After watching the string of new releases by Google, Yahoo and MSN over the past months, I can’t help but feel that more money and time is being spent on flashy new eye-candy services like Google and MSN’s satellite services then on improving core search functionality. I do about 1-200 Google searches every day, but other then the one time I looked up the White house on Google’s satellite service out of curiosity I’ve never been back. Ditto with Yahoo’s myYahoo service, I tried it once out of curiosity and didn’t go back. All these efforts seem to be designed to create a more sticky portal for newbies, but the simple point of the matter is that at the base of it all, people will stick with the “portal” that also returns the best search results. Google search is popular not because it is has lots of eye-candy, but rather because it returns the best results in the fastest times and doesn’t clutter up their results with lots of spurious results and eye-candy. Google News is popular because it does exactly what you’d expect it to do and nothing more. It sweeps the Internet looking for the latest news and categorizes it nicely for us, again without loading up on unnecessary eye-candy . It is to be expected that this would happen when Microsoft jumped into search, they are after all the kings of eye-candy but I had hoped Google wouldn’t be tricked into moving away from the very reason why they are the search leaders in the first place. Were I in Google’s place, I’d be busy turning Google desktop search into a killer application and porting it to work on Linux and Macintosh desktops, they are competing against Microsoft now, and Microsoft plans to extensively embed their search technology into the next version of Windows. That means Google has only a certain time period to get their desktop search into the hearts and minds of the public. Porting to Mac and Linux is important because they are growing markets that Microsoft isn’t likely to touch and any advantage is a good thing in this competition.
Don’t get me wrong, Google maps is a very impressive piece of DHTML, but there are already multiple online map services available all around the world and Microsoft have much more money available to them to be used in marketing and the creation of online eye-candy.
Google should concentrate on their key points of superiority, they have the best general search engine, the best online news aggregator, the best webmail service and a huge base of loyal users. They could learn allot from the Mozilla foundation who use their loyal and vocal users to shout from the rooftops to great effect. Press releases are not as affective a marketing technique as being told by your friends about an awesome new application. Something Microsoft themselves are learning to their chagrin while trying to halt the Firefox migration. Google should capitalize on that by creating a portal for Google users to “spread the word” and to suggest new directions and functions that Google should look into. After all, it is those very users that have made Google what it is today. Most importantly Google should be very careful with their image. The “Do no harm” mantra in their company prospectus is of great importance to them as straying from it would seriously affect their loyal user base. Microsoft has not got a great public image any more because they have proven that at the end of the day their will go where the money is and that means they support big business more then home users. (An example would be the Digital Rights Management being slowly embedded into Windows so that record and movie companies will have more say over your actions then you do in the future.) Google needs to balance their clean image with their corporate requirements so as not to drive a wedge between themselves and their best marketers.

According to the latest update to w3schools browser statistics, Firefox has climbed to 25% of the browser market and Internet Explorer 5/6 has dropped to 64.8%. W3schools is a very popular site with web developers and has shown Firefox increasing and Internet Explorer decreasing since before Firefox hit version 1.0 (although they classed it as just Mozilla back then). If you add the full Mozilla suite’s market share to that of Firefox, then the Mozilla browsers are just under 30% market share now. We’ve been following W3schools statistics for some time now and the Firefox trend has been continuing at a more or less stable rate since before Firefox was added to their statistics.

Not a bad effort considering that in January last year IE accounted for 84.1% of the browsers. The amazing thing about Firefox’s market share isn’t just that it keeps on growing, it is that it is still growing despite competing against a web browser that comes included with Windows. People don’t have to “get” Internet Explorer, it is the default browser for Windows. To use Firefox, they have to get, install and most importantly use it, and the fact that so many are doing so is nothing short of amazing. It is one thing to hear that 60 million people have downloaded Firefox, it sounds impressive and looks good in news articles, but it’s quite another to see popular sites the world over reporting that Firefox is actually being used by a large number of those people. The Mozilla organization is non-profit, they give their products away for free and they don’t have an advertising budget as such and any efforts in that regard are based on user donations and word of mouth. To compete against a company that spends as much on Marketing as Microsoft is quite an achievement also.

Sites like W3schools (and HTMLfixIT as well for that matter) are tech sites, meaning most of their visitors are interested in or work for the tech industry in some capacity. Internet Explorer has much higher market share overall, but the tech users are good early warning indicators for what the rest of the users will be doing in a year so so. HTMLfixIT’s own statistics (which you can see in the box to the right of this article.) are showing even higher Firefox usage (nearly 40%) and past experience has shown that our statistics are at least a year ahead of the non tech users trend wise. It is good to know that ordinary people can still make a difference on the Internet.

Zdnet has an interesting article about Microsoft and the patent system. Microsoft recently indicated that they thought the patent system needed serious reform, they then went and patented a heap more obvious or non original ideas apparently to prove their case that the patent system needs reform. I suspect Microsoft’s idea of reform is a system where they get free run, but where people challenging their patents or people suing them for infringement don’t. Microsoft has patented 3000 “ideas” so far this year alone, so I can see why they patent system needs reform, but it’s not until you consider that it costs Microsoft $100,000,000 a year to defend itself in patent cases that you get an idea of why they might think it needs reform.

To reform the patent process isn’t that hard, the problem stems from the overworked and underpaid folks working at the patent office who don’t have knowledge or experience in all the fields they are being asked to rule on. What should happen is an industry consortium of experts in each field should be created. And all patents for their field should have to pass though those experts before being granted. This would ensure that people actually knowledgeable about a field would be making the decision that something is innovative and non obvious. There should also be some sort of period just before approval when applications are made available in a public forum and the public get a chance to show prior art or other reasons why a patent should not be granted. The experts should then have to review any relevant evidence that came up before making the final decision. Zdnet’s idea that frequent offenders be banned from the table is a good one also.

It isn’t perfect, but it would be much better then what we have now. I have no idea if anything I’ve written offends any patents out there and it’s likely that I won’t know until the holder takes me to court and that worries me a lot as I’m just a little guy plodding along in the trenches. This doesn’t discuss the need or implications of software patents directly, I personally think copyright is all that is needed for software, just like print media, movies and music. But the problems detailed above are 100 times worse when applied to as intricate and ill defined a process as “software”.

If recent news from the UK is correct, then Intel are trying to quietly slip hardware DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology onto their users. Why is that bad? You ask. Well, DRM can mean handing control of your rights over to record or movie companies. They will be the ones that get to force what they consider to be fair use” onto users. Apparently Intel is not talking details, they have admitted that the DRM technology is in there, they just are not telling us what it does or how. I’d imagine the reason for that is out of fear of the same sort of public outrage that happened when Intel introduced the retrievable CPU unique serial number some years back. It is suspected that the next version of Windows will contain DRM features throughout, tied to hardware where possible.

If PC and software makers are going to continue to dictate what I can and cannot do with my own PC, then I’m going to buy the fastest dual core AMD chip I can find that has not yet had any DRM features added and build a system running a nice clean DRM free copy of Linux and leave it at that. To hell with any company that would try to dictate what I can and cannot do with products I’ve legally bought. I’ve often thought that, contrary to popular opinion the record and movie companies, along with many software companies love the digital revolution. Why? Well because there were just too many freedoms they could not remove from analogue audio and video by the nature of the formats themselves that they can strip away quite easily from digital formats. I suppose that the alternative is to move to France, where the movie and music companies are having a much harder time convincing the courts that users have no right to have rights. I don’t swap music or movies, I don’t even run any peer to peer software and I’ve never sat in a movie theatre holding a camcorder. I just want to be able to play music and movies I buy on the electronic devices I’ve also bought. That includes in the car, on the phone/PDA, and on my dozen or so PC’s. Is it so wrong to want this?

DRM is not bad in and of itself, used correctly it stands a good chance of improving user security and reducing several of the problems we as net citizens face on a daily basis. The problem is that when you put so much power in the hands of hardware and software manufacturers, that power is nearly always eventually used against the user. Lets face it, if a record company were to go to a “software” company and say “We’ll give you 30 million dollars a year to use your software/hardware DRM system to make sure that people can’t back up any digital music bought from us”, there is a good chance that your rights have just been handed to the record company. Technically they can do that already without hardware, but when you add hardware to the equation, you’ve just created a system that is much harder to get around. If movie and record companies really want to do this, they should be charging far less for their digital copies then they currently are. I can buy a CD and manually rip it (not legally in Australia because we don’t have “fair use” laws) and use it on my car stereo, my music player etc, but using DRM digital data, I must apparently buy copies for each device, which works out much more expensive then just buying the CD and ripping it myself. If they want to make DRM fair, they should be charging 10 or 20 cents per song rather then the online extortion they have going now. It’s been proven time and again that software DRM isn’t infallible, the number of times Itunes and other services have had their DRM broken is quite surprising, but when hardware comes into the picture it will be considerably harder to work around, so your rights will be what they tell you your rights are. That’s just not good enough for me. I’ve not been a fan of Intel for many years. Back when I worked for IT wholesalers I discovered that Intel’s marketing is far more important to them then their technology and that were it not for AMD (and before them Cyrix), we’d all be paying much more for our PC’s then we do now. The problem here is that AMD are apparently going to be jumping on the “Trustworthy computing” bandwagon as well. Unless the governments step in with specific laws dictating what rights they can take from users, we’re all in trouble. They are slipping this past users using security as the bait, but rest assured their is much more to DRM what you won’t hear them touting to the public until it’s too late to do anything about it. You can read more about the issues involved in DRM on EPIC.org’s DRM page.

INSERT:
Intel have since denied any hidden DRM in the 945 chipset. They say that they support many types of content protection and plan to support more, but that there is nothing hidden.

Netcraft just released a toolbar for Firefox that among other things protects users against Phishing attacks. They released a version for Internet Explorer months ago and this new release equals the playing field. The interesting thing is that the IE toolbar has only been downloaded about 100,000 times over all those months, whereas the Firefox version was downloaded 60,000 times in the first few hours of it’s release. This seems to show that Firefox users are much more concerned about their security then Internet Explorer users, (hardly surprising really all things considered.)

In other browser news, Netscape 8 breaks some XML rendering functionality in Internet explorer. Microsoft has apparently recommended that people get rid of Netscape 8 and use Internet Explorer (hardly surprising advice from Microsoft really). I can’t think of anything safer for users then to have a broken Internet Explorer, but unfortunately this bug only affects the display of XML data and some people take that kind of think personally. Netscape 8 is a good browser and has some innovative features, but it seems that they really rushed though the beta and release period without enough diligence. They (AOL) have indicated a fix is in the pipeline and should be available next week.

Linksys, Cisco’s consumer division have released several routers with firmware based on parts of the Linux operating system. In order to do that they had to license the firmware as GPL and make the source code available for free online. Earthlink (a giant ISP) has taken that firmware and modified it to support IPV6 addresses (as opposed to the IPV4 IP addresses the vast majority of us are using now). The benefits of IPV6 are many, but among them are the fact that we are running out of possible IPV4 addresses and so we must use NAT (Network Address Translation) to offer Internet connections to people behind private internal networks. IPV6 removes this limitation has it has an infinitely larger number of available addresses. The point of the story is that by offering their Firmware under the GPL license, the power to modify or bugfix their router is in their own hands, you need not wait for ages to get the functionality or bug fixes you need. There are already several groups about that are adding extended functionality to the router firmware so if the manufacturer doesn’t offer the function you need, the chances are good that somebody else has done the work for you or are working to do so. Isn’t sharing great?

Read TheInquirer for the full story or see Linksys for the Linksys WRT54G firmware upgrade.

There has been much talk that the new Xbox 360 is running an modified version of Windows 2000, and much more talk about the connectivity features of the new console, but it doesn’t seem that many have put the two together. Lets consider, a Windows 2000 based OS with Internet connectivity and millions of inexperienced kids…. How long till we start seeing Xboxes infected by worms and viruses? Virus writers are smart, they have managed to find ways onto computers by using flaws in Instant messaging, web browsers and dozens of other application types. When there are 40 odd million Xbox 360’s out there with broadband connections you can bet that it won’t be long before they start getting serious attention. In fact there is already a huge code base of worms and Viruses available for the Win32 platform of which Xbox and Xbox 360 are a part, many of them could be modified and ported to affect Microsoft’s gaming console. Give it time folks, it will happen. Maybe Microsoft will then extend their new OneCare subscription service to Xbox users so they can rake in a few more dollars. Consider that there have already been viruses written for PDA’s and mobile phones, then consider how much better a target a PC based device on a broadband connection is, consider also that the Xbox 360 is reported to be able to interface and share with Windows Media PC’s and the target is looking better and better. In fact it’s already starting with news that a denial of service flaw has been found in Microsoft’s popular Halo: Combat Evolved game and a cross-site scripting flaw in Microsofts Xbox360.com site which is part of Microsofts Xbox live subscription service.