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Weblog • Archive • Cutedge

by: Bernard Teo

Thu 25 Mar 2004

Sun Tech Day

Category : Commentary/suntechday.txt

There's a Sun Tech Day coming up on 20th and 21st of April 2004. We're going to be helping out Leon Chen and EC Tan at Apple's booth and lab session. Besides Apple, Oracle's also present. So we're going to load Oracle on an Xserve, and figure out what we want to show. Leon says that, at the previous show in Beijing, Apple's booth drew a lot of interest from the Java crowd. I think it's going to be fun. Guess which vendor is not going to be there?

Posted at 10:28AM UTC | permalink

iSight - let me count the ways

Category : Commentary/mindset.txt

The local Mac users are a feisty lot and up in arms over the poor product knowledge shown by the people selling Macs in Singapore, as this post shows. You can search the discussion group archives for a lot more of such comments, some of them quite funny.

But, then, it's not all about complaints. More than occasionally, you get gems, like this from a guy called Timmy in reply to an earlier post about the usefulness (or, rather, lack of) of the iSight :

"Well, the iSight is more than just a webcam. you can use it as a digicam too. let's say you're at a press conference or interview. just mount up your iSight, point it in the right direction, and hey, live video recording! can also use it as a mic to record audio of meetings, useful for minutes taking.

"There are also fun apps like iStopMotion, I'm sure you can use iSight to make such movies. And then there is ToySight, can play games using iSight: it detects the motion of your hands to control the game!"

So, you learn so much more about what you can do with the iSight. Timmy would make a super Mac salesman. I think about some of the bicycle shops we have in Singapore, like Treknology and CycleWorx. Macs should be sold like that - by enthusiasts, to other enthusiasts.

Posted at 10:26AM UTC | permalink

Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea

Category : Commentary/IT.txt

Singapore is trying to get more people out of the public sector and into the private sector as entrepreneurs. But we've been doing this (dare we call ourselves entrepreneurs) for ten years and wondering, lately, if the smart ones are not the ones who stayed put (on their Herman Miller chairs).

But then I read this article by Robert X. Cringely, "A Lose-Lose Situation - Sometimes IT Integration Just Isn't Worth the Trouble", and I'm reminded of just when and why we decided we wanted no part of that scene, anymore.

Apple has a web page about Macs in business and the stories there pretty much describe where we're heading and what we want to help make happen - e.g., "My decision to go with Mac was based on two key criteria - the quality of the user experience, and reliability. The technology had to be transparent, intuitive, easy to use. So my staff and I would be happy and motivated and productive while using it."

But all you have to do is read one article and you'll realise why Macs are such a hard sell with IT departments - "I'd worked with PCs at prior practices, and I knew they required a lot of IT support. And I didn't want to pay somebody a whole bunch of money to set up and administer a PC network, to worry about constant server patches and updates, port configuration and reconfiguration. With the Mac, I basically did it myself. I don't have an IT support contract, because I just don't need one. The beauty of a Mac network is that it pretty much configures itself! And that saves me thousands of dollars a year easily.

"Finally, I wanted my staff to be as comfortable as possible using the technology. I didn't want to spend a whole lot of time training. With Mac, I trained my entire office staff myself. It took no time at all, because everything's just so intuitive. Click here, click there, and they were all very confident about using the Mac - even my previously technophobic nurse."

I'm wondering how I'm going to make any money, myself.

But, another story. I went with my friend, Ronnie, of Tarawerkz, a longtime Mac consultant and 4th Dimension developer, to the department in charge of Healthcare Computerisation here - he helped a doctor build a 4D-based patient records management system and now another hospital wants to use it. The catch is : he has to get past the IT Department. So, in the meeting, there are a couple of Information Architects (whatever that means), a Database Administrator, a Security "Expert", and a Network "Expert", and they're all grilling him on porting all these to Oracle (the favoured platform), conformance to their IS architecture, producing specifications, schemas, and data flow diagrams. They're doing what is called "due dilligence".

Poor guy. There's very little money in it, and all this work before he's even awarded the job. In the middle of helping him explain how 4D could work with Oracle and Microsoft's Active Directory, my mind drifts and I see that all these guys don't need to care how long this takes because they're all on salary. They're walking all over this one guy's work but that guy is the only one in the whole room who's created anything of value - he's after all the guy who's built something that has worked, and that another hospital wants to use.

It's like in American Idol. If being the judge pays so well, and you get to be nasty and condescending, and get paid well too, then why don't everybody be the judge? Everytime this happens, I'm thinking two words - Ayn Rand. Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Here's to John Galt and Howard Roark.

Posted at 7:05AM UTC | permalink

Mon 22 Mar 2004

The Gift of Travel

Category : Commentary/giftoftravel.txt

Gather round a group of people who've been blessed with the ability to write extremely well and collect their travel experiences. You'll get a book like, "The Gift of Travel" - a collection of quite wonderful travel stories.

You'll read about a couple of long-distance, cross-channel swimmers who saved a pelican who, later, turned up to greet them at the finish line. And a couple of stories about coming to terms with death and loss. And many more.

Reading it was something I looked forward to, at the end of each day, the last week. Finished my meal, get into something comfortable, whip out the slim volume, and I'm immediately transported. Nice short stories. I was really sorry to reach the end.

Posted at 9:11AM UTC | permalink

Fri 19 Mar 2004

SpamAssassin on OS X Server

Category : Technology/pantherserver.txt

I have SpamAssassin and the Anomy (Anti-Virus) Sanitizer running on the OS X Panther Server. There are some differences in how I've set up Postfix on OS X Client and how it works on OS X Server, but the concepts remain the same. I needed to tweak things a little and it works.

So I should be able to show how a message (that looks like it's spam) gets tagged by the SpamAssassin filter. And I've some attachments with known viruses (courtesy of Michel Poulain, who's been catching viruses since he was a kid; thanks, Mike, if you're reading this) that I can send to show how they will get caught by the anti-virus screen.

So, Leon and EC at Apple will now have an anti-spam/anti-virus solution they can package with their Xserves.

The Panther Server is interesting. I can hang on to the TiBook (that I'm running it on) for another week. I'm wondering why Apple didn't put the same care into the Server Administrator control panels that they gave to the iApps. I think there's a way to design the administrator interface to make it appeal to the IT geeks.

Posted at 10:21AM UTC | permalink

Spam Assassin

Category : Technology/spamassassin.txt

It seems like a long time ago since I was fiddling with both Spam Assassin and Mike Poulain's anti-virus filters for Postfix, but I've promised to help Leon Chen (World Wide Developer Relations) and EC Tan (long time Mac guy) at Apple to take a look at installing Spam Assassin for OS X Server.

I've had a trial copy of OS X Server from EC for some time, but I've never had a spare machine to run it. So I'm now running it on a TiBook he loaned me.

I've been finding my way around it. The Postfix part is mostly quite familiar. I still need to figure out how the Cyrus stuff works. As well as Open Directory. The administrator interface looks clumsy and lacks the usual Apple polish. But, I think I'll enjoy poking around it.

It took a whole afternoon to re-trace my steps to figure out how I had managed to get Spam Assassin to work on OS X client - and I had done it just a couple of months ago.

When you find a way to systematise the whole procedure and make it work with just one click, you eliminate a whole lot of work. But not everyone would be pleased to see that work eliminated, and I can actually see the point. It is often the case that you get paid for the perceived difficulty of the job.

With technically dense things like IT, very few people are sharp enough to tell make-work apart from real-work. And even when they could, even fewer are wise enough to think that they should go out of their way to reward an elegantly concise solution. It's not like in soccer, where the highest earners are those who make the difficult things look easy, like Zinedine Zidane or Thierry Henry. Actually, it's quite the opposite, and I'm trying to understand why.

There's a moral dimension to a systems analyst's work, if you're unlucky to be so pre-disposed. It's hard to work this out.

Posted at 10:19AM UTC | permalink

Thu 18 Mar 2004

WWDC, Help for the Visually Impaired, and Other Things

Category : Commentary/wwdcitem.txt

I may be able to go to WWDC this year. It looks like it may be interesting. But I have still four more weeks before I need to decide.

Here's an article that says, Apple is building help for the visually impaired into the next revision of OS X. It's going to be called Spoken Interface. In the time-honoured Apple way, its name alone is enough to tell you what it does. (Compare Rendezvous with Sun's JXTA). Also, in the time-honoured Apple way, it's going to be made available as a framework, so that all Cocoa applications will get access to its functionality with very little extra work.

So that is Apple's way of doing well by doing good.

Apparently Apple does listen to its user base. So, this is my wish. We've had HP people, DEC people, Sun, and now IBM people running Apple Singapore. When are we ever going to have Mac people running Apple Singapore? Maybe some food for thought.

Posted at 2:01PM UTC | permalink

The Understanding Business

Category : Commentary/TUB.txt

Today's Straits Times Money page has an article about how Singapore hopes to be the front-office for jobs going to back-office outsourcing operations in India and China. That's the role our IT industry hopes to play - if only we have the project managers who are skilled in understanding business requirements, who could design and organise the solutions, and who could then communicate these specifications to lower-cost programmers in India and China.

First, I think there's a problem with this picture. It pre-supposes that this is not a role that India and China would themselves want to play. If you get the customers into the front office, you could then try to sell them a whole host of other complementary solutions. So that's a choke point that both India and China would want to get hold of, as soon as rising wealth, improving infrastructure, and a more worldly-wise population allow them to do so. So whatever advantage Singapore gets hold of here - if it could get it at all - would only be temporary.

Second, and this is an observation, even with such low-cost alternatives available in so much abundance, the critical skill - that of being able to understand, design, and communicate information - is still so hard to find.

It brings me back to the statement (which I always thought I read in Lewis Mumford, but is usually attributed to Marshall McLuhan) that "We shape our tools, and in turn, our tools shape us".

In the case of our IT industry, since our practitioners chose to wield the computing tools at the level of the technician, then it should be no surprise that we end up with IT guys who only know how to "work the steps", if somebody else could first define the problem for them. And, as the article admits, this is the situation we find ourselves, and at great cost, in terms of lost opportunities.

Is there a better way? I think so, yes, and it's what we've been fighting for for more than ten years. It's to get IT people to dis-entangle themselves from first an IBM-centric, and then a Microsoft-centric - (and that should also include Apple-centric, if such a case ever could arise) - worldview and see beyond the technology and understand that we're really working with information rather than with technology.

As Richard Saul Wurman said many years ago, we're really in The Understanding Business. It's from the perspective of helping people understand, organise, and disseminate information that we should align all our other concerns - about computer processors, networks, and databases. These form the tail, and the tail shouldn't wag the dog.

But which PC guy would have heard of Richard Saul Wurman? Or Neville Brody, April Greiman, Allan Haley (typefaces), or Nigel Holmes (pictorial maps) for that matter? You wouldn't have come across them, and their ideas about information design, if you had not been interested in fonts, desktop publishing, and communications.

That's the struggle, to take control of the discourse, so that we get people to talk first about the information we want to provide, and how soon, and why these matter to the organisation, before we talk about conforming to Oracle or Visual Basic, Access, or .Net. Maybe I have a poor constitution, but the sight of dogs, of all shapes and sizes, being wagged vigorously by their tails in countless IT meetings have left me wanting to throw up.

It's been hard to get people away from their fiddling with dip switches, and opening up the computer chassis, and swapping network cards - when these look like so much justifiable work.

It's been hard to argue that we need to get people quickly away from these low level stuff (because we could always buy computer systems that will just work ;-), and get them instead to focus on the level where they're working with the information design. That's much harder work. You have nothing to show that you're working. At least, not until you actually deliver on the idea that works. And you need a lot more awarenes about the outside world, about businesses and what they need to be profitable, about setting priorities, about workflows, and most of all, about people.

But how do you get people to understand these abstract things? It doesn't look like much to do with dollars and cents. But, if we ask the wrong questions, we solve the wrong problems. If we've been building up our ability to work first with the information design, and then to integrate the hardware and software to meet the requirements of that design, being careful to choose the combination that works better for the user than for one's own career, then we would be uniquely placed to play that role of the information architect - by now.

Better still, we may be able to work out how to overcome the labour-cost disadvantages, since countries with those advantages still lack the single critical skill to put the whole thing together.

But our little dog has come back to bite us. And will continue to do so, for a long time more.

Posted at 3:17AM UTC | permalink

Mon 15 Mar 2004

The Myth

Category : Commentary/macsmyth.txt

I'd hate to be known as an Apple groupie. It's possible to love the products built by this company, but to dislike the people inside who should have done a better job getting these products into the hands of more users.

While corporate IT departments have done a very effective job of blocking the entry of new Macs into the enterprise - and eliminating those wherever they are still to be found - Apple itself has been culpable, not least for having sales and marketing people who, one, feel the product sells itself and, two, have nothing but contempt for the so-called Mac fanatics.

Or, is this only confined to Singapore because it's too small a market for Steve Jobs to care about? But whatever the local Mac Users Group feel about Apple, you can be sure it's not warm feelings for the local Apple retail and consumer marketing guys.

Jesse Sng, a long time Mac user and developer, submitted a post to the local Mac users' mailing list, entitled "Selling Macs - The Myth" - and it expresses basically what I feel myself, so I'll put a link to his message. It is a carefully thought out analysis of why Apple has failed to grow its market share, at least here in Singapore.

"Often, Apple and Mac users would talk about superiority and totally miss the point because the customer is not looking for superiority but rather he is buying into an entire community or ecosystem. So selling him the idea that he is joining a fringe minority isn't going to help."

Come on, Apple. Why don't you staff the ranks of your sales and marketing team with people who are truly convinced about your products, rather than with people who think that the Mac is an easy sell, and well, there's always the dumb Mac user who is willing to pay for anything (and cheer anything) Apple puts out?

These are two things holding back the size of the Mac user base - Microsoft-centric IT departments that are hostile to the Mac, and complacent Apple people who take a cynical, exploitative view of the hard-core Mac user, rather than involving them in a healthy, expanding ecosystem. Or maybe this concept is too hard to understand?

As I have tried to describe in these writings, I believe that the Mac's small market share is in no way due to technical issues, like the "computer architecture" that Apple chose to adopt. The problems are, instead, "people" issues, and should be addressed as such.

Actually, "people" problems are both harder and easier to solve. Easier, because they are not intractable, unlike structural problems from choosing a fatal, dead-end technological route. But they are harder to solve simply beause they deal with people, and whether or not they have tried to align their objectives with the needs of their organisations.

I have yet to hear of an Apple marketing guy turning up at a Mac meetup. Perhaps he could learn a bit about how ordinary users are teaching others, even hitherto hard-core PC users, about why the price of a Mac is worth paying for. Perhaps he could learn that there are lot more ways to grow the Mac user base. And isn't this all that matters? But perhaps not. There are always other agendas.

Posted at 6:29AM UTC | permalink

Sun 14 Mar 2004

Family

Category : Commentary/family.txt

My wife took this picture of me and our kid, Brendan, on the right, before we went out to the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, below.

Today, we had one of those really fine days.

Posted at 2:59PM UTC | permalink

Sat 13 Mar 2004

Black Elk Speaks

Category : Commentary/blackelk.txt

Look,
I fill this
sacred pipe
with bark from
the red willow. But,
before we smoke, let us see,
how it is made, and what it means.
This eagle's feather represents the thoughts
of Man, and how they should rise high, like the eagle.

I don't where I first discovered it, but I've always liked this poetic rendition of the words of Black Elk (Chapter 1 of Black Elk Speaks).

"How it is made, and what it means." I thought about this while re-reading my last post - about how we don't think enough about the meaning of the tools we are using.

I'm thinking about events of ten years ago, about an organisation I had worked for, and the proposal paper that was written to standardise the organisation on Windows, which ultimately sounded the death knell for Mac, in this and in so many other organisations. I was thinking about how that paper was written on a Mac, and how it got through a few management levels, many of whom were also using the Mac to read, edit, and approve it.

When the right hand doesn't know what the left is doing, we have a clinical term for it - schizophrenia.

I don't really know who - except for a few people I know - really reads this weblog. But I write to untangle my own thoughts, and to see where I ought to be going.

I'm writing about how we don't reconcile what we are saying, and what we think we believe in, with what we're really doing. The management books are full of "delighting the customer", creating "stark raving fans", "building things to last", doing things "the right way", thinking "creatively", thinking "out of the box", "teaching elephants to dance", "passion for excellence", and "taking the path less traveled".

But the gurus don't seem to be able to recognise what they are writing in praise of, even when it hits them on the head.

Somewhere, along the line, we've got to reconcile all these. And think things through, if we are not to be humbug.

The problem with espousing these ideals and thinking out loud is that people may come along and try to make you live up to those ideals, to serve their own ends. For example, when they want help with their Mac. Or want support, free or otherwise, to the ends of the earth, for the things I've put up? Hey, after all the things you said in your 'blog. That's the danger. But we've got to move on. Like how the Vietnam War vets took to saying, "it don't mean nothin".

Writing is a good way to clarify one's thoughts, and to take part in shaping the emerging worldview (the Weltanschauung). And when it stops being fun, it should stop.

Posted at 1:57PM UTC | permalink

The Alternative Model

Category : Commentary/alternativemodels.txt

Rob Enderle wrote the following reply to a reader of his article about "Apple's Competitive Advantage" :

"Microsoft grasped the core dynamic that was going to define the industry first and Apple never got it. They, like IBM, wanted to do both software and hardware and both firms lost as a result. Apple, who arguably created the first real PC, and IBM who defined the most popular version, are both shadows of what they should be against firms that are more specialized and often far less creative."

Yet, in his article, Enderle had also said, "Apple's designs are, well, elegant. There is no better word for it. Sony and Toshiba can come close at times, but, on average, Apple has the best-designed hardware from an aesthetics point of view of any vendor."

So how could we believe both statements to be true? We could believe that computing devices can be, architecturally, both open and closed at the same time - like the Mac (an attractive, proprietary, custom-built interface wrapped around platform-neutral Open Source parts). We could also believe that Apple's designs are elegant precisely because Apple is able to control the way its hardware and software come together, in a way that Dell can't. But it is not clear why we should believe that an admittedly well-made product is doomed to failure just because it doesn't conform to the ideological model that the analysts have in their heads?

The way Apple chose to do their technology has rewarded them with a famously loyal customer base. And, except for the periods where they had poor management - which could justifiably lead one to believe that the problem was poor execution rather than the wrong concept - Apple has always been profitable.

So, why the air of inevitability, whenever an analyst intones about the might of Microsoft's "model" - of flat, layered architectures controlled by Microsoft?

I believe that Apple's diametrically opposed model - vertical integration of industry-standard platform-neutral software layers (as opposed to Microsoft-centric ones) - is not only as viable as Microsoft's. It is also of more relevance to an age where the ability to produce small, portable, stylish yet useful, information-driven devices is the defining skill for new companies and economies to emulate. Here, the ability to decide what to leave out, is just as important as the decision about what to put in.

That's the importance of watching the war currently being waged over the iPod and the iTunes Music Software. If Apple wins this war, and holds on to its market share, even as it is stubbornly holding on to its notion of building both the hardware and the software, then it will destroy the purity of the model that the analysts have worshipped for ages, which justified the existence of all those mediocre Windows-based PCs.

I believe that neither Apple nor Microsoft has a monopoly on ideas about how we could use computers and other information-based devices. But if Apple's model can succeed, then it will inspire other aspirants to exploit the same idea - take all these Open Source parts and make them work even better than Apple has done. Apple's model leaves room for others to compete. Not so, Microsoft's. Computer architectures are a lot more subtle than the simplistic model people like Rob Enderle and Charles Ferguson have room in their heads for. (Jim Carlton had to use a Mac to write his tome celebrating the fall of Apple. Would he have had the time, focus, and energy to find the right turn of phrase to turn the screws on Apple, if he had been writing all that on a PC? In other words, if he had to be "a rocket scientist of system administration"?)

The question is: whom do we wish to serve? Ironically, cheering on Apple doesn't mean we're Apple-groupies, and cheering on Microsoft doesn't mean we are rooting for the "industry". To me, it is always the other way around, and I hope I've managed to articulate why. We should be rooting for computers that work better, and for better competition (at the very least better than Dell). I think we have a better chance with Apple's model, than with Microsoft's.

Posted at 3:56AM UTC | permalink