Solipsism Gradient

More on Microsoft:

Is Microsoft Vista the new QuarkXPress?, by Daniel Erans:

Quark has long owned the desktop publishing world. Yet, after a decade of dominance, the company stumbled, leaving the door open for serious competition just as Adobe was introducing a strong competing product. Is Microsoft about to do the same?

Worth reading, although I don’t agree with all his conclusions…

Also lots of stuff on the Mini-Microsoft blog.

In other news, Microsoft reorganizes into 3 main divisions. No word yet on where their Mac software division will fit in…

I usually pay relatively little attention to news about Microsoft, not counting the usual jokes about virii and blue screens. What one hears about XP and Vista is usually not too exciting, and even MSFT stock has been slowly but steadily going down since 2000.

But lately there’s been some philosophical discussion of the whole Microsoft story. For instance, Forbes has a very interesting discussion of Microsoft’s midlife crisis:

…In the dog years of Silicon Valley, Microsoft, at 30, is in advanced middle age. The company relies on Windows and a suite of desktop applications – products released a decade ago – for 80% of sales and 140% of profits. Newer products – the Xbox videogame machine, the MSN online service, the wireless and small-business software – collectively have racked up $7 billion in losses in four years…

The article goes on to draw parallels to IBM, which suffered a similar crisis in the Eighties. Then I saw a couple of Business Week articles, including one about employee dissatisfaction. It was interesting to read how far Microsoft has come from its beginnings – both in the positive and negative senses – and in what varied direction.

Then I saw this great post over at Matt Gemmell‘s blog:

I just don’t have any real anger towards Microsoft anymore…

…I’m not interested in Microsoft bashing or even much Windows criticism at this point, and that surprises the hell out of me, to be honest. I guess I just don’t really care anymore. I have an OS that I really like, without the sense of compromise I had way back in the days of classic Mac OS. I feel I’ve got the best end of the deal, and I still get the “elite club” thing we’ve all always cherished. I don’t want Apple to destroy Microsoft, nor are they going to…

…I wouldn’t want to use Windows on my own machine, but at long last I think I’m finally really comfortable with it being around. I guess that if I was Microsoft, I’d find that pretty terrifying.

Of course you should read the whole thing; I’ll be translating this for publication in Macmania magazine later on, since I thought Matt’s really spot on here.

Finally, while considering writing something up here, someone pointed me at the latest Rob Enderle Apple Death Knell (here are the other ones – currently 46!). I won’t dissect it too detailedly as The Mac Observer folks have already done so, but what I found most striking about that piece was the great disconnect between the writer’s view of Apple and “Linux” as minor/doomed competitors of Microsoft for the entire computing market, and my (and other’s) feelings of Apple and Microsoft inhabiting increasingly different spaces.

Yes, there’s still part of the rivalry over the desktop OS market – the Tiger/Vista face-off which both sides view as mostly decided, each in their favor. And the QuickTime/WindowsMedia thing, which has largely migrated out of the desktop space into the music player space. But, come on, it makes no sense anymore to speak broadly of “marketshare”. The computer market has split into multiple markets. Servers are going one way, cheapie home or office computers another, high-end game machines yet another, and so forth for at least a dozen of splinter markets. Apple is interested in some of these segments, but not in most others; and correctly so, as they shouldn’t fall into the trap of overextending their reach, as Microsoft seems to have done. Instead, with the iPod, they’ve defined and dominated one new market with great focus and competence.

I can’t resist quoting one paragraph of the Enderle piece, however:

For Office 12 the clear advancement is discoverability. The product has over 1,500 features and most of us use 30 or 40. The massive UI enhancement has to do with being able to find and understand these features, the vast majority of which have been included in earlier versions of the product. This is something where the words “long overdue” seem incredibly inadequate. Everything else, no matter how compelling, that is new in this product simply seems unimportant when compared to this one comprehensive overdue enhancement.

If I understood this alright… the user now needs a search facility to find out which of these 1,500 features should be used to turn off, say, automatic uppercasing? This is the microcosmic analogue of Microsoft’s error of trying to do all things for all markets. And failing, if Forbes’ numbers are correct.

If my hunches are correct (as I’ve explained in the previous post), Apple will probably seize the PowerPC->Intel transition to leave the retail OS market entirely. They’ll sell updates for holdout Mac OS 9 users for some time, and updates for MacIntel boxes, but in 2-3 years they may even stop breaking out OS update sales figures from other software sales figures. It will be great fun reading these columnist after that happens.

Michael Tsai links back to my previous post and to lots of other great comments. I particularly recommend Brent Simmon‘s analysis. And of course John Gruber‘s take is hors concours.

The phone thingy leaves me completely cold; I don’t own a cellphone, and don’t intend to buy one in the near future. Still, I suppose I should be glad that the market appeared to like it; AAPL even went over the magic $50 mark today for a few minutes.

The iPod nano looks great, even if it’s a little expensive per gigabyte. If I find a suckerbuyer for my 40GB (3G) iPod, I might even switch… given that I use it mostly as a glorified shuffle in the car and in the gym, and I have larger drives elsewhere to keep my main music database, it would make sense. And the “no moving parts” aspect is of course ideal.

(I was puzzled by repeated references to “nano” being a dumb name… until someone told me it refers to a 70s(?) TV show, which I’d never heard of. I wonder if all future “nano” products – and there will be zillions – will be affected by this?)

The third aspect is the new iTunes 5 interface. Dan Wood dislikes it, as do most others who’ve commented. It took me a moment to look beyond the Mail-style splitter control to notice that metal had gone, replaced by Yet Another Different Interface Style.

Personally, I thought the margin-less aspect is positive, and the new gradients aren’t too bad. I never use Mail, so I found the divider-less splitter very strange; although I like to experiment with new UI, this is one thing I won’t try out in my products. (However, users of RBSplitView should note that this is easy to do with it.)

Overall, this reinforces my opinion that Apple is now moving away from a intelligent design approach to UI, towards a more survival of the fittest sort of thing. Each application’s group tries out new UI elements and the ones that survive get incorporated into Interface Builder’s palettes one or two releases down the road. It’s certainly more exciting but also, at times, disconcerting…

Just found a nice review of XRay (and some competitors, but that’s cool) by MacFixit’s Dan Frakes in an article called “Troubleshooting Tools: File Utilities“. Thanks Dan!

In other news, work on XRay 2 is continuining although I hesitate to insert the word “apace” here – there have been many offline emergencies to take care of, unfortunately. Basically, I think I have the general UI reasonably well defined and now am working on the background file engine. I’ve retreated from using WebKit for the main info view because of efficiency issues. However, the benefits of reading the WebKit source code were great, and I may still use it for some parts.

As usual, UI considerations are very important in my mind and I got sidetracked, although profitably, several times. The longest delay happened when I got tired of battling NSSplitView and took several months off to write RBSplitView. The experience gained from this proved invaluable later on, although at a time it looked like my other UI revisions would make a split view completely unnecessary… but right now it’s in again.

More on this as it happens!

Well, sites are still abuzz: the Apple Intel Transition Kits have been opened and photographed, and at least some of them are based on a stock Intel motherboard. With an Infineon SLD9630-series TPM chip on it.

Some libertarians and open-source advocates came out swinging since, as usual, TPM, TCPA, DRM and even the moribund Palladium are usually used interchangeably. Some cooler heads popped up, but the Slashdot thread was particularly entertaining. Cory Doctorow even said:

Apple may never implement this in their own apps (though I’ll be shocked silly if it isn’t used in iTunes and the DVD player), but Trusted Computing in the kernel is like a rifle on the mantelpiece: if it’s present in act one, it’ll go off by act three.

…

It means that the price of being a Mac user will be eternal vigilance: you’ll need to know that your apps not only write to exportable formats, but that they also allow those exported files to be read by competing apps. That they eschew those measures that would lock you in and prevent you from giving your business to someone else. I’m pretty sure that apps like BBEdit and NetNewsWire won’t lock me out, as their authors are personally known to me to be wonderful, generous, honorable people. But personally familiarizing yourself with the authors of all the software you use doesn’t scale.

So that means that if Apple carries on down this path, I’m going to exercise my market power and switch away, and, for the first time since 1979, I won’t use an Apple product as my main computer. I may even have my tattoo removed.

Now, Cory is one of my favorite authors, and Boing Boing is the first site I check every day, but this unfortunately just plays into the hands of the FUD crowd.

The situation is somewhat complex. Granted that DRM is a bad thing and should be avoided. Granted that, as the EFF says, a trusted platform can be misused under certain circumstances. However, jumping from the mere presence of the TPM chip to the conclusion that DRM was one of the reasons for the entire Intel switch is very far-fetched. Even if the Mac OS X kernel checks for, and uses, the TPM chip to prevent users from running Mac OS X on a non-Apple PC – a use I consider entirely legitimate – suddenly switching in mid-paragraph to DRM protection of media, and encryption of formerly public data formats, is unwarranted. (This very common confusion between the aims and definitions of TPM, TCPA and DRM is quite well addressed in a rebuttal paper published by IBM a few years ago.)

And the examples given – BBEdit and NetNewsWire – are totally off anyway. BBEdit, by definition, saves stuff in plain text format! If I want to mess about with any other type of format I certainly wouldn’t use BBEdit anyway; and NetNewsWire exports data in OPML format because it’s public. Regarding closed formats, the StuffIt .sit has been very popular (although completely undocumented) since before Cory became a Mac user in 1979, yet few people have complained about this until very recently.

The obvious and ostensive purpose of the TPM chip is, of course, locking Mac OS X’s Intel version (which strictly speaking is a “universal binary” version) to running only on the transition kits. Apple has repeatedly and clearly stated that they won’t allow Mac OS X to run on non-Apple computers; and, since the clones were killed and Apple has started charging for the system, this has always been stated in the license terms:

2. Permitted License Uses and Restrictions.

A. This License allows you to install and use one copy of the Apple Software on a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.

This was sort of redundant in the past, as there were no other PowerPC-based general-purpose computers on the market at any time; and few people would have argued, as some seem to be doing now, that they have a “right” to install Mac OS X on computers explicitly disallowed by the license – not the least because doing so would have entailed an impossible amount of work. Strangely, the amount of work required has now been perceived to have shrunk enough to argue for this position…

So, what’s inside the TPM chip to make it so repulsive? Infineon has published some technical data. It’s a simple microcontroller with a standard LPC interface, like other on-board peripheral chips have; the interface’s peak bandwidth is about 4MB/s. It has several types of internal memory, including 16KB of EEPROM used to store secure keys, a random number generator, specialized hardware for fast generation and checking of SHA-1 digital hashes, similar hardware for RSA encryption and decryption, and several anti-tamper facilities. In other words, it’s a simple peripheral that can receive blocks of data and return other blocks of data, transforming them according to the algorithms and keys stored inside. These can be the same for all deployed chips or can be different for each equipment, presumably at some additional cost.

Naturally, all those functions could be equally well performed by software running on the main CPU. The difference is that with a relatively trivial effort, such software could be intercepted or decoded by a hostile party; this is several orders of magnitude harder to do with the TPM chip, as long as suitable precautions are taken by the software which accesses it. Note that usually the “hostile party” is not the computer’s owner, who always has the option of ripping the chip off the board, or more practically, spending his/her money elsewhere! It all depends on how the chip is used, as well see below.

I don’t have access to a transition kit myself, and would be under NDA if I had. However, from what I’ve read on the net, the Mac OS X boot process checks for the presence of the TPM chip and later on uses it to verify, or decrypt, some parts of its own object code; a perfectly legitimate use. Will this chip be in the Intel Macs when they come on the market? We can’t say, of course. Its presence in the transition kit units is of course explained by the fact that time constraints forced Apple to use a standard Intel motherboard. In their own systems Apple will be free to integrate TPM-like functions into the system controller chip, for instance, since they’re only using a small subset of the chip’s capabilities. They could also ask Intel to produce slightly modified versions of their CPUs, which might restrict Mac OS X to Macs as effectively as running on a PowerPC did in the past.

What if they opt for the easy way out and simply keep the full TPM chip for the standard Intel Macs? If the chip is used only for restricting Mac OS X to Macs, no problem. But what if they use it for more nefarious purposes, say, for strengthening the iTunes DRM encryption? I don’t see how this would be any more harmful than the existing situation; civil libertarians are concerned about the existence of DRM, not about its relative efficacy. By its construction, the chip’s functions are only accessible to “trusted” software modules, meaning that it wouldn’t be useable by any random application.

The TCPA specifies a complex system of interlocking security procedures to produce a “trusted” system – meaning a system where both the user and the software running on it can trust everything to be in a known state. That is, the BIOS (or EFI, or whatever) and the TPM chip are mutually certified, then every single piece of software or hardware that is loaded, or initialized, later must be similarly examined and certified by a trusted function. If a non-certified item is encountered, it must be either rejected altogether or the system must enter an “untrusted” state. So, to do this consistently, Apple would have to reject all third-party peripherals and software applications! Certainly the CIA, FBI and some corporations would be eager to buy a number of such systems, but who else would? Notice that you could also just protect certain data paths – as Microsoft’s Protected Media Path project is supposed to do; to be really effective, this would mean trusted DVD drives, loudspeakers, monitors and so on. Banks would need trusted keyboards and network cards. In other words, this is not something suitable for your general computing needs.

Even so, let’s suppose that Cory is right. Let’s suppose Steve Jobs goes psycho and deploys the Mac Intel machines with full TPM, TCPA, DRM and whatnot. Let’s suppose that all things at the iTunes Music Store will now be sold only with strong encryption, as well as all Pixar films, MTV music videos, and so on. Let’s suppose all other software companies are infected and stop support for plain text files, HTML, XML, etc. Let’s suppose that we all go mad as well and continue to buy Macs at current quantities or better – say, 5 to 7 million a year. What would happen?

Why, the current installed base is something over 30 million PowerPC Macs (or even more, depending on your sources). By the end of 2007, Intel Macs will be perhaps 15% of that. It will take at least 5 years, probably more, for Intel Macs to surpass the PowerPC Mac installed base. In other words, non-TPM systems will be in the majority for several years. Can you see Apple (or their stockholders, of which I’m one) restricting such important markets to 15% of their customers? Or even 50%? For years??

If you really believe this, I have a bridge here I’d like to sell…

…as I was posting this, I saw that John Gruber, as usual, has a highly cogent post about this very subject.

The dust is slowly settling, Apple stock is behaving normally, and everybody and their dog have emitted opinions about the MacIntel story. So who may win, and who may lose in the next 12 months?

Winners:

• Apple, of course. As I commented below, they’re free (or will be, in a year) of the CPU-architecture-as-a-religion meme. They get a literally cool CPU/chipset for their PowerBooks; although I suppose they won’t use that name in the future; how about IBook ? They get dual-core CPUs right now, and a 64-bit version in the future. Even the stock analysts are liking this, though for mostly the wrong reasons. Also, switching processors did establish a precedent for Apple: Intel knows they’re not captive clients, and they’ll have to treat Steve Jobs with kid gloves lest he switches away again. Finally, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will come out simultaneously, or even some weeks before, Longhorn, and with smaller minimum requirements. The new low-end Intel Macs may even take a goodly part of the low-end market away from Microsoft.
• Intel. They were certainly getting tired of being perceived as just the evil tail end of the evil Wintel dragon. Intel’s not very pleased with Microsoft these days and they were being pressed on other fronts. Getting Apple’s business is a glamorous endorsement which has far more weight than Apple’s smaller marketshare leads outsiders to believe. They’ll certainly be pleased to have a partner which actually will insist on getting the latest and greatest stuff, without being concerned about backwards compatibility issues like, say, legacy BIOS support. By the way, Intel will now be free to cut away, say, the 50% of the Pentium that still support all those legacy modes and compatibility instructions, and supply Apple with an optimized-for-Mac OS X chip. With all the silicon saved, they could double the number of cores, put in more cache, support Altivec instructions or whatever they fancy; after all, it won’t really have to boot Windows anyway, right? Finally, Intel’s attempts to produce new PC designs were, let’s be charitable, not much good. They now have the best design team in the industry to showcase their new technology.
• Developers. At least the Cocoa developers, the Open Source developers, and the Carbon developers that already were using Xcode. For most vanilla apps, it’s just a recompile and some tweaking. The added discipline will be good for people, and the market will grow a lot. This is a great time to be a Cocoa developer, and I for one intend to take advantage of it.
• Stockholders. Both Apple and Intel stock will benefit from the new synergy between the two companies. I’m an Apple stockholder, and I’ll be looking at Intel stock very carefully soon.
• Gamers. Let’s face it, most full-screen games usually push aside the underlying OS when they come in, have their own user interface, talk directly to the graphics card and deign to let the OS do something only for mundane stuff like saving scores files. So many developers didn’t even bother to port to the Mac. When Virtual PC or a similar product comes out, gamers will have access to all Windows games at full speed; and it’s almost certain that the Intel Macs will have some virtualization facility built in, but won’t dual-boot. As long as Mac OS X will be whatever the new machines boot into, Apple will certainly allow other OSes to run under its control; that way, the user will always have the Mac OS X GUI visible somewhere. The effect of this on game developers is debatable. Some will be relieved not to have to do dual versions anymore. Mac-only developers will lose the Altivec advantage, so this may have some impact.

Losers:

• Metrowerks. CodeWarrior has, unfortunately, been going downhill since they were acquired by Motorola, and is now officially dead. Apparently their Intel compilers have been bought by Nokia, a move so outside my field of expertise that I’m not going to comment further on it, but they’re out of the picture now. Apparently they’re concentrating on the embedded market now, where they may still do well.
• Microsoft. Or at least partially. Windows is the new Classic; Windows apps will run in a “Red Box” and will look quaint and old-fashioned. As I said above, Leopard may well eat into Microsoft’s low-end marketshare. And the Wintel meme is dead; people now know that there are alternatives to Microsoft, and are actively looking for them. Defecting to the Mac will now appear easier and more natural for non-techies. Yes, Microsoft will keep a finger in the pie; their sales of Office won’t go down, as any Windows sale lost will be compensated by a Mac sale, and they’ll certainly be selling much more copies of Virtual PC, if they can bring the cost down. Still, this is a philosophical defeat for Microsoft in several aspects.
• Adobe et al. Adobe are publicly committed to port their stuff to Xcode and Intel. From what I heard from inside sources, the Xcode transition will take several times as much effort and time as the Intel transition per se. Adobe and other companies with huge codebases that used CodeWarrior have their own software workflow and converting this may take up much, maybe all, of the next 12 months. What this will do to the apps they bought from MacroMedia is anyone’s guess; I’ll say that some of them may not survive. From past experiences the move may be altogether too much for Quark, who’ve taken years to do a not-so-good Carbon port.
• AMD. The consensus seems to be that AMD, even though they might seem at first glance a better fit to Apple than Intel, apparently didn’t have the necessary product line depth to fit the new Apple. Still, nothing says they couldn’t supply chips for future high-end Apple products.
• AV developers. Apple’s Pro AV products already had the market pretty well sewn up, and now they’ll be running well-optimized on the new Macs from day one. Competitors will be at least a year behind; not an enviable position.
• Cluster users. The whole G5/Altivec hype was really justified for these guys; Xserve clusters have been building a well-deserved reputation for very high-end scientific computing. I don’t see a comparable Intel-based machine coming out from Apple before 2007. The same applies to 64-bit computing. Steve Jobs hinted that new PowerPC machines are still in the pipeline, so this may be moot, but the folks I’ve talked to here are quite nervous.

RBSplitView 1.1.3 has just been published.

Also, Michael Dupuis has more insightful comments about Brent’s writings, which are multiplying faster than I can get a handle on. Marvelous.