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140 million copies of Vista sold. How does Leopard compare?

Apple has no numbers to compare with the 140 million copies of Vista that Bill Gates says Microsoft has sold since the latest version of Windows started shipping in late 2006.

Literally, no numbers. The last time Apple released a Leopard sales figure was Oct. 30, 2007, when the company said that it had sold more than 2 million copies of Leopard in one long weekend. Apple reported $170 million revenue from Leopard sales in the December ‘07 quarter, but that represents fewer than 1.3 million copies. Apple also sold 2.32 million Macs that quarter, more than 2/3 of which probably had Leopard pre-installed.

Even so, the two operating systems aren’t even playing in the same ballpark when it comes to raw sales.

Of course, Vista was greeted with brickbats and Leopard with raves, but Gates didn’t dwell on that in Tokyo Wednesday, where he gave his Japanese partners an update on how Vista is doing. “That’s a very rapid sales rate,” he said.

Not necessarily.

“The most significant number,” says Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, “is Apple’s upgrade penetration vs. Microsoft’s. Apple estimated that about 19% of the OS X user base was on Leopard by the end of its launch quarter. By my math, Vista is used by about 12%-14% of the Windows user base more than a year after its retail launch.”

Posted in Windows Vista, Microsoft, Leopard | No Comments »

Alexa Updates Its Web Rankings

Amazon-owned Alexa has announced a major update to its 10 year old web ranking system. Previously, Alexa’s rankings were based solely on data collected from the downloadable Alexa Toolbar, but now the company is aggregating data from multiple sources. That’s good news, but it may be too little, too late for a company whose rankings have faded in relevance in recent years.

Alexa launched its web site rankings in 1998 based on data from its toolbar software. In the late 90s and early part of this decade, Alexa was more or less the only place people could turn for public ranking data on the web at large, and so their rankings — though often times inaccurate — were widely quoted. At the time, unless you wanted to pay for data from firms like Nielsen, comScore, or HitWise, it was Alexa or nothing. Alexa rank became a metric that people actually paid attention to and took seriously.

But in recent years, that has changed. Alexa now faces competition from Compete, which launched a similar public service in 2006, and from Quantcast, which was founded in 2005. Both of those companies gather data from numerous outside sources and their rankings are generally seen as more accurate than Alexa’s.

“In recent months we’ve heard from our Alexa users that understanding Internet usage beyond Alexa Toolbar users was increasingly of interest,” wrote Alexa in the announcement of their rankings overhaul. Recent months? The inaccuracy of the toolbar-based rankings has been discussed for years, which is why we think this might be too little, too late for Alexa.

Beyond the problem of public perception, Alexa also still displays their data in non-standard ways. The hard-to-understand pageviews per million, reach per million, and rank are not easily compared to other data sources, which makes Alexa’s information less useful than it could be, even if it is presumably now more accurate.

Historical data on Alexa is currently only available for the past 9 months while the company recalculates old data with its new ranking algorithm.

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iPhone vs. BlackBerry 9000: The keyboard wars, round 2

Do smartphones need really need physical keys?

The folks who designed Apple’s iPhone bet that touchscreen keys would be good enough for most users, and based on a February survey of iPhone owners that found 72% “very satisfied” (versus 55% for RIM), Apple’s gamble seems to have paid off.

The complaints about the virtual keys that were so persistent when the iPhone first came out have largely gone away.

But not quite. Just as Apple (AAPL) begins manufacturing the second coming of its famous smartphone, we have two new data points suggesting that the keyboard wars are far from over.

The first comes from an open letter to Steve Jobs posted by Dan Tynan at PC World in which he lists “5 Things iPhone 2.0 Must Have.” No. 1 on his list: “Enlarge the Friggin’ Keyboard.”

Tynan cites an Aug. 2007 User Centric test in which 20 veteran thumb typists were confronted with the iPhone for the first time and, not surprisingly, took twice as long to enter text and made more errors.

What does Tynan suggest that Apple do about that? He likes the slide-out keyboard that HTC built for AT&T’s (T) Tilt, a solution he describes as “nifty.”

Gives how hard Steve Jobs and his team worked to design the iPhone — stripping it down to bare essentials and selecting a form factor with as few moving parts as possible — they are unlikely to take kindly to Tynan’s suggestion.

The second data point comes from Engadget, which has released what it says are the first leaked photographs of the new RIM (RIMM) BlackBerry 9000.  SteveJack at MacDailyNews was the first to point out the resemblance to — and the key difference with — the iPhone. He writes:

“RIM clearly seems to have tried to copy Apple’s iPhone’s exterior look, but beyond that derivative bit of attempted tomfoolery, the anachronistic physical buttons remain, taking up space whether or not they’re in use.

Also remaining is the small screen, mashed into the upper half of the device in order to make room for those tiny, slippery-looking plastic buttons festooned all over the bottom half of the device. The software’s UI has been prettied or messed up (depending on your taste), but it has none of the multi-touch goodness of Apple’s iPhone. It’s the same old, same old in an iPhone-inspired wrapper.

You can judge the distance behind and overall cluelessness of iPhone’s future roadkill by the amount they copy the iPhone’s exterior. See: LG, HTC, and now RIM, among many others. This ceaseless quest to dress up antiques in Apple veneer is pathetic and sad.”

A partisan review, to be sure, and more than a bit over the top. But he may have a point.

Posted in BlackBerry, iPhone | No Comments »

Apple iPhone 2.0 Software Preview

On Thursday, March 6, 2008, Apple CEO Steve Jobs hosted a special event at the Apple Town Hall on Apple’s Cupertino campus, where he and two other company executives detailed plans for iPhone 2.0, an upcoming iPhone software update that dramatically enhances the value of a product that is already, quite frankly, pretty darn valuable. What Apple is doing with this update is both revolutionary and exciting. Though I wasn’t invited to the event, I downloaded a copy of the video presentation and watched it on the plane ride home from Las Vegas, where I was attending Microsoft’s MIX’08 show.

iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK)
Scott Forstall, the vice president of iPhone software at Apple, presented the iPhone SDK portion of the event, which was a bit more technical, by definition, than the enterprise bit. (Forstall comes off as a vaguely smarmy Jobs clone, similar to the many Bill Gates clones that infested Microsoft a decade ago.) In keeping with his role as Jobs Jr., however, he started off with a quick review of how the previous iPhone development model, the woefully inadequate Web apps, has done. Forstall said the program has been “incredibly successful,” with over 1000 Web apps developed since last summer. The closest you’re going to get to a groan at a partisan Apple event is absolute silence, and that’s what Forstall got with that comment: Obviously, Web apps are not a first class development path for the iPhone. Indeed, the presence of the new SDK pretty much confirms that even Apple believes this too. That said, Forstall hinted that the iPhone 2.0 release would include some improvements to Web app development, but he didn’t explain what those might be, perhaps wisely.

Moving along, Apple’s native iPhone SDK appears to be far less locked down and controlled than most expected. Forstall said that the SDK includes the exact same tools and APIs that Apple uses in-house to develop their own iPhone applications. This is impressive, I suppose, though such a thing is common practice in other software markets. (Microsoft, for example, develops code with the tools it gives to third party developers as well, for example.)

Forstall described the APIs as “the platform,” which is based on “the most advanced platform in the world, in the form of Mac OS X.” (Ah, hyperbole.) Mac OS X is comprised of four architectural layers: Core OS, Core Services, Media, and Cocoa, the latter of which is the user interface application framework, sort of like Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) on Windows. (Though, of course, Cocoa is “The. Best. Application Framework. Out there,” according to Forstall.) The iPhone OS is built on the same basic layers: You get Core OS, Core Services, and Media, just like with Mac OS X, but the top layer is replaced by something called Cocoa Touch. That’s because Cocoa is based around a mouse and keyboard interaction paradigm. (This belies the best application framework claim above, but whatever.)

Cocoa Touch is combination of the object oriented Cocoa framework and “everything [Apple] knew about creating a touch API for the iPhone.” This suggests to me that Cocoa Touch is, in fact, a fairly recent development and that Apple did not, in fact, use these technologies when it create the original iPhone OS software. (Not that it matters, I suppose.) Anyway, Cocoa Touch is the user interface application framework for the iPhone.

Forstall then examined each of the iPhone OS architectural layers a bit more deeply. Core OS, for example, is the lowest level of the system, comprised of such things as the OS X kernel, sockets, security, power management, and the file system, among many others. The iPhone’s kernel is identical to that of OS X: It is built from exactly the same source code, he said, but optimized in certain ways for the device. This alone makes the iPhone compelling from a technological standpoint: Until MinWin hits with Windows 7, it’s hard to imagine anyone using the kernel from a desktop version of Windows to build a smart phone.

Posted in iPhone | No Comments »

The Best Things About AIR

1. Cross Platform

AIR lets developers write code once and offer their applications to both Windows and Mac users. If that was the only part of this announcement, it would be exciting.

2. It’s beautiful

AIR lets developers use Adobe Flash, Adobe Flex, HTML and AJAX to create desktop apps. That means no more ugly desktop software! AIR apps combine the beauty of Flash with the responsiveness that AJAX brings to the web and that desktop software almost always offers.

In addition to the gorgeous Twitter clients built on AIR, there are more serious AIR apps that leverage the same beauty and usability for more serious applications. See, for example, the company Acesis, which offers an AIR for the capture of structured medical data.

3. It’s not in the browser

The browser is great but how often does yours get overloaded? To say that the web based future will be confined to the browser would be pure folly. I want web enabled apps that I can use outside of and during my otherwise frenetic bopping around web pages in my browser. The fact that some AIR apps are easy to set persistently above all other apps on your desktop makes it all the easier to use them throughout your workflow inside the browser and elsewhere.

4. Thermo

Adobe demonstrated an upcoming design framework called Thermo in October that can be used to create Flex apps for the web or desktop. Thermo lets developers easily integrate Photoshop items into the user interface of their apps. The company describes this feature as the option to “Turn artwork from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks directly into functional components that use the original artwork as a ’skin.’”

This means big improvements in user experience and visual appeal of apps. Put those puppies in AIR and it’s going to be exciting.

5. It combines the responsiveness of the desktop with the cloud of the web.

It’s not about a Web Operating System or anything that will replace your local desktop, it’s about combining some of the best traits of the desktop with the cloud connectivity of the web in individual apps that live on your desktop.

The combined wisdom of the personal computer with the visions of the thin client or web-based world, is smarter than any picture of the future based solely on any of those paradigms seperately.

Now that AIR is in production, we’re going to see a whole bunch of dazzling and mainstream AIR apps made available. Here are some resources you can use to dig deeper and follow this trend as it develops.

Posted in Adobe Air | No Comments »

11 Things To Know About Semantic Web

1. You don’t need to apologize for calling it Web 3.0. Of course the Web does not upgrade in one go like a company switching to Vista. But there is a definite phase transition from current technologies. My personal Web 3.0 definition is “the combination of Web 2.0 mass collaboration with structured databases”.

2. Semantic Web will start the long, slow decline of relational database technology. Web 3.0 enables the transition from “structure upfront” to “structure on the fly”. The world is clearly too complex to structure upfront, despite the tremendous skills brought by data modelers. Structure on the fly is done by people adding structure as they use the service and by engines that automatically create structure from unstructured content. Structure on the fly is very, very hard and RDBMS is very, very entrenched so this will be a long and slow transition; but the decline is inevitable. Innovation has slowed in the RDBMS world - with open source at one end and Oracle at the other, there is little reason to innovate - just when Semantic Web innovation is accelerating. RDBMS was good for enterprise scale performance and reliability but for Internet scale it falls short; just look at what companies like Amazon use.

3. If you have a firm grasp of the theoretical underpinnings of the semantic web, things like RDF, tuples, Sparql and OWL that make my brain hurt, you will be able to charge a fat premium in consulting fees for a while, as not many people really understand this stuff. But make hay while the sun shines, as some entrepreneur will surely figure out how to abstract this stuff and make it accessible for the masses.

4. The success stories will be different from Web 2.0. Just like Web 2.0 success stories were different from Web 1.0 successes. Web 2.0 successes were mostly about a single feature (photos, bookmarks, video, phone, blogging, etc) where there was extremely rapid adoption by consumers. Semantic Web is inherently about integration and those plays tend to be different, longer and much bigger potential.

5. Don’t look for a killer app. That implies a client/consumer win. This is much more likely to be a server/platform/enterprise win. Even if the initial experimentation is done in the consumer domain; Freebase for example looks like a mass Beta test for some enterprise technology that Metaweb wants to release later.

6. As this is a platform play, look for powerful APIs and ways to motivate entrepreneurs to build apps on top, with a clear “show me the money” proposition. Those apps maybe consumer or enterprise focussed.

7. Semantic Web could slow the Google steamroller. This could be like the PC for IBM or the Web for Microsoft. The steamroller’s momentum carries it forward for a very long time and it can build all kinds of wrapper systems around it, but something new always does come along. Google mastered how to give some structure to countless unstructured HTML pages. Semantic Web will gradually make that less critical as the underlying content will be more structured. These big generational changes - mainframe to PC to Web - seem to be happening faster, so it seems about time for another big generational change to start happening.

8. But don’t look for Yet Another Search Engine (YASE) to be the David to Google’s Goliath. Just like PC was not another mainframe and Web was not another PC. Don’t ask me precisely what it will look like; if I did know I would have to kill you if I told you. I just know what it won’t look like

9. Vertical Search is the pragmatist’s Semantic Web. Vertical Search businesses use whatever techniques they need - basic search engines, scrapers, APIs, human editors - to create some meaningful/useful structure in a single domain. Over time these cobbled together pragmatic solutions will be replaced by a semantic web platform, probably by an API that enables human editors to leverage their valuable domain expertise.

10. Tagging is the quietly disruptive technology. Everybody tags. It is the most basic human urge to mark what we find. We do it with Folders in Windows. We do it online with Bookmarks. Specialist tag Microformats such as Hcard and Hcalendar add more structure and we are only at the very start of this wave.

11. Semantic Web will leverage the “community” to add structure and this will use some techniques from first generation Social Networking. But it is very unlikely that Semantic Web will emerge from the walled gardens of current social networking sites. The winners will know how to motivate community to provide structure and will provide the tools that make the structuring so easy that nobody knows they are doing anything so boring as structuring. That is the big lesson from Web 2.0 that will be applied in the Semantic Web.

Posted in Semantic Web, web 3.0 | No Comments »

How to unlock 1.1.3 iPhone

Mr. GEOrge HOTz did it again. He just loosed a world of hurt on AT&T with a software unlock for 1.1.3 iPhones.

That’s right, the software is said to work on any fresh from the Apple store, shrink-wrapped iPhone sporting the latest 1.1.3 firmware and 4.6 bootloader, something the AnySIM unlock can’t do. GeoHot’s instructions (and dev / elite team smack talk) posted after the break. We haven’t tested yet so, as always, take care.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

–snip–
geohot’s 1.1.2 software unlock
yes, this is what you have all been waiting for
now fixed to support 1.1.3

1. Download these:
gunlock and the secpack from http://iphonejtag.blogspot.com/ or the blog
the 4.02.13 fls from http://george.zjlotto.com/index.php/baseband/

2. Downgrade your phone to 1.0.2. See all the great tutorials online to do this.
Your baseband won’t be downgraded, this is normal.
This will probably work on other versions too, but 1.0.2 doesn’t lose wifi on bb access.

3. Kill CommCenter and run “gunlock secpack ICE04.02.13_G.fls”

4. Reload CommCenter. For some reason my phone was in brick mode. Use the elite team bricktool to get out.

5. Enjoy your 1.1.2 OTB unlocked iPhone

Now who’d have thought it’d be this easy

This release is no thanks to elite/dev
I wish they would share like the old days.
I don’t believe everyone in the team is like this, but come on guys.

If you want to contribute to me, the person who discovered these exploits and wrote this tool
paypal geohot@gmail.com

Posted in iPhone, Apple | No Comments »