The pulse of Alexander Interactive

Apparently switching operating systems isn’t easy. Besides the issues that people talk about (Can I run my apps? Is it faster? Is it better?) there are all sorts of personal identity issues tied up in the operating system one chooses.

(Pausing a moment for full disclosure: my personal operating system history, in reverse order, is Mac OS X, SuSE Linux, Red Hat Linux, Windows 9x/NT, Mac 6/7/8/9, TRS-DOS, PET, and whatever happened to be running on the DEC-10 with the dumb terminal and the roll of paper. Also there have been a few side-dalliances with FreeBSD and Win 2k.)

Initially I didn’t think of an OS as a separate entity from a computer. It was just part of the computer, what showed up when I turned on the old TRS-80. We can thank Microsoft for making us think of the operating system as a thing in itself, other than an inherent attribute of a computer.

At the beginning of the 90′s I started to work on Macs because that’s what was going on in the music world, where I was operating. This was about when Windows 95 came out, and in retrospect it was a pretty dark time for Mac. People were crowing about how Windows 95 eliminated any need to get a Mac. They really took it personally.

(A couple of years later, I abandoned the Mac because I was getting into Java programming, and the Java runtime sucked on the Mac. Macintosh Runtime for Java. MRJ. I remember it well. Bleh.)

Working on the Internet led me to discovering UNIX. I wanted it. I suddenly came to the realization that the Internet was really a UNIX-centric place. UNIX and the Internet just seemed to go nicely together, in a way that Windows simply did not. I downloaded the super-cool, incredibly indie Red Hat distribution (wow, times have sure changed) and pretty soon was installing it everywhere, including on my IBM laptop.

Fast forward to more recently – when Mac OS X came out, and I realized I could have UNIX on my laptop, and all of the shiny Mac stuff (including commercial audio production software) all on one OS.

Now I’ve never used XP much, and don’t have an opinion about Vista. Apparently some otherwise happy Windows users don’t like Vista. The complaints I’m hearing are along the lines of “too slow, fancy UI chrome doesn’t actually enhance usability, security features drive me insane” and so on.

One of the biggest sins seems to be that after 5 years of nothing from Microsoft (and during the course of many, many OS X upgrades), Vista simply wasn’t as jaw-droppingly amazing as it should have been.

Well for whatever reason, a number of people I know, who were previously staunch Windows users, are bailing. But they’re bailing under protest. They hate the idea of being part of the herd, and joining those dirty hippies in the cult of Mac.

The idea that one’s consumer habits are part of their identity isn’t terribly new, but it is kind of fascinating for me to watch people struggle with reconciling the apparent conflict between the technical and user experience benefits associated with switching to Mac, with the danger that they’ll become yet another latte-swilling zombie, wandering aimlessly under the influence of the mighty Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field tm.

To which I say: folks, its all temporary anyway. Apple makes the best stack right now, but someday they’ll get knocked off by something easier, faster, more powerful and yes, sexier. And then you’ll find me switching. And I won’t be losing sleep over it.

Editor’s note: today marks the first of our UX Critic features, where we’ll be giving rapid-fire critiques of multiple players in a single industry vertical. Today we start with online photo-stamp creation, for soon-to-be obvious reasons….

One of the subtly fun developments of the online era is the introduction of photo stamps, where individual consumers can custom-create official US postage. Having started and stopped a few years ago, the segment has commoditized nicely, with even the US Post Office offering its own online and offline stamp-creation tools.

This writer, having recently had a baby, and having been sent by the new mother to buy stamps at the post office and found a fairly abysmal selection of 42-cent stamps, decided to make his own. (The original image can be viewed here; the stamp snapshots are included below.)

First stop: Zazzle, the popular custom printer. Zazzle’s online tools are easy to use and extremely fast. I was able to upload multiple images, move and size them with ease, and compare multiple images atop each other. Their discount pricing model kept costs reasonable ($12.95 a sheet for 10 sheets of 20 stamps). I liked the 24-hour turnaround time. But the large ZAZZLE.COM imprint on the stamp turned me off, so I kept looking.

I next went to photo.stamps.com, the official outlet of the US Post Office. But their stamp layout, a large square, didn’t serve my image well. (It should be noted that zazzle.com seemed locked into a horizontal layout–not useful for vertical images.) The site required registration for anything beyond basic image positioning, so I was unable to compare pricing without going into the FAQ–they turn out to be $14.95 for my quantity. They also don’t ship for 3-5 days.

Last stop: yourstamps.com. Their site identified my image as horizontal and created a layout that matched–nice! They had custom borders and designs–nice! But they don’t have discount pricing, making my order nearly twice as expensive ($18.95/sheet) as stamps.com and Zazzle. Worse, the site logo switched twice midstream, from Fujifilm to Cooper Imaging and then to Epixel, making me nervous about placing an order there. Finally, the site needs 7-10 days to process orders, even for local pickup. Too many negatives despite the visual appeal.

In the end, despite that ZAZZLE.COM imprint, their site had the most compelling offer. They gave the best price, layout, and turnaround time, and their tool was a cinch to use. Even a few of these would be good differentiators; having them all on one site is a real victory for the Zazzle team.

Can lightning strike the same place twice? Can we get some more angels to dance on this pin? How about re-creating the PC demand explosion on another hardware platform, hopefully resulting in the same wealth creation that coincided with the PC revolution?

Hm. I think I’ll take the angels. Looks easier.

The 90′s was filled with venture capital firms looking for someone to be the next Microsoft. The effect of that particular tornado was so wide and so long lived that most people lost sight of what an anomaly it was. People kept making business plays based on creating an equivalent to the PC explosion, while glossing over the fact that the odds of doing so were quite a bit worse than winning a lottery. In a lottery, at least someone is guaranteed to be the winner. It could be a long time before something like a new hardware platform explosion occurs again.

Let’s look at the forces that combined to create the original Intel-based IBM PC Clone + MS Windows market explosion:

• Rapid standardization of business on an open platform (which was open by accident: it was based on the PC reference specification put out by Intel)
• A proprietary product (MS Windows) was attached to the explosion, but only because it was a significantly undervalued part of the supply chain. No one had thought seriously about an operating system for a computer as the high ground in technology before then.
• A radically open platform for application development. For a retail-level offering, there was a remarkable lack of centralized control over what you could run on top of it. You didn’t need Microsoft’s, IBM’s, or anyone’s permission to write an app.

Alone these factors would have been significant, but together they created a firestorm that is extremely rare. In fact, a firestorm that is practically impossible to re-create. What everyone now knows is that IBM screwed up. To let these factors coincide is against the basic instinct of business, and it wouldn’t have occurred in this case if IBM had understood properly what was happening, and had executed properly.

So in an environment where key players in an industry are not massively screwing up, the conditions to create the firestorm just don’t happen. Fire does not get stolen from the gods.

In the business world, people keep wanting to use the razor blade model. They catch the customer and then extract recurring fees. This is the way that game consoles, cell phones, cable tv and so many other things work. This can be a great way for a business to make money, but it essentially guarantees that the firestorm and the associated wealth explosion will not occur.

I started thinking about this topic when I was speaking with a co-worker here about his Zune. (Yes he has a Zune. He’s the only person I’ve ever met in person with a Zune. Actually he owns two of them, a black one and a coveted brown Zune.)

Initially Microsoft’s response to the iPod was to initiate Plays For Sure – an attempt to re-create the firestorm. The idea was Plays For Sure was a program in which Microsoft supplied the software and independent manufacturers supplied the hardware. The plan was that they would displace the iPod just as they had the original Macintosh.

But relying on re-creating the firestorm is a weak bet. Not surprisingly, it didn’t pan out, and Microsoft abandoned the strategy (screwing their Plays For Sure partners in the process) and released the Zune instead. An integrated, closed, offering instead. The Gods continued to keep fire to themselves.

Everyone is all abuzz, as they always are, about Apple’s latest product news, in this case the $199 3G iPhone. As expected, the focus is on the price: $199 for an iPhone! What a deal!

Yet it’s not that great a deal. The entry price has been lowered but not the true cost. Of course, Apple and AT&T know this; it’s the foundation of the cellular industry, and AT&T Wireless is happy to exploit it here.

Full disclosure: I am a wildly satisfied iPhone owner. I’m not buying the new one, though, in part due to the economics. Here’s why.

The current (now previous) iPhone cost $399 for the device and $20 per month for a required AT&T Wireless data plan. Over the life of a two-year (24-month) contract, the total cost of ownership amounts to

399 + (24 x 20) = $879

This number excludes taxes, regulatory fees and marginal inflationary adjustments, but it’s an accurate gauge of what Apple and AT&T get from the consumer across two years.

For the new phone, the price drops to $199, but the monthly data fee has risen to $30. Sounds small, but over the course of two years, guess what?

199 + (24 x 30) = $919

By the end of two years, total cost of ownership for the new phone is actually higher for the half-price iPhone. Apple managed to get monstrous press coverage of its $199 price point with little mention of the data charge, which substantially affects the equation.

Now, I’m obviously simplifying a conversation with many other variables. (For example, over two years, “real cost” including inflation and float may benefit the monthly plan; people who renew contracts in less than two years have altered ownership costs; etc.) But my point is simply put: list price and true cost are not the same, and the 3G iPhone is no cheaper than its predecessor.

How many CPUs do you have?

One of the most interesting changes to the web in the last couple of years is that computing hardware is moving beyond mere commodotization and into the realm of the metered service. Companies that formerly would have had to heavily invest in hardware (and the associated system administration costs) in order to deploy web sites are beginning to have a viable alternative: cloud computing, available in various flavors such as Amazon’s EC2, Slicehost’s virtual machine based hosting, or quick set-up hosts like WebFaction.

Instead of buying hardware to host your website, it is now possible to rent computer time at any capacity level. This allows businesses to essentially pay for only the computer power they need.

This is great, but implicit in this is that we need to change the way we build web applications. What is rapidly becoming the predominant hardware paradigm (via cloud computing) for web applications is in a direct disconnect with the technologies that we’re using to build them.

It has to do with how many CPUs (processors) the technology can handle.
The approach-du-jour in web apps is rapid development through frameworks that take advantage of powerful, dynamically typed languages like Ruby and Python. These frameworks allow people to build web applications very, very fast.

However, these languages are executed in runtimes that are not SMP (symmetrical multi-processing) enabled. In other words, the runtimes can only handle one processor at a time. There are numerous hacks in the web development world to get around this, mostly involving running multiple instances of the runtimes. However problems creep up – the well known scalability problems that Twitter has encountered have their roots in these issues.

So up on the bleeding, ragged edge of web development, we’re starting to look at alternatives from other industries. In the telephony world they’ve had to deal with these kind of scalability and reliability issues long before we were around, and they have some pretty impressive solutions.

Erlang, developed by Ericsson, is a language and runtime created from the ground up to live in an SMP world (originally its “cloud” was telephony equipment). There is a famous Erlang app which claims nine nines of reliability. That’s 99.9999999% uptime, or a few seconds every 30 years. Way more than any website needs.

Unfortunately, Erlang is, well, kind of weird. People coming from said Python or Ruby background will have to re-learn some very fundamental approaches to problems, and that’s not going to be easy. In fact it might not even be possible. Fortunately, Erlang compiles to bytecode (similar to the way Java and Python work) meaning that its possible to write a different compiler and perhaps uses a different language on the Erlang runtime (called BEAM).

So just today I noticed, (in what is clearly a really, really early incarnation) – a little project called Reia. Its pretty raw now, but it purports to be a Python/Ruby-like high level language that compiles to Erlang BEAM format, giving it all the SMP-loving, fault-tolerant and distributed goodness that comes with Erlang. I don’t know if Reia is the winner, but I feel pretty confident that creating a friendler programmer interface to the Erlang runtime is a winning proposition.