details.

Case in point is this post, I’ve never posted to htmlfixit.com from this computer before, but because this computer and my home computer both have weave installed, this computer “remembered” the post address and the user-name and password to log in.

This is the way things are destined to move, all your data available all the time from anywhere. I’m a fan.

Microsoft, who have been known to patent tiny and sometimes seemingly obvious things (timed mouse clicks for example) while riding on the shoulders of giants who often gave their truly revolutionary discoveries unencumbered by patents, has been bitten by the spurious software patent issue themselves. Microsoft Word it’s been ruled, is in breach of somebody else’s software patent (related to XML tagging). Better yet, an injunction forcing them to stop the sale of such infringing products has been granted also (Word and Vista). This has led to speculation that there may be something to the theory of Karma after all and that what goes around really might come around.

Sadly Microsoft has way too much money for this to make much of an impact on them. They’ll most likely pay the fine (290m), perhaps create a workaround and carry on business as usual. But still, the more money they have to hand out in the US, the EU and anywhere else that dislikes their practices, the more likely that at some point in the future, the board will realize that their version of business as usual isn’t really all that profitable anymore. Read more at Reuters.

According to Informationweek, IE8 has been out for only a very brief period, and yet many early adopters have already changed back to IE7. They also say that IE is now down around the 67% mark in overall popularity thanks to Firefox and Safari.

Makes for interesting reading and highlights again why you should never code your site in browser specific language.

There has been a great deal of fuss regarding the Windows 7 beta release and how it may be everything Vista should have been. To see what all the fuss is about, I grabbed a copy and set about installing it in a virtualbox VM and having a play. Here are my observations.

It’s very polished for a beta. It looks more like Apple OSX than any previous version of Windows. It seems quite stable. It boots and shuts down reasonably quickly (about XP speed to my eyes) and uses an order of magnitude less system resources than Vista. However, all of the above points bring to mind one question: Vista was created after many many years of development, whereas Windows 7 was evolved from Vista in about a year I think. So why was/is it so hard to get Vista to perform like this? It almost looks like they released Vista as a buggy bloated waste of hard drive space on purpose just to make the next (much sooner) release look so much better.

When you think about it, Windows 7 has almost the speed and system resource usage of the 8 year old XP OS, it can still suffer from Viruses and Spyware, It doesn’t seem any more or less stable than XP (which was pretty good in my experiance), so I’m left wondering why people are singing the praises of an OS that manages to mostly match its much much older sibling? Don’t get me wrong, Windows 7 is a MASSIVE step up from Vista. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it’s only a minor step up from XP. It looks better than XP or Vista, it seems easier to use and more intuitive than Vista as well. (I’m so used to and familiar with XP that my opinion is not valid as to its ease of use)

Conclusion: Well done Microsoft for fixing the problems with Vista, but why didn’t you do this the first time around? Also, XP has been a pretty good OS for Microsoft and for end users. Until something really revolutionary comes along, everything is going to just seem like an incremental upgrade of XP.

Windows 7 is a good looking, stable and solid OS, but I’ve not seen anything so far that would compel a tight fisted company bean counter to justify replacing XP as it doesn’t really do much extra for a corporate desktop. As with MS Office, Microsoft’s older OS products are going to become their biggest competitors, especially with the current financial crisis making everyone nervous.