Rooting For Microsoft

Like anyone who has spent time building web pages in the early days of IE, I have a special place in my heart for Microsoft. A deep dark cold place filled with all the hair I pulled out in those days floating on top of a nasty pool of sweat and tears I shed during that same time. Related, did you know that after they released IE6, they disbanded the web browser team. Read that last sentence again. Don’t be too shocked, these are the people that brought you Zune and Vista. Normally, I just roll my eyes and leave the fumbling giant be.

Anyways, I find myself in an odd situation these days where I’m rooting for them. I feel queasy about it, but in sticking with my principles and rooting for the underdog to rise up and challenge the leader which hopefully brings about more innovation overall, I find myself rooting for Windows Mobile (or Windows Phone they’re calling now-a-days). And there is sad news on this front; Project Pink is in trouble and probably will be canceled soon.  The absolutely last thing I want to see is Microsoft monopolizing the market (after which I assume they would disband their Windows Phone team – hehe), but at the same time I don’t think any sane person thinks Microsoft will dominate this market anytime soon or ever for that matter. So I don’t worry about that and am currently rooting for a situation where they pour resources into the situation and at the least scare Apple, Google, RIM, and Palm into innovating their ass off. I know, I know, we still have a lot of players right now keeping each other going and no one is disbanding any R&D groups just yet. But still it is still sad to hear that Windows Mobile is dead and the Android is the only real competitor to the iPhone.

In closing, Microsoft, I will never stop making fun of you about disbanding the IE6 team back in the day. And if you simply disband your various mobile OS platform teams (yes they have several) I will officially move from a fear/hate relationship with you to just simply pitying you. Come on Microsoft, I’m rooting for you, do something impressive with your boatloads of cash I keep hearing about.

My first iPhone app

Risk Visualizer iPhone App

So, I finally published my first iPhone app: Visualize Risk! Or more accurately, Apple finally approved it after over 2 weeks in review. They need to hire more folks.

To be honest, it’s a bit embarrassing how simple an app it is. And although I had a whole boat load of feature additions already suggested to me, I wanted to see what the infamous Apple iPhone application review process was like so I cleaned it up at an early stable point and submitted it. For such a simple application, it took much longer than I expected. And after over two weeks of waiting, I sent in an email earlier today to make sure I wasn’t missing something and waiting indefinitely. 5 hours later it was approved and in the app store. Maybe that was just a coincidence, but you can be sure I’m going to send in an email soon after I submit my next app.

As for my experience building the app, it wasn’t really much work. Definitely props to Apple on how well the SDK is put together. And due to the popularity of the platform, as of the summer of 2009 there is a ton of material on the Internet that helps developers get started. There is of course the iPhone application development course that Stanford is making available to the public, but there is a ton of other material as well.

After learning Objective-C and a bit of poking around in the SDK, it really took no time at all to code it. I did have a major detour in the beginning before I figured out the power of the UIScrollViewController – which handles all the multi-touch input including zooming in and out. I went down a “wrong” path of building this by drawing everything in OpenGL ES so that I could zoom in and out. As fun as it was re-learning OpenGL, which I hadn’t touch since college, that path required a heck of a lot more coding which the UIScrollViewController takes care of.

Anyway, now that it’s finally up, I feel a little pumped up about writing more apps. Hmm, maybe a game

Response to Sascha Segan’s article “A World Without Apple?”

Sascha Segan is PC Magazine‘s Lead Analyst for mobile phones and PDAs. And he recently wrote an article titled A World Without Apple? where he paints a very flattering picture of various technology related situations in South Korea. I tweeted that I disagreed and he suggested I continue the discussion. Once I was finished with my comment on his blog, it turned out to be too long to post as a comment so here it is. I’m directly responding to his article so you might want to give his article a read first. Also, please do not dismiss me as an Apple fanboy. Far from it, I complain about Apple as much as I praise them. I’m for competition and innovation.

re: Triumph of the keyboard

My disagreement here stems from my view that the statement “touch keyboards are fundamentally flawed” is incomplete at best. Are there negative aspects of a virtual keyboard? Yes. Are these negative aspects insurmountable with some user learning? And more importantly are these negative aspects greater than the sum of positive consequences of having a virtual keyboard? No. Given that the physical size limitation of a mobile device forcing various compromises, I contend the sum is significantly positive. Some of the features Segan refers to when he says “we love the rest of the iPhone’s features” are a direct result of having a keyboard that’s dynamic (characters, arrangement, and orientation) and can go away entirely solely based on context. Typing in Korean (or any other language for that matter) on the iPhone is awesome and easy to switch to.

What Segan sees as a triumph, I see as a lack of innovation thanks to a lack of competition.

re: More diversity, less DRM

I’m not a big fan of the “iPod monoculture” here in the US but I agree with the other commenters that more Apple does not equal more DRM. And inversely, less Apple did not seem to have lead to less DRM. I’m not too knowledgeable on this issue, but I think the comments from Koreans on the ground trying to use mp3s on their phones say a lot.

re: More TV?

This observation as well as Segan’s observation that more people are listening to music on their mobile devices might be true. But the cause he attributes to this behavior is wrong. This has more to do with public transportation (among other things). Many, many more people in Korea take public transportation than do people in the US. This leads to a lot of time waiting for and standing/sitting in a bus/train. That leads to a lot of activity on mobile devices, this consumption leads to more services (e.g. TV on phones). Public transportation isn’t the only reason, but it’s got a heck of a lot more to do with it than not having Apple there to muck up the works as he’s suggesting.

re: Missing Links

People using a stylus are doing so because they are stuck on WinMo (eck). Also, I don’t I agree that Koreans are naturally patriotic about their gadgets. It’s what’s sold to them thanks to the various conglomerates’ power over so many aspects of South Korean life.

The biggest missing part of this article is highlighted by his last sentence. “I’m not sure if we can learn anything from Korea’s relative avoidance of all things Apple, but it’s still interesting to see a country where they really do think differently.” Apple is missing from Korea not because people there are willingly avoiding it. They are forced into this decision not out of some open-mindedness or some special ability of the Korean people to avoid the Apple Fanboy Syndrome. It’s got more to do with the dominance of MS IE in Korea. The very sad, detailed story is available on Mozilla in Asia. IE is basically required for daily life, thus no choice but to use a Windows machine, thus not a strong presence of Apple.

I didn’t even get into all the shenanigans of SKT and KT in not bringing the iPhone to Korea or how expensive smartphones and service is in there. I’m afraid to say, from what I read (I don’t live in Korea), SKT and KT are even worse than AT&T if you can believe that. Channy Yun does a great job of dismissing all of the excuses in his post, There Are No Obstacles to Introducing the iPhone in Korea (in Korean).

There are positive aspects of Korean society to be sure. For example, although in retrospect it turned out to be a god awful idea, I love the initiative the government showed in providing Koreans with SEED when no good alternative was available to them. And I think there’s some truth to the belief that people there love to explore new technology. But as of 2009, in regards to computing device innovation and freedom (including mobile devices of course), I’m afraid it’s a slightly less than ideal situation in Korea.