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Don Dodge, in saying Microsoft Will not Fall into the Innovators Dilemma, compares Google Apps for Your Domain to Office Live, but he misses Christensen's point on how successful businesses gets stuck making only incremental innovations.

The real technology disruption here is that Google Apps for Your Domain (and Google Docs, the free version) use HTML as their native format, not Microsoft's crufty legacy format, nor the equally crufty XML data-dump. Writers who use Word every day, like David Weinberger and Teresa Nielsen-Hayden, get stuck trying to make it behave and judging by the comments on both those posts they aren't alone. When my friend Maf was working on Microsoft Office, he summed it up by saying "every time I tell someone I work on Word they tell me it's far too complicated, then ask for 3 more features".

Most people use Word because it is the default - they have to use it because others do too. They do not use its advanced features, they just type stuff in. Fifteen years ago, I was a keen Word user, and spent hours working out how to do well-laid out tables in it, and carefully constructing style sheets so that they behaved right. Nowadays I do those kinds of things with HTML and CSS, which are open technologies that anyone can implement and use.

HTML is now the default document format, and an easy wysiwyg editor for it is long overdue. GMail's automatic conversion of attachments to a hosted document with version control is just the kind of 'worse is better' disruption Christensen documented so well 10 years ago.

Oh, and by the way Don, Nintendo Wii is the disruptive innovator in consoles too.

Technorati Tags: HTML, Innovators Dilemma, Word, writing

When Rosie and I first came to the bay area in 1992, we visited San Francisco Zoo. One of the exhibits there were polar bears, and we watched one pace out a looping walk, his feet hitting the same spot each time through, one leg swinging out over the edge of the moat on each circuit. He was completely accustomed to his cage.

Reading Ars Technica's commentary on Airport Extreme's IPv6 support reminded me of this. Apparently, if you use this device, your computers can route across the world again; people can connect to them from anywhere, just as the internet was designed to behave. That's what the 'inter' part of the name is about.

That's right, if you enable password protected services that are off by default, like ssh and ftp, on your Mac, the new Airport base stations actually route them, instead of requiring further buggering about with port mapping and explicit protocol translation through packet sniffing to get them to behave as they were designed. This gives Iljitsch van Beijnum a fit of conniptions, because he'd apparently rather rely on the illusionary security of a firewall then actually securing his machines services. Lets hope he doesn't own any laptops.

Technorati Tags: Apple, internet, security, Wifi

I joined Google this week, and am busy getting my head round its fractal complexities. Rosie wondered if I was begoogled (somewhere between bedazzled, beguiled and besotted).

Then, naturally, she googled 'begoogled' and found this blogpost, which uses it to mean something else.

Rosie then clicked on Chalicechick's Buy me stuff, I'm cute wishlist link, and, as she scrolled through it, became rather concerned.

What Rosie saw was this list, and as she progressed, she was increasingly worried about how much this random blogger girl had in common with me.

"Glenn Gould? Homeschooling? Ealing comedies? Father Ted? Roger Waters? Groundhog Day? Extreme Programming? Who is this woman?"
"I'd better not tell Kevin about her, he might fancy her more!"

I had used Rosie's Mac to buy something from Amazon, so when Chalicechick bookmarked the link to edit her wishlist instead of the permalink to it, Rosie got mine instead...

Technorati Tags: Amazon, bego, geeky, Google, wishlist

Apple has long kept its new product secrets close, wary that details leaking of new hardware will reduce sales of current products, just at the point where they are most profitable. I've written before how this culture spread unnecessarily into Apple's overall culture, and why they have missed a lot of the social media effects because of it. However, something has changed - both with the iTV AppleTV and todays iPhone
announcement, Jobs is trumpeting new hardware months before it's available.

The difference here is that these are new categories for Apple, and the goal is to make customers wait for the Apple product instead of buying an alternative from someone else. By setting the price and broad features now, Jobs forces the competition's shipping product, based on last years technology and manufacturing costs to compete with what he will have in 6 months time. This is something that can only be done from a position of strength, which the iPod success gives him, but it is also a bit of a risk, as the product may disappoint.

I'm reserving judgment on the AppleTV until I see more details of what software it will run, in particular whether it can use Perian to play other video formats, and can use BitTorrent for HD podcasts, but it only having enough CPU oomph for 720p playback seems to be aiming low compared to a lot of existing Apple products, as well as the Xbox 360.

Update: Apple seems to understand the advantages of downloading media for later playback - these two new products both cache video locally in the great iPod tradition. So why on earth is the keynote up as a stream? I'd like to watch it on the train home tonight, so I want to download it, but no. Twits.

Update: Since I wrote this, it has shown up as a podcast on the iTunes store, so I will be able to watch it on the train on Monday. It's not linked from the Apple main page, so you may have missed this too; clearly there are still some internal Apple turf wars over this.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Macworld , iPhone, AppleTV , HD, HDTV, Live TV is Dead, video

I spent a chunk of time looking at HDTVs in Best Buy and the Sony shop yesterday, and wasn't impressed. Overall, what I saw on the displays looked full of compression artefacts, with poor colour. Most of them were 720p displays, with the 1080p ones starting about $4,000. It seem there is some buyer's remorse around too, as customers grapple with upconversion and, no doubt, with HDCP's deliberate degradation. It sounds like Pip Coburn's warning in The Change Function - that flat panel TV's are a no-brainer, but HDTV complexity could mess things up with extra perceived pain of adoption - was more accurate than Mark Cuban's 'HDTV beats the net' rant.

I also had a look round the Apple store yesterday, and saw excellent HD quality on a $2000 HD iMac, and a $999 23" Cinema display (not to mention the $2000 30" display which is way beyond 1080p in size). Where did I get the HD content? Over the net - The Harry Potter 5 trailer and Rocketboom's HD edition. The problem of connecting computers to HD screens is a mess, but it is one of the media industries' own creation, as they insisted on a new connector with DRM in the cables. Another friend of mine is working on some interesting new projection systems that may mean that all the computers will need is a white wall to point at.

Technorati Tags: DRM, HD, HDTV, Live TV is Dead, video

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