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Last month on 15th March 2012 at New Delhi, W3C India & IAMAI (Internet & Mobile Association of India) had organized an one day conference titled “Mobile Web Initiative in India”. I got invited to participate in one of the panel discussions on the day “Challenges of Indic Adoption on Mobile Web” covering on the Technology for enabling Indian Languages on Mobile Platform & Lack of standard interoperability.
The panel was moderated by Ms.Swaran Latha (W3C India Country Manager & Director & HoD for TDIL Programme of MC & IT of Government of India). The moderator covered in length the challenges in this area, what Govt. of India is doing to get all stakeholders on board in enabling Indian Languages, nudging them into place without any hard legislations. My good friend and the expert on this field Mr.Muthu Nedumaran from Murasu Systems (Malaysia) covered on the technologies that are now available including in iOS, Android (HTC Explorer) and recent BlackBerry OS. Mr.Sridhar of Akruti talked about the path that has been covered in last two decades in this field.
I myself talked on the need for educating and awareness building amongst the users & stakeholders on the possibility & business potential of enabling the Devices, OS and Apps for Indian Languages. India only has 5% of its population (say 40 Million of the 800 Million Mobile users) who know to read & write English, what about the 95% they are not using SMS or even Address book?. There is an urgent need for the industry to educate the users that using Mobile doesn’t mean learning English & poor communication. I have seen that most of the time the Device OEM’s Engineering & Head Office (say in US, Europe, Japan or Taiwan) is ready to do Indian Languages (when they do tens of languages worldwide this is routine to them), it is the Indian Marketing & Operations office that throws the spanner. They sit in their glass offices in Gurgaon & Bangalore and think everyone in India speaks English including Drivers, Maids, Cooks & Factory workers. By doing this they are not only killing our languages (but most of Indian Languages are classical languages surviving over thousands of years of external invasion), but also depriving the productivity & economic advantage that better communication through Mobile enables for common man (Aam Aadmi).
There is no cost reasoning today for not doing Indian Language support today in Mobile Devices (it costs less than 50 US cents per device and falls to zero when you go to millions of units). Today Indian Languages is supported in major Mobile OSes – iOS (Display & input through Apps), Android through OEM software from HTC or Samsung has full support and Blackberry through add-on install. Even Nokia Symbian OS has support enabled in their lost cost devices. Only Microsoft Windows Phone 7.x doesn’t have any kind of Indian Language support, it is sad because Microsoft was the first major OS vendor in PCs to fully support many of the Indian Languages way back from Windows 2000. Hopefully the next version of Windows Phone (WP8) having an unified Kernel with Desktop Windows (Disclaimer: Nothing official yet from Microsoft, but rumoured here) will start supporting Indian Languages.
Finally if the stakeholders can’t be convinced it is time for Parliament (and not individual State Assemblies) to come with laws requiring Indian Language support across the eco-system (Operator, SMS, Devices, OS & Apps) – *YES I said this, which is rare for someone like me who prefers lean and small Government & Compact Laws*.
After Vadavooran, this is the next stage play under the Shraddha umbrella and I went for it with my wife and son today. Vidhuran is performed in a mime (No dialogs except for a brief introduction) format which is new to Chennai. To tell Mahabharat in this format is a bold step by MacTrics, a Mime and Body Theatre Group formed in 2009. Their facebook page introduces the play as “Inspired from the Vidura of Mahabharata, Vidhuran is an amalgamation of three performing arts – Theatre, Dance, and Mime combined to tell a single story. With an enthralling Monologue at its narrative core, snippets of scintillating Mime presentations and stylized, Contemporary Bharathnatyam intersect the main narration at apposite moments, accentuating the high points in the show".
The play is directed by a young Assistant Director from Kollywood “Victor” and Dramatised & Narrations by Industry veteran Mr.Vietnam Veedu Sundaram
You can see in YouTube the trailer from their performance of the same play last year in Chennai.
For the play today which ran for 90 minutes (started exactly @7PM as printed in invite) they had taken the Mahabharat Wax Palace story. The initial scene of Royal Darbar was breath-taking with everything on stage including Chairs, Royal Throne was made (what do I call this?) of actors – see the 3rd picture above you will see it. In the following scenes it became more complex – with a huge ship (picture 2 above) being brought to life and it moved on the stage with people inside it; a water falls and river; a water fountain inside the palace; a wax tunnel that was crumbling; horses with people riding on top it. The dancers performed with precision, grace and skill. The music was apt & brought the story to life making you forget there are no dialogs.
Overall a brilliant performance. Congratulations to the entire team. Never miss this if they come to a stage near you.
Finally, my son *surprisingly* enjoyed this thoroughly.
As always attending a Microsoft technology conference (TechEd India 2012) was fun & educative. You can catch the clips here and other information from here, so I will keep this post to few sessions I managed to attend.
The 3 day conference happened at Hotel Lalit Ashok, a fine hotel but as a conference venue I try to like it but I can’t. The map they give while registering keeps getting less comprehensible year after year, I was pretty sure if I run in circles I could have found the rooms faster than the map or ask the event folks. And this happens even though I am supposed to be familiar with the topography & room names as I have been here for many years now, either as a speaker or as an attendee.
In Windows 8, apart from Metro UI & WinRT there has been incremental improvements to Windows 7 in terms of Boot time, Tast Manager, Explorer file copy & so on. But I learn that there are significant improvements to Windows Server "8" from Windows Server 2008 R2. I attended the Windows Server "8" modern workstyle enabled by Pracheta Budhwar & Windows Server "8" The power of many Servers, the simplicity of one by Kamal Jain. Both were introduction sessions to new features in Windows Server "8", lot of improvements have been made relevant for all use cases, from Single Server to Clusters. DHCP Resiliency, SAN storage copy offloading, unified server manager, Hyper-V dynamic movement of running VMs & many more.
Demo Extravaganza by Harish Vaidyanathan & Nahas Mohammed was fun & entertaining. They showed lot of cool stuffs around Windows 8 Keyboard shortcuts, roaming profile and so on. When they were distributing "goodies" like Nokia Lumia 800 or T-Shirts, the stampede like scene near the front rows were scary.
Vinod Kumar demos in Demo Extravaganza on tips for Office 2010 were interesting, I knew the Access email data collection tip but the PowerPoint Photo Editing feature (Remove Background in Format Ribbon) was new to me.
Day 2 the first session I went was BigData & Elastic Cloud by Ramkumar Kothandaraman. He rocked with his practical insights & applications in real life for BigData (How Target figured out a teen girl was pregnant before her father did, U.K. Man deported from LA for joke tweet about Destroying America). His example for explaining MapReduce was awesome – making juice by first cutting fruits, then grouping them by fruit-family (Apples, Oranges) and then putting them through a blender.
One of the biggest challenges of using BigData is the setup & configuration of something like Hadoop & its relatives (Pig, Mahout, Hive, Hbase, HDFS, Zoo Keeper). Ramkumar demo’ed the upcoming cloud offering from Microsoft Hadoop on Azure (currently in invite only beta), this was exciting to me as it makes Hadoop approachable to every developer out there. You can program MapReduce functions with Java or JavaScript, it is likely Microsoft will add support for .NET Languages in upcoming languages. Out of box you get cool Graphing features to visualize data easily
The next talk I went was a session by MTC (Microsoft Technology Center) team – Vinod Kumar, Govind Kanshi & Anirudda Deswandikar. MTC team rocks with their frank,practical advice on when to use & when not to use hyped technologies like ORM, Cloud, XML & Virtual Machine Platforms (Java, .NET). With all the marketing hype surrounding REST & Cloud, this talk was a bit of fresh air.
In the evening the last session I went to was by my fellow Microsoft Regional Director (RD) Stephen Forte (CSO, Telerik) on Agile Estimation. He was hilarious, putting serious data on why software estimate is always wrong at beginning. You can only improve estimate on iterations after each iteration, it is important you have many smaller iterations and there by improve your estimate. He talked about using "User Stories" & Tracking Backlogs as techniques to capture user requirements & maintain sanity in the project process. You need to insists on having one user story at least for each page if the project is a website, a single line like "Replica of Amazon.com" is not acceptable. Stephen demoed on how you can use PlanningPoker.com for improving Estimations. His same talk made in the TechEd USA is available here, don’t miss to watch it.
He gave following books for further read:
(Disclaimer: Microsoft India had given me a free pass to attend TechEd India as I am one of the Microsoft Regional Directors, a honorary title & partner program)
I have written many times about how I prefer Shatabdi train for travel between Chennai & Bangalore, so I will not tire you again on that.
Today I had to go to Bangalore for Microsoft TechEd India 2012, I was not speaking this time so no need to go the day before for rehearsals. Being a Wednesday there was no Shatabdi in the morning and if I take the evening one I will miss Day 1 of TechEd entirely. So I decided to try the new luxury bus from Olivea (the same group that now owns Nilgris supermarkets). The one way ticket (discounted) costed about Rs.1700, includes on-board breakfast, individual video, premium seats, wash room – though the last one is least thought of while booking, makes a lot of difference for a comfortable travel. From Chennai the bus leaves at 7AM, boarding was from Hotel Radha Regent at Inner Ring Road (near MMDA Bus terminus). The lounge at Radha Regent was comfortable and they give you complimentary coffee/tea. Since I had reached there at 6AM itself I decided to go for a tasty breakfast (additional charges by the Hotel).
The bus had only 50% of seats occupied out of the 21 seats.
First the nice things:
- The seats were pretty comfortable & were of nice width (Aircraft business class like)
- Individual Video screen with selection of Movies
- Bouquet of live television channels, thanks to DISH Satellite DTH
- On-board Breakfast (Idlies, Upma, Sambar were all piping hot; Chutney & Flavoured yogurt)
- The ride was without much bumps, thanks to the modern suspension
The things that were poor:
- The interiors were looking old, dull; poor maintenance I suppose
- Though the seats were comfortable, the tray in front was badly designed. You have to hold the food plates in old hand, otherwise it will fall down immediately
- The wash room was dimly lit, not designed for a bus so it was hardly usable due to jerks, poor plumbing & bad odour – even after several hours of journey I can’t the get stinking smell out of my mind
- They advertised Wi-Fi, but I couldn’t find any SSID nor any information was provided for that
- Apart from a water bottle, breakfast, they served “Fanta” in open paper cups (could have given a canned juice). No coffee or tea was offered
- For some reasons I felt a little nauseating (may be due to two breakfasts or due to the frequent lane changes & the churn in stomach because of that) during the whole ride
- The video entertainment system was complicated, too many controls, two wired remote & bad audio
The last thing that was bad was the drop point in Bangalore being at HSR Layout (Outer Ring Road) in their own office. No transportation was available there (no taxi, no autorickshaw), your choice was limited to someone picking you up or calling a call-taxi (which the receptionist did promptly).
In summary, the luxury bus with a lounge service was great ideas but poor execution. A missed (business) opportunity like many other things in today’s India.
This is the follow-up to my earlier post “My new iMac”.
Printer
I have a 3+ years old HP Photosmart C7288 All in One Printer/Scanner. Its a nice versatile machine, double side printing, the inkjet cartridges on an average lasts about 12-15 months for ordinary household usage. I was not sure whether HP will have driver software for such an old printer for Mac OS X Platform, but surprisingly I found there is native out of box support in Mac OS X Lion for Printing & even scanning. HP also has provided with latest full-featured driver software and it works great.
UPS
I have an APC Back-UPS RS 1000 for power backup, it is important this works fine as nowadays in Chennai everyday we have scheduled power shutdown for 2 hours and many unscheduled power outages. After some web search I found Mac OS X Lion out of box support for many UPS brands especially APC. After switching ON, I just inserted the Data cable from UPS to iMac and it detected and enabled the UPS feature automatically in Energy Saver applet in System Preferences . It even shows a Battery meter in the menu bar that can show either the percentage of power left or the time left.
Configuration
There is not much that you needed to do in Mac OS, other than enabling “Firewall” in Security & Privacy Applet in Systems Preferences, which you can do after you have installed all your applications & devices. The Bluetooth Keyboard and Magic mouse that came with iMac worked just out of the box, you just need to pop some batteries into them and switch ON.
Parallels – Running Windows 7 in iMac
All said I love “Windows” especially its versatility and there are some apps in Windows that I definitely need in my Home PC. I truly wish Microsoft makes hardware as well as they do Windows software, XBOX & Microsoft Mouse are proof on what they can do when they put their mind to it.
The first piece of software that I absolutely need is KeePass. This is a password management software that’s written in .NET and works great on Windows. There is an iOS version called KyPass that I have been using on my iPhone and iPad for years now and it has full compatibility with the v2.0 database (KDBX) that’s created by the Windows .NET client. There is even a Mac OS X Port called KeePassX but unfortunately that supports v1.0 (KDB) database, so its a pain to export/import between Windows/iOS & Mac OS.
The next software I need is Internet Explorer, as few of the banking sites I have to use are available only with IE. One of the Indian Public sector bank I use has a security software that’s required to login that works only in Windows. There is no technology reason why they can’t provide a Mac OS or iOS or HTML5 versions, but the ground reality is that there isn’t one and I can’t do much about it. I have taken loan from the bank, so its not easy for me to switch bank just for lack of software support.
The third in my list (my important software list is actually longer but many of them have Mac OS equivalent as explained in next section “Apps”) is “Windows Live Writer” that I am using to write this post, as the name suggest this software is only available for Windows, this is the best blogging client software that’s out there including apps on iOS. It is surprising that WordPress and many other popular Blogging Software out there have no native client for Windows or Mac OS.
Lastly from time to time I need to use Windows for various tasks, so it is extremely important that I am able to run Windows in my iMac. I didn’t want to go the multi-boot option with BootCamp as its not practical to keep rebooting for every little thing and I then need to maintain two different OS in my Home PC. I explored the landscape and narrowed the choice to Parallel’s Virtualization client for Mac OS X. I downloaded the trial, impressed with the experience purchased the full version for $59 (they sent me a discount of $20 after trial download). I have used other deep integration Virtualization software like “Windows XP Mode” using Virtual PC software from Microsoft for running WinXP under Windows 7, but Parallels goes beyond this. It gives you an App integration option that makes every Windows App like MS Paint or Solitaire appear just like a native Mac OS, this includes Docking, Menu Bar integration and even sharing the same folders (Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Music, Downloads) which means no copying files between the two OS.
Parallel’s even shows you Windows Start menu from Mac OS Menu bar, Windows Task Bar items in Mac OS Menu bar and more.
One thing about Parallel’s is that it took quite some time to figure out how to activate the software when its in the App integration mode. The link for activation from the “Request support” in Menu bar doesn’t work, the email with key doesn’t say where you need to go to activate. It turns out you need to have the Guest OS shutdown and reach to Parallel’s main settings window to activate.
Apps
Below is a list of Apps that I have managed to discover so far and using in Mac OS X Lion.
- MS Office 2011 for Mac OS X (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) is not a problem there are versions from Microsoft for Mac OS for years. For most part they work just like the Windows counterparts that I am familiar, with Ribbon introduction in MS Office 2011 for Mac the familiarity makes it very easy
- Microsoft Lync, we use this for our corporate IM and there is a native client for Mac OS
- Microsoft Messenger, the familiar Windows Live Messenger is called by this name in Mac OS
- Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, Adobe normally ships with every copy of Windows version of their software, a Mac OS version. Few years back I bought Adobe PhotoShop Elements 9 and Premiere Elements 9, the DVD had Mac OS version, so I installed them and they worked just like in Windows
- Google Chrome, there is a native version available for Mac OS
- VLC Player, this is one of the must piece of software especially since I will be using iMac as a Digital Hub. Fortunately there is a native Mac OS X version of VLC Player, thank the good souls who make this available
- Twitter, the official client from Twitter, Inc. is available in Mac OS X App Store here. Considering that FaceBook official App for Smartphone and Tablets is a HTML5 App, its surprising they don’t ship for Mac OS an App
- Skype, there is a native version available for Mac OS
- Handbrake, this is a must app if you are using iTunes and watch video in any digital devices. This open source Video Encoding software is the best out there, its free and a native version is available for Mac OS
- NHM Writer, I use this to type my mother tongue (Tamil) in Windows. But there is something better in Mac OS X, that too out of box. It is Murasu Anjal, the pioneer for last 3 decades in this
- ImgBurn: This is a fine (free) software for taking an exact image of a DVD/CD and then burning them. It also helps in skipping/fixing slightly damaged discs. I couldn’t find a port of this to Mac OS, but found something similar (but not as complete as ImgBurn) that’s called “Burn”
- Paint.NET, this is a fast, simple yet powerful Image editing software that is free and works fast. Unfortunately there is no port of it for Mac OS, surprisingly there is no basic Paint software (like MS Paint) that ships with Mac OS. Wikipedia says there used to be MacPaint but that doesn’t ship anymore. I found a software called “Paintbrush” that’s okay but is very basic
- Solitaire, just like Paint, I couldn’t find any games shipping with Mac OS X. Not even Solitaire!
- Nero, this is one of the best Disc Authoring Software. There is no port of this for Mac OS. There seems to be equivalent software from another company called “Roxio”, since I have got iMovie (out of box in OS X Lion) and Adobe Premiere Elements, for now I think I will not need Roxio and to spend a $50 on buying this
- Windows Live Mesh, there is a fine piece of software that I have been using for years now and there exists a port from Microsoft for Mac OS X. Unfortunately when I tried it now in iMac, it didn’t sync. So I looked around and found SugarSync (I have used Dropbox before but was not impressed with it). I installed it in Windows7 WorkPC, iPhone, iPad, iMac & MacBookAir. After installing SugarSync, I enabled OS X Firewall so I had to manually enable connections to “Sugarsync Manager” in firewall applet.
- Other than this in the last two weeks it seems to be working fine, it is syncing the files to cloud and to every other device pretty well. It is a paid service for storage beyond 5GB, for the 60GB version I am using it charges $9.99 per month which I think is worth every penny considering you have an automatic cloud backup with version control
- Antivirus: At the moment I am not running any Antivirus in OS X, I may change it if I feel a need to. I don’t expect to download from untrusted sources or expose this machine so I guess I should be fine. All my documents and pictures are in Sync folders and I have Norton 360 in my Office PC which scans all these files. For all other downloads from 3rd party sites I plan to do them only from the Windows guest OS inside Parallels and to protect that I have installed K7 Antivirus inside the Guest OS. Not the most safe setup, but should be fine for a Digital media hub PC.
If you followed this year Oscar awards you will know that the best animated movie award went to this short film (~15 minutes) “The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore”. I watched this movie today and it was awesome. No dialogs.
The movie starts with a young writer writing his memoir and then getting caught in a bad hurricane. After it ends, he sees a young girl who is flying with books all around her carrying the flight. He then sees a Humpty Dumpty book and follows it to a magical world of books. He then starts managing the magical book library. If you are someone like me who loves books then don’t miss this movie. You can buy it from iTunes store or if you are lucky catch it while it is still in YouTube!
With Windows 8 in the horizon why did I buy a new iMac?. It boiled down to few practical issues.
My Digital Media Hub which was a Windows 7 PC gave up its last breath after nearly 5 years, when I looked around for a good branded PC from Dell or HP with lots of RAM and storage (1 TB HDD, Quad Core, 8GB RAM, Powerful graphics) it came to nearly Rs.75K-80K like the Inspiron model below.
First, I realized any Windows 7 PC I buy today will not have great touch capabilities and it will be better to buy a new Windows 8 PC when it ships, but that’s going to be a wait of another 6-9 months. My son who has not been able to see his favourite TV shows in my Apple TV or in my iPad will not be happy with this wait. Over the years I have learnt that is wiser to go for a device/gadget that solves the problems that I have today, rather than wait for a new device. You can never beat the new technology wave.
Second, it is going to be in my Home. I can never imaging replacing my Windows 7 Workhorse in my office desk, what’s the point of losing 20 years of experience and productivity that comes with it and I have so many applications that works only in Windows. But the PC I was looking for now, is instead going to be used by my family for some regular browsing, Facebook, YouTube & some MS Office, all this iMac can handle comfortably just like a Windows 7 PC. Mainly it is going to be my Digital Media Hub, so it is going to be only iTunes based. I have already moved my Digital Library last year from Zune/XBOX to iTunes as my iOS devices in the house started proliferating at unstoppable pace. As it stands today Windows Phone 7.x does not support even display of Indic Languages (Tamil for me) so I don’t see myself moving from iPhone to WP7. So what can be a better PC than a iMac for iTunes workload?.
Third, I am not new to OS X as I have been using a MacBook Air for last 4 years as my travel laptop in dual boot with Windows Vista/7. But frankly I always ended up using more Windows due to familiarity.
And lastly my wife ordered that if she allows me to write this big cheque then whatever I bring home has to look good in “her” Den along with our Bookshelf & TV and I have to use it for next 3 years at the minimum.
Having narrowed down I checked out for an iMac and got the below quote. It was a bit expensive than PC choices but not my long, so I went ahead with it. I convinced our regular vendor to rush me delivery in few days against 2 weeks for this 1TB SKU.
When the iMac arrived in the carton box it was a treat to open just like opening the box of iPad or iPhone4. The box came with just the Monitor (with the machine in it), just one cable (power cable) and a small wireless keyboard and mouse. Setting it up was a breeze. I will post my experience of configuring it for my taste, my apps and my accessories in next post.
I am not in Barcelona today, I wish I was there for the Consumer Preview launch of long awaited Windows 8 from Microsoft. I am super excited, the last I felt so was when I was waiting to get my hands on Windows 95 & then for Windows XP.
Microsoft decided not to do a live webcast, not sure whether the recordings will be made available later. I am writing this blog post by following the proceedings from the superb live coverage by The Verge. With in few months of their launch, The Verge has become my technical news site of choice, I seem to be visiting it few times every day.
(Couldn’t help to notice the sofa used for sitting and demo’ing the Windows 8, the idea and the design of the sofa is strikingly similar to the one used by Steve Jobs in the original iPad launch. I see nothing wrong in getting inspired on good ideas, especially this one that is communicating the relaxed use-case for a Windows 8 device)
Microsoft talked in detail on their no compromise with Windows 8 – you don’t need to choose between Keyboard and Mouse or Touch, it can be both. PCs & Windows always have been about choice. I liked their USPs which show how Windows 8 is different from say iPad – features like side by side apps, sharing of information with Charms & Search within apps. I think these are certainly big limitations of iOS today and so pluses for Windows 8. Microsoft highlighted their point that “When you use one app, all the other apps get better”
In the Windows Store all apps will be free during Consumer Preview, so immediately install Windows 8 and rush to Windows store for downloading.
I like the new devices they showcased today, especially the new lighter and thinner machine. They even showed a machine with a port that is motorized and comes out, cool isn’t it. In the picture below of a Ultrabook look at the display (top) it is so thin, I can hardly find it in the picture.
Look at this giant screen below which was flipped from being Vertical to being flat to the ground in seconds, kind of like surface, super cool.
I like the new Storage spaces feature, ability to keep adding new storage devices and all of them getting pooled into one giant storage with no need to backup, fit and restore. Microsoft has been trying to do something similar to this for ages with Windows and Windows Home Server, but never got it main stream. Over the years, my experience of using a Windows Software mirroring has been mixed. Windows To Go, the ability to run Windows from a USB stick is exciting & can turn out to be quite useful.
It was good to see availability of lots of Apps already, including Kindle (which they demoed) and Facebook & others (which only icons were seen).
You can download all the bits from the list below (Kudos to Microsoft Operations, all the downloads happened for me immediately & were fast, just few minutes of announcements, great work in scalability):
Finally, a full review of Windows 8 is here by The Verge & a Preview from Microsoft here.
I like going to the annual Chennai Trade fair (38th India Tourist Industrial Fair as it is called) that happens every year in Island Grounds, Chennai – past postings for 2009 and 2007. This year I have an added reason to go, to try my newly learnt Photography skills. I tried going there yesterday, being a Sunday it was crowded to the brim. No parking till Gymkhana club/Pallavan House, so I went home. But I returned today with a vengeance, armed with my newly bought Nikon TelePhoto Zoom lens (55mm-300mm). It was evening around 6PM when I entered with my son, place was sparsely crowded and spent next three hours going through Government department stalls, shops and kid rides. The place on the other side of Kuvam River was swamped with the militant “Chennai” mosquitos, so go fully covered and with a good application of mosquito repellents.
I was surprised on how few Government stalls were really informative like the Fire & Rescue, Police. In the Fire & Rescue Department the staff manning it were friendly and took effort to explain about “Saving life in a Sewage Canal” and on the “Fire Triangle”, good kid friendly stuff.
If you ask me about rides I did – No Giant wheel or Roller coaster for me, what’s the point of spending money to get scared the hell out of me!
It is no news iPad has taken over the world by storm, with 55 Million units sold in just under 2 years this is phenomenal. For entertainment and consumption of content no other portable device has come closer to iPad. Microsoft & Bill Gates have pioneered and spent enormous resources on Windows Tablets for over a decade now, but they didn’t get one secret sauce right – the secret was ease of use and not power. I have a iPad2 and love the device for its simplicity & convenience. Apple got the formula right due to several reasons – correct timing, technology was available in 2010 to make it happen; iOS hides the technical complexity nicely, never showing or asking the user to make configurations or choices; the device is compact and the fact you can carry it effortlessly makes it approachable and friendly to non-techies. My mother who is in her 70s is averse to any technology more complex than a TV Remote (simpler one), over the years I have tried to make her use various devices so that she can consume her favourite Music, Movies & Family Photos. Whether it was XBOX with Windows Media Center or Netbooks or Google TV or even Apple TV she always felt a fear to spend more than few minutes to understand and try it. But with an iPad she took to it immediately, I think this was due to its use of natural gestures of using touch to control it. The same goes with Preschool kids, Doctors & Teachers.
Now its the turn of Enterprises to go with iPad. Over the last few months there are news of more Enterprises developing their internal & LOB Apps for iPad, 83% of businesses planning to deploy iPads. Apple shows many examples (pictures below) including GE deploying many of their enterprise apps for iPad, British Airways making an impact to passenger experience through use of iPad. All of these use cases are possible with other technologies (and Windows 8 has everything in theory to do these work loads better) but the fact is that iPad is doing it today & solving problems that no one saw before. Apple was initally slow but now is taking advantage of this momentum in enterprises, spicing up their business side with increasingly decent content on support & new resources.
And all this is not limited to Western world, I am hearing first hand from Indian Enterprises (Automobiles, Manufacturing & Media) whose IT departments are planning to replace Laptops given to their CXOs and A-Level Executives with iPad for ease of maintenance. I am not sure whether this can be extended beyond corner offices whose occupants have their Secretaries carry a laptop and do all the productivity work. Even if MS Office (as rumoured) comes to iPad or to Windows 8 on ARM (WOA), you can’t be productive in creating Documents or manipulating Spread sheets without a Keyboard & Mouse, instead of trying that clumsy combinations you are better off with a regular PC/Mac for these workloads. Of course majority of the workforce in Enterprises do this kind of work from 9 to 5.
Windows 8
Though many have criticised Apple for the walled garden approach of iTunes & App Store (I don’t like it at times like when it comes to Photos management), it is an important reason for the success of iPad. Microsoft in my opinion pioneered this integrated App Store model way back in 2002 with XBOX Live, but then over the decade they missed seeing the obvious and extending it to their PC, Phone & Enterprise software. Many in Media report this due to politics between divisions in a large company like Microsoft. I am happy that at least now in 2012 they are doing things right with Windows 8 & Windows Phone. Especially with WOA (Windows on ARM) and Windows Phone 8 Apollo (Rumoured) they seem to be not going for shortcuts but taking some big, audacious moves that I feel are right. We will have to wait and see how the market accepts them. I don’t see the race to be over yet in Tablets & PCs (may not be in Mobile where Android is leading in market share), Microsoft still has a good chance to play (and even lead this space) if they execute and deliver flawlessly. So far Windows 8 appears impressive but its not only the OS that is important, it is the entire ecosystem, especially their hardware partners to innovate and come with devices that people aspire for is key. In the Enterprise space with Windows 8 I feel Microsoft has an inherent advantage with their Windows Server, Active Directory, Exchange Server & other enterprise software all of which they can leverage in favour of their Tablets for Enterprises. But for consumers I am still clear on what’s going to be their compelling offering that will match & excel iTunes (Music, Movies and Apps), eagerly waiting for Feb 29th so that we may know more about this with the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview.
Closing comments
All this battle between Apple, Microsoft & Google technology boundaries are being pushed at ever greater speeds and consumers are getting benefited enormously. And that’s for sure. Without competition any industry stagnates and it is more true for IT Industry. So let the guns roll, cannons be fired and the best minds win!
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