getwired.com

If you read this document and walk away thinking that Macs are truly more expensive based upon just that reading, you’re making a mistake.

That document is so one-sided it isn’t even funny. They’ve added in over $2500 in fluffery that shouldn’t even be there:

1. Five years of Mobile Me, at $149 a pop. That’s $745. You don’t NEED Mobile Me to use a Mac. It’s convenient, but not required. And more importantly, there is no analog to it listed for the comparable PC. They lamely mention Mesh and SkyDrive as the same thing. They are not.


2. An upgrade to iLife $99 (WHY?) They may buy iLife - but again, this is an entirely gratuitous inclusion with no analogue on the PC.


3. Mac Office Home and Student at $149. Okay, sure - but you can NEGATE this one, since the PC buyer would need to acquire the same, or remove it from this list. You’re comparing Apples and oranges.


4. Quicken for Mac at $70. Again, I don’t get it. Why is this in there? Did the PC include it? No, no it didn’t


5. Other SW at $70. “Other SW”? WHAT other software? Huh? Bogus puffery.


6. One to One Care $99. I don’t even know WHAT this is. You try finding it on Apple - or even on Google for that matter. Is this list fictional?


7. AppleCare at $249. Listen - some people believe in extended warranties. Some don’t. I don’t buy AppleCare, and I’ve never needed it (knock on wood). If I bought another major OEM PC other than an Apple (other than a Toshiba, which has been very reliable over the years), I’d probably get an extended warranty. But not AppleCare.


8. AirPort Extreme Base Station at $180. Again, this is just asinine. The PC doesn’t have any wireless hub listed, and yet the Mac will work with ANY hub. WHY is this listed here? Gratuitous addition.


9. 1TB Western Digital USB Drive at $150. Huh? Why? Why not list some external storage for the PC? Just because the PC has more room, doesn’t mean the Mac user will need that much. I mean, it isn’t like we’re gonna install Vista on it. We don’t need that kind of drive space. Yeah, I said it - and I meant it.


10. Stand-alone Blu-Ray from Sony at $300. Stupid add-on to compare. Macs don’t ship with Blu-Ray. Wah. BFD. I have a Blu-Ray player where I want one - under my HDTV. I don’t need it on my laptop - that’s what iTunes is for.
    
11. 2GB 800MHz DDR2 RAM at $100. I don’t get this one either - you don’t need 4 GB on most Macs. Not unless you’re planning to run a ton of Windows installs in VM’s, or you’re planning to run Vista. Yeah, I said it again. My Macs run fine with 2GB. Add a Windows VM or two, and dang skizzy, you better add more RAM.


12. ATI Radeon HD 4870 at $350. This makes no sense, unless you’re buying a Mac Pro. You can’t upgrade a video card in a Mac, for better or worse, unless it’s a Mac Pro.

Add all of those up, and it comes to a grand total of $2561 of “inflation”. This makes the whole argument pointedly weak. If they can’t make the “Apple Tax” stand without lying, they shouldn’t use it as a tool. Not unless they also thing PC buyers are also tools.

Macs cost marginally more than a PC with the same hardware, and truth be told there are some segments of the market (netbooks, cheap 15″ laptops) where Apple HAS no competition to offer a PC purchaser. But to me, if you add in 1) how well the OS is engineered to work with the hardware provided in the Mac, 2) how much less resources the OS requires (10.5 vs. Vista), 3) how reliable the hardware is, and 4) how you don’t HAVE to run around like a chicken with your head cut off on the second Tuesday of every month, you have to take other things than upfront cost into account.

Parents often chastise children because kids don’t understand the care and feeding of a pet is a long-term commitment. They also chastise teens because teenagers often misunderstand the care and feeding, and actual ownership costs of owning their own vehicle. It’s important in this same vein to not fall prey to the same myth - that the upfront “value” is everything. It isn’t. You have to understand that no matter how good you take care of it, that Windows PC will have more costs down the road. How about antivirus, antimalware, and antispyware, which is NOT optional on the PC, but most Mac users don’t even know about? How about teaching your grandparents how to patch their PC, so that it doesn’t become a part of the next cool new botnet? How about remote assistance, when the PC hits the floor due to a bad driver install?

Macs have problems too. But I think it’s VERY important to not take the Mac Tax marketing tool into account as truth. Because I really don’t think that it is.

I’ve been spending a bit of time looking into something that has bothered me for awhile. I refer to it as “Predatory Utility Software”, or “PUS”.

On Christmas day, I received two pieces of spam. These were admirable because they were able to defeat SpamSieve (my favorite software purchase of 2008). They were frustrating because they offered a piece of… software called “Error Nuker”.

For years, I’ve been telling people that so-called “registry cleaners” don’t do anything, and in fact can be the single most destructive tool you can run in Windows. One bad edit, and you can kill Windows.

I’m not even going to delve into the method that many tools like this use to spread themselves. While not “malware” in the truest sense of the word, spamming novice users, and confusing them to the point that they download tools like this should be illegal.

Windows gets “cruft” in the registry and occasionally in the filesystem over time with the installation, uninstallation, and updating of applications and Windows itself. The thing is, though this cruft in the registry causes your registry hive files to grow in size, it is benign. Tools such as this that lie to users and tell them that “errors” will occur are frankly more malignant than the actual problem they feign to solve.

I ran “Error Nuker” on a test Windows VM. It took quite a bit of time to “scan” my system, telling me each of the locations it was scanning. But you know what? In the end, all it did was point out locations in the registry that referenced files on the disk that were no longer there.

Now, it’s important to note that dead links from the registry are usually the result of uninstalling the application that put them there*. Meaning that, the only thing that cares that the link is dead is the application or application(s) that are no longer there! Meaning it does nothing!

*This tool also calls out files in Most Recently Used (MRU) menu locations in Windows - which if you are like me, you edit, send, and delete documents like crazy. But these MRU links being dead is hardly what I’d call an error condition.

“Error Nuker” is something like $20-$49 (depends on which spammer you get solicited by, I guess). Frankly, it isn’t worth free. It literally does nothing, and although it has a safe delete option, the fact that it is just a glorified registry cleaner means it’s effectively useless. An analogy? Do you think washing your car will make it go faster? Me either.

I’ve seen worse “PUS” - specifically the kind that is truly malware. But it’s really a shame that we’ve gotten to this point, where Windows users will fall prey to junk software pimping itself as fixing Windows’ problems.

Just saw this article on eWeek discussing Microsoft’s “search payola” initiative not exactly working. I have to ask… did anyone predict otherwise?

We live in a world where everything is defined by time. We all bought VCR’s. Why? So we could watch movies, sure - but moreover so we could watch TV shows when we had time. Enter the TiVo, and it’s countless imitator DVR’s. These devices succeeded in shifting the paradigm as they shifted time. As pagers and answering machines, to cell phones, we adopt new techology not just because it’s “new”, or “cool” - if it were, Microsoft could just put tailfins on Live Search and we’d all go there, right?

What Microsoft’s Live Search marketing team failed at here was they failed to listen.

Q: Why do users go to Google instead of anywhere else?
A: Because Google has, unquestionably, the best search engine on the Internet.

Q: Why has the world latched on to the term “Googling” or “to Google” or “Using the Google” (Bushism) instead of saying, “Yahooing” or “Live Searching”?
A: See answer above.

As a former employee and former shareholder, I find it mind-numbing (that’s one step beyond mind-boggling) that Microsoft ever considered buying Yahoo, and that this is still coming up as a potential. Buying the failing, flailing, second-fiddle search engine won’t get Microsoft any more eyes. Half of those users will just throw up their hands and use Google if Microsoft acquires Yahoo.

It’s not about paying people, it’s not about buying an audience - at any price. It’s about providing search that “just works”. People don’t go to Google because it’s cool (sure, the thematic logo is fun), but give me a break - people use Google for search for one, simple reason. You save time by searching there.
Yes, that’s right. Google did it too. They changed the way we used the Internet, by making search brain-dead. I remember using WebCrawler, AltaVista, Excite… countless engines before them. Each with subtly different results. But you had to either manually aggregate them together, or use an aggregation engine - to find anything reliably. Google did away with that. While I think Google may have lost some of their “do no evil” ethos along the way, one thing they haven’t lost is their search edge.

Microsoft - there is one way, and only one way, to get users to search on Live Search, always. Make a better mousetrap. Payola and buying eyes will never work. if that’s the grand strategy, pack it in and go home - because Google will continue to inhale your lunch.

The headline just had to happen. It simply fascinates me how the media thinks that Apple pulling out of MacWorld is a sign of Steve not doing well physically.

Who cares?

Years ago (1996) when I was interviewing at Microsoft, I bought two suits (bought under the premise that I would need them if I didn’t get the job and wound up staying at EDS - thankfully that didn’t happen and I wound up taking them back). The guy at the suit store in Redmond was making conversation, and eventually we wound up on the topic of me interviewing at Microsoft. He mentioned that he had, in years past, met Bill and his father, and that both were nice guys, but when I seemed “fawning” or apprehensive as it were, he reminded me that they were just normal guys who “put their pants on one leg at a time”. Over the years, I was lucky enough to work near several senior MS employees (no, not those two), and got humbled.

I eventually learned that he was right. And that frankly - as I like to say, Microsoft has no “big giant head” that audits, approves, denies, and oversees everything. That, despite the fact that many people always felt Bill was “that guy”. He was all over the place - but didn’t shepherd every single thing. Microsoft, like most companies, succeeds not through sheer dictatorial leadership, but through (generally) teams working together on common ideals. Sure - it may not work perfectly all the time, but they are where they are.

Personally, though Apple is a much smaller organization, and I do believe that Steve is very thorough in his role, and that he has a keen eye for style, form, function, etc of Apple’s devices, that when Steve does decide to reduce his involvement in the day to day process of “guiding” Apple, that it will be far from fatal to the company.

Whether Steve does or does not have any sort of medical issues is frankly of limited business to the media. I’m disappointed in the sensationalism that the media is giving to this. It’s his own issue to deal with, and as a responsible CEO, he’ll certainly help define the next generation of leadership at Apple.

And about that generation. There are a lot of very sharp people at Apple. It isn’t as if Steve designs all of the hardware or software himself. He never has. He’s a well-spoken, charismatic evangelist. There are other leaders, evangelists at Apple, and there are other great speakers.

When the time comes for a management change, Apple is going to be ok. It’s going to be alright.

SiriusXM’s stock is officially on the floor. And it’s had me thinking why - as I’ve been pondering canceling my own subscription.

Since Howard Stern went to Sirius in 2006, he has been talking big about the death of “terrestrial radio”. But I think it’s bigger than that. With iTunes, a growing selection of on-demand media (think of all of the places you can on-demand movies from), and to a smaller extent, the growing reliability of Internet-based music and media channels, the threat posed to both traditional radio and SiriusXM is real. Add to that the shrinking volume of disposable consumer dollars, and SiriusXM is as hosed as “terrestrial media”.

Honestly, the music selection of SiriusXM isn’t that spectacular - the playlists repeat more often than they should, and the variety means that personally, I have about maybe 15 channels, tops, that I ever listen to. The sole breadwinner that they have is truly unique broadcasters - such as Howard, Oprah, and Martha… I listen to Howard for the whole rubbernecking factor - just to see what happens next (and frankly I’m ashamed of myself ).

But it’s getting harder and harder for me to validate paying for SIriusXM - when Howard and a few other channels are all I would miss - and I have to think, post-acquisition, that many Sirius, and LOTS of XM subscribers, feel the same.

Saw this hit the wire yesterday(Starbucks laptop theft) . It is indefensible. In 2006, Starbucks could not find 4 out of use laptops, each containing between 10,000 and 50,000 employee’s personal identifying information.

The time has come for the federal government to enact laws. Not compliance laws, but identity theft protection laws that make the rampant careless storage of employee, patient, or customer personally identifying data a felony. There are at least three things wrong with this latest Starbucks identity theft issue:

1. Employee, customer, and patient data should NEVER be stored on a mobile system unencrypted, and frankly shouldn’t be there to begin with.
2. Employee, customer, and patient data should NEVER be stored on any system unencrypted, whether the system is secured or not.
3. Starbucks didn’t to diddly to protect this data after losing it several times before, and in fact lost nearly twice as many employee’s personal data this time as last time (97K vs. 50K).

Frankly, compliance initiatives to jack to secure employee, patient, and customer data. The insane number of laptop and desktop thefts that are occurring every year (my wife’s data from IBM over 13 years ago was lost last year!) that are 100% completely preventable through the simple use of volume encryption software can be stopped immediately. But senior executives are not being held accountable for the inaction of their company, regardless of who “makes the mistake”.

The federal government needs to act on preventable identity theft. Now. This is a pattern of bad behavior that senior executives in organizations everywhere need to be made clearly aware of, and given severe, personal financial penalties for not stepping forward and preventing.

Sigh… I really had hoped we were past this era of “pay the OEM to pimp your wares”, at least with web browsers.

I don’t know where I would be without Google. It’s an invaluable tool for search. But their browser? Snooze… Like too many tools from Google, it’s a developer toy designed by developers for developers. Even if you foist it onto consumer-grade systems, most users won’t select it unless OEM’s make it the default browser (yech).

Frankly, I’m not elated with IE8 just yet either, though I like it better than I liked IE7 during it’s beta phase (taking the menu away… BAD idea!). But at their heart, I still believe that the IE team has the diverse scenarios much more understood to deliver a web browser that is suitable for consumers, enterprises, and provides some new dev-candy - without being all out nerd porn as Chrome currently is.

At work, I like to use this quote: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” This quote is a great quote by Mohandas Gandhi. It works really well describing the response you face as a whitelisting company going up against 25 years of the same old AV “security” solutions. It apparently also describes what happens when a software megalith gets set in their ways and gets out-innovated by a smaller company that actually cares about what customers want and don’t want. Vista was a failure. Microsoft has now entered full spin mode. http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-10064580-75.html

I have to ask… Why on earth does Google install Chrome where it does? On my system, it is installed in:C:\Documents and Settings\wmiller\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome and drops it’s own auto updater in a VERSIONED directory under that. WTH? Application Data is, not surprisingly, where a User’s application data is supposed to live - not an application itself - and an updater like that should be downloaded either into the same directory as the application or into the temp directory. Nice app sprawl, Google. Thanks.

I largely use Macs now… My iMac at home, a MacBook Pro at the office, and another Mac Mini tucked back on my desk at the office for a lightweight VMware system for testing. In general, I like each of these systems a lot. But if there was one thing I could ask Steve for about the hardware in particular, this would be it. Please, for the love of all that is good, will someone at Apple create a DOCKING STATION or a PORT REPLICATOR for the MacBook Pro/MacBook? When I am at the office, even with a sweet 21″ Apple Cinema there, and all of my peripherals plugged into it. I have to plug in the AGP, USB, and Firewire from the Cinema to the MBP, and then plug in the power cord - on the opposite side from each other. Leaving the office is the same exercise in reverse… it’s just kludgy, and “un-Apple”. It’s a minor thing, but a reminder that Apple is still stuck in their consumer past. Laptops in business need port replicators/docking stations. It just makes life easier for a portable that truly gets used everywhere.