TechTruth

Let’s Talk Smartphones

techtruth — Sun, 10 May 2009 01:08:11 +0000

There’s an ongoing dialog about who makes the best smartphones, and I’m going to try to put an exclamation point on the fact that Apple’s iPhone is far and away the best there is. JD Powers recently studied the space and, aside from battery life (which was rated as one of the least important satisfaction factors) the iPhone dominated. Why, you might ask? Forget about all the fanboy stuff, the iPhone is dominant hardware-wise, has a fantastic OS, and kills every other smartphone manufacturer on the apps side.

What makes me qualified to say this? Well, I have had top of the line HTC Windows Mobile devices, my wife is currently using a BlackBerry Bold, I have played with a BB Storm, an HTC Touch Pro, and of course, I have an iPhone. So what makes the iPhone so great? Let me try to lay it out in 3 key categories:

Hardware – The iPhone hardware is nicer than anything out there. The laser cut glass screen, the solid and reliable hardware just feels good, and everthing in it just works (i.e. GPS, WiFi, graphics). Other hardware platforms are nice, but the quality just isn’t quite as solid.
OS – This is big, folks. Remember that OS X is a completely re-designed OS that’s a few years old, and iPhone OS has OS X (and BSD) as its foundation. It’s solid, largely reliable, massively flexible, and most of all it’s “newish”. It’s a great OS and the possibilities are pretty much limitless.
Apps – In case you hadn’t heard, it’s all about the apps. Apple knew, and knows that with over 1 billion apps downloaded in 10 months since the App store opened. RIM, Google (Android), Microsoft, and Nokia are all playing catch up – big time.

I think the most significant contender in this space is RIM. And I would say RIM still dominates on the enterprise side for a lot of reasons – manageability, messaging, and security among them. But Apple is catching up there too, even though I still think the enterprise space is a bit of an afterthought for them, as the consumer space had been for RIM. For RIM to catch Apple in my mind, they need to completely rehaul their OS. RIM OS is long in the tooth – the foundation is over 1o years old. I think they will do so in the next year or so, and if they do so, and do it right, they’ll give Apple a run for its money.

But here’s the bottom line, the iPhone is by far the best smartphone on the market today, and in my mind RIM is the only one that can really be a strong contender. Look for a new RIM OS in the next year or so, and let’s see if they can catch Apple. Of course it’ll also be interesting to see how much of a leap ahead iPhone v.3 will be (expect it in a couple of months).

Mark

Extended warranties on PCs/laptops is a racket!

techtruth — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 01:11:13 +0000

I have developed a renewed disdain for extended warranties/maintenance/support for PCs and laptops. I’ve always known it was a scam – expensive insurance, but my new hate comes at the enterprise level. I have been advising clients to ditch extended support on desktops and laptops and just take the basic 1 year warranty. This makes sense, as it really is (or should be) an option that you can decline. But a recent experience with one of the large vendors (starts with D and ends with ell) we were trying to to buy some laptops and our account manager essentially refused to quote us without the extended warranty. Suffice to say that they didn’t get our business – in fact Apple did.

Why am I so against extended warranties you ask? Well, run the numbers…it’s a complete and total scam. Let’s say an enterprise buys 100 new laptops for $1200 each. They will pay $3-400 extra for extended warranties on each laptop (that’s how much it costs, even if the don’t show the line item on the quote). So the assumption would be that the failure rate on those laptops would have to be 25-33%. That’s ridiculously high even for a piece of shit. A high-end failure rate would be 10% in 3 years, meaning break even extended warranties should be around $120 on the high side. So these guys are making conservatively $200 on the extended warranties. Now that’s a racket…margins go from 5% to 25%. No wonder they want to sell you the extended warranty.

Now think about self-insuring – so to speak. You buy 10 spare laptops with your 100 laptop order. You pay an extra $12,000 to keep cold spares on hand. If a laptop fails, you give out a new one, bring back the broken one, fix it, and re-issue it. The extended warranties, assuming the lower-end $300 per $1200 laptop would cost $30,000. So you pay 40% of what you would have by self-insuring. See where I get the numbers? Tell deskop/laptop vendors to stick their extended warranties where the sun don’t shine. Agree? Disagree? Let me know.

Later,

Mark

Apple in the Enterprise

techtruth — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 23:10:49 +0000

It’s been an interesting week. It started with me finding out that I was going to be involved in a pilot project at work. I want to be clear, it’s a great initiative and I’m really stoked about being included/involved. But part of this pilot means I have to sort of occupy two separate work spaces (cubes if you will), which means I kind of have to get a laptop. I guess they could just give me another desktop, or even a thin client with a virtual desktop at my new workstation, but let’s just say we’re not quite there yet. So laptop it is. I’ve been resisting a company issued laptop for a couple of reasons – first, I have my work desktop and I have my home desktop that connects to the corporate network and gives me access to everything I need, and I have my hackbook for occasional travel. Second, I know that my company typically issues a piece of shit, boat anchor of a laptop that I’m sure as hell not going to cart around, so it”ll end up tethered to one of my desks with the Kensington lock. So what’s the point of having a laptop if you’re not really mobile?

So I got involved with our IT guy and said “if I’m going to have a laptop forced down my throat, can I at least be involved in the selection?” Normally, I would have gotten a sound “no” and be sent on my way, but it so happens that we are unhappy with our laptop vendor and are looking at alternatives. So the search begins. I say, “look, let’s get laptops that people can get behind and will actually carry around with them.” Okay, so let’s look at specs. So we spec something out…here’s what we want:

12.1” or 13.3” screen (we’d consider 14.1” if it wasn’t too heavy).
2.2GHz or better (preferably 2.4GHz) dual core Intel processor.
4GB of RAM
Preferably 4 pounds or less.
At least 4 hours battery life under “normal” use conditions (preferably 5-6 hours).
Windows XP Pro, but we’d take Vista Business and downgrade if we had to.

That was pretty much it. Give us quotes based on those requirements. We were floored by what we got back. To make a long story short, the prices were much higher than we expected. We looked at other vendors and it was the same story across the board. To get an “enterprise class” laptop that met our specs we were looking at a minimum of $1,400 up to well over $2,000 on the high side.

So,I threw a crazy idea out to our IT infrastructure manager – why not get MacBooks? The cost would be $1,699 to meet our specs and Apple is known for the quality of their hardware. My idea was met with some resistance – not because the manager is a luddite or Windows bigot, but because he was concerned with how he would manage and support Macs. Totally understandable, and I actually would have been somewhat dismayed if he hadn’t been thinking about that.

I suggested running Boot Camp with Windows as the default OS, and that notion piqued his interest and at least got us thinking about if this is even do-able. The truth is that the tools and resources are available to have Macs play nicely in a Windows environment. We are going to try a small pilot and basically build an OS X image that will allow the MacBooks to join our Windows Domain, use VMWare Fusion to allow us to run Windows apps, and see if we can make this a workable solution.

My personal belief is that we will be able to make this work, and that it’ll be a win-win-win for all involved. The cost is in-line with comparably spec’d laptops, our IT guys will get to build on their expertise, and the employees that get MacBooks will be thrilled and perceive it as a perk (even though it doesn’t cost the company more money). Apple is becoming an increasingly viable option in the enterprise. If, like me, you hadn’t previously considered Apple a viable enterprise solution, maybe it’s time to give it some thought.

CRTC – Mind Your Business

techtruth — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 03:31:15 +0000

As is often the case, I am very concerned with the CRTC sticking its nose into how private companies deliver services to paying customers. In the past Canadians have been forced to pay a “tax” of sorts to ensure an adequate level of “Canadian content” is delivered to Canadian households. Historically this had been in the form of mandating “Canadian content” levels in television and radio broadcasting. But now, as the government body considers how it can control new media (i.e. the Internet), it is contemplating a $100M fund to ensure Canadian content makes it on the global public Internet. Seriously? What a sham! The only way to control whether – or how much- Canadian content makes it on the public Internet for Canadian Internet subscribers would be to have a big proxy server to limit the content and advertising of the global Internet – in other words, massively censor content for Canadians as it does now with television (specifically advertising). If you’ve ever watched the Superbowl in Canada, you know that all the fun US ads that play during the Superbowl are replaced with lame Canadian advertising.

Anyway, what caught my attention today was an article in the Globe and Mail (see it here) where the ISPs have threatened to take this to court to challenge the legality. I don’t say this often, but good for them. What the CRTC is proposing is downright criminal – forcing the ISPs to add a surcharge to their bills to support a $100M fund for Canadian content on the Internet. When challenged, the CRTC head (a former judge – go figure) responded ““The courts will decide”. Well, let me tell you, Mr. von Finckenstein, courts that employ judges like yourself should not be deciding this matter, the Canadian public that use and pay for these services should determine how they want to spend their Internet dollar. You are talking about levying a tax on Canadian Internet users that they do not want to, and will not pay. Let me tell you what will happen. ISPs will base themselves in another country (perhaps the US), buy last mile connectivity wholesale from the incumbent providers, and deliver uncensored Internet access to all Canadians that want it without charging a “Canadian content” tax. In fact, if the CRTC decides to go ahead with this net neutrality-crushing ruling, I might just have to start up my own little off-shore ISP.

This blog isn’t about politics, but what the head of the CRTC is doing is inviting alternative ISPs with servers in other countries to provide a service that Canadian ISPs will no longer be able to provide. Keep it up Mr. von Finckenstein, and watch your plan disintegrate while you crush Canadian ISPs.

TTFN,

Mark

The economy from my (and a tech) perspective

techtruth — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 23:32:37 +0000

The first thing I want to say is how thankful I am to work where I work doing the job that I do. As we are all inundated with horrible economic news, the company I work for is doing very well. So well, in fact, that we are looking to hire up to 80 people (which amounts to 40% growth in a company of 200ish people) and I just got a promotion! Yes, life is pretty good for me, and I’m learning how to appreciate how lucky I am. I find myself wondering how anyone at work could possibly bitch about anything today, whereas a year ago I would have been the first to complain. We are very lucky to have a job at all, and even luckier to have a job at a company that’s thriving in this economy (not to mention it’s a really great place to work).

It makes me think of all the IT leaders I’ve been talking to on the phone in the past few months. We have been helping our clients find ways to cut IT costs, and while the last resort for most is job cuts, sadly many have had to resort to cutting staff. I always try to drive people toward saving money in other areas first, and naturally I am better informed in my specific research coverage areas. Without giving away the farm, here are the things I am advising our clients to do:

Get rid of costly network bandwidth. Whether its for inter-branch WAN connectivity, or simple Internet connectivity, get rid of T1s wherever possible. It is THE most expensive last mile bandwidth by a long shot, but telcos still like selling them and enterprises still have them because “that’s what they’ve always had”. The cost per Mbps on a T1 is $3-400, while the cost per Mbps for SHDSL, ADSL, Cable, or Ethernet is well under $100. Consider Verizon FiOS…20Mbps symmetrical for $140/month on a 3 year deal ($7 per Mbps). Talk to your telco/carrier/service provider and get another last mile wherever possible.
Cisco owns 70+% of the LAN switching and routing market. The thing is they are one of the higher cost suppliers. Consider HP ProCurve, Foundry, Extreme, etc. if for no other reason than to keep Cisco honest. Also, if you have to buy new networking gear, look at buying used or refurbished on the secondary market. Network Hardware Resale is a popular supplier (not with Cisco as you might imagine) and offer warranties, support, and maintenance. All this at 50-90% less than Cisco.
Drop support (i.e. SmartNet) on most of your network hardware. You should keep some support on your core network, but look at 5x12xNBD instead of 7x24x4, and dump it altogether on the edge…just keep some cold spares on hand.
Look at WAN optimization to decrease bandwidth demand and costs. You could see paybacks of under a year for bandwidth reductions/avoidance.
Get your telco on the phone. Even if you are in mid-contract, I think telcos are more likely to negotiate a reduced spend, or changes without penalty at this time.
Work down mobile costs. Get a better handle on minute pools…keep them at 80-90% utilization. Under that level raises cost per minute, over that level and you risk blowing over your minutes and paying $0.25 per minute. Also, restrict data usage to only those that absolutely need it. I spoke to a client yesterday who dropped his mobile bill from $40K to $11K/month by doing things like this. SMEs should also consider not issuing mobile devices and allowing users to expense a pre-defined amount every month as individually liable mobile expenses.

There’s more that can be done, but I’ve found very few clients who have taken the above measures, and the truth is there’s likely thousands of dollars a year in savings there for most enterprises.

Hang in there IT leaders, we’ll make it through this.

Mark

OSX on the Lenovo S10

techtruth — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 02:43:36 +0000

Well, I managed to turn my S10 into a hackbook running OS X 10.5.6. It’s been quite a journey, but I’m pretty much all the way there. I followed the step-by-step found at http://www.netbooktech.com/2008/10/13/guide-to-installing-os-x-on-lenovo-ideapad-s10/ which got me most of the way there, but there were some niggling things I wanted to work that I had to look high and low for. One of my issues was 2 finger scroll on the Synaptics touchpad. I finally did get that working with this link http://www.insanelymac.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=88811 but I still can’t get sleep to work without disabling USB. At this point I want USB more than sleep, so no sleep for me now. I did have sleep working for a while and it was fantastic, but needed USB so had to revert to the old USB kext.

So how hard is this? Let me say this…it’s not for the faint of heart. It took me a long time and a lot of “grief”, but in the end I think it’s worth it. Don’t try this at home kids if you don’t have a couple of days and the desire to do a lot of Googling. I consider myself to be pretty technically capable, and I had some help from a friend who is not only *very* technically competent, but also has a Mac.

So, there it is…my experience making my Lenovo S10 netbook into a hackbook. It was an incredible learning experience and I’d do it again in a heartbeat (in fact I already had to after installing some kexts and running into a deadly kernel panic). If you have some patience, some smarts, some technical ability, and want a cheap and pretty cool hackbook, go for it. If not, then stick with XP.

TTFN,

Mark

EDIT – For sleep with USB I followed all of the instructions, but I was editing the kext files with the GUI Textedit app and that was my problem. I had to use the disk utility to repair the permissions on my drive, and voila – perfectly functioning sleep and USB. It took a lot of digging to find that little trick, so hopefully someone else finds it helpful.

Aspire One Stolen, Lenovo S10 Fills Void

techtruth — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 22:31:54 +0000

I went away last week to speak at a conference and forgot my Aspire One in the seat pocket of the American Airlines RJ I was flying on. I realized right away and got back to the gate within 10-15 minutes, but I was too late. We were the last passengers to leave the plane, so I know for a fact that an American Airlines employee stole my beloved netbook. Was it the flight attendant or the cleaning crew? I don’t know, and I don’t care, but it really pisses me off that American Airlines didn’t do anything to help or compensate me. They seem to know that this happens all the time and just don’t care that their employees are stealing from passengers. F**k American Airlines I say, that’ll be the last time I fly with them.

Anyway, I clearly needed to replace the netbook, and I needed to do it immediately. I ventured out to try to find a Best Buy, CompUSA, or soon-to-be-closed Circuit City. Apparently all of these places were a 25 minute, $30 cab ride away, so I took the 10 minute, $10 cab ride downtown to try my luck. I tried a few little independent stores and all of them tried to completely screw me by selling me a $7-800 netbook. Even Radio Shack tried to sell me an Aspire One for $499US…completely insane considering that I bought my Aspire One with the exact same specs for $379CDN. I had given up and was going to bite the bullet and take the long, expensive cab ride out to the Best Buy when the cab driver remembered that there was a Circuit City in a mall close by, and it was actually on the way back to my hotel. Sweet, they were still open and selling all laptops and netbooks at 10% off. They didn’t have any Aspire One’s, but I think that may have been a blessing in disguise. They had an HP Mini 1000, Averatec Buddy, and Lenovo S10 ranging in price from $310 for the Averatec to $404 for the HP. All had pretty much identical specs (but the S10 has the 160GB hard drive, while the others were 60 or 80GB), and all had 10.2 inch screens. I opted for the Lenovo at $350, and so far I’m very pleased. I have installed Windows 7 on it, and have been able to get all of the OEM hardware and software installed and working.

I really like the 10.2 inch screen compared to the Aspire One’s 8.9 incher. My eyesight is failing me as I age, so the extra screen real estate is a blessing. The keyboard is also slightly more comfortable, although it’s negligible. Apparently the MSI Wind has a really nice sized keyboard for a netbook. Anyway, I’ll keep playing with the S10 and post any interesting findings. In the meantime, I would advise anyone flying American Airlines to hold on to your belongings, or you could end up having to dish out a wad of cash to replace your stolen merchandise.

Over and out,

Mark

See ya, Nortel. It’s been a slice.

techtruth — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:43:24 +0000

Well, it’s a sad day for Nortel, it’s employees, shareholders, and an entire country. After over a century the Canadian institution that is Nortel is on the verge of extinction. Some may try to put a happy face on Nortel’s Chapter 11 filing by saying that they simply need protection to restructure and emerge as a viable entity on the other side. Let me tell you something – and I have historically been bullish on Nortel – it ain’t gonna happen. They are done like dinner. One or more companies will buy up anything of value, and the rest will wither away to nothing. 6 months from now Nortel will be a hazy, sad memory – kind of like an embarrassing drunken tirade.

And that’s really what the past 9 years have been for Nortel – an embarrassing drunken tirade. The company’s leadership has f****d up everything they have touched. A burgeoning carrier business – lost to hungrier and more innovative competitors. A robust enterprise business and dominant telephony product line – again, dithered away and taken from them by nimbler and smarter nemeses. I could go on and on – it seems every decision they’ve made this century have been ill conceived. It’s been hard to stand on the sidelines and watch them get slaughtered by their rivals – and themselves. For the last year or so I’ve been thinking to myself “there should be a mercy rule here – this is a blowout.” The bankruptcy filing is the mercy rule, and in my mind it couldn’t have come soon enough. As much as it saddens me to say, it’s all over for Nortel. Over a century poured down the sewer in less than a decade – that really sucks.

R.I.P. Nortel (a.k.a. Northern Telecom)

Windows 7 on the Aspire One

techtruth — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 00:17:28 +0000

Is Windows 7 going to be better than Vista? In my mind it already is. I installed it on my Acer Aspire One netbook tonight and other than a little glitch with the WiFi it is running flawlessly. This is something that would have been unheard of with Vista…can you imagine trying to run Vista on a netbook? Forget about it.

This is a real coup for Microsoft. I actually blew away Ubuntu on the netbook to install Windows 7, and unless something crazy happens this little thing is going to keep running Windows 7. I’m pretty excited…I can do everything on my netbook that I can do on my desktop at work, and it’s much prettier. And I can’t wait for the next train ride to Toronto. I’ll be tethering this little baby to my iPhone using PDANet (need to jailbreak your iPhone in case you were wondering) and use my 3G connection for connectivity. Maybe I’ll get myself a 6 cell battery for it and extend battery life up to 5-6hours.

That’s all for now…imagine that, 2 posts in one day.

After a brief hiatus, layoffs and Windows 7

techtruth — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:30:35 +0000

Yup, I’m brutal. Two and a half months between posts…not cool. Okay, I’m going to do at least a couple of posts a week from now on, even if I don’t have much to say about technology.

Today, I have a couple of things to say. First, the economic turmoil is starting to effect my industry. The “big dog” Gartner has announced 117 layoffs (3% of worldwide workforce), including 5 analysts, and AMR is laying off 10% of its staff. Fortunately, growth in the research and sales departments continues where I work, so I should be alright.

Second, I finally got a clean install of Windows 7 x64 beta to work on the weekend. I had done an upgrade from my previous Vista installation, which was an upgrade of my previous XP installation, but 3 OSes in and years of apps and crap later it was pretty sluggish. I actually have a pretty decent PC…Dual Core 2.2 overclocked to 2.43 GHz, 3 GB of RAM, 512 MB ATI Radeon video card…not too shabby. I had been trying to do an x86 (32 bit) clean install (build 7000), but kept getting and error early in the installation that files were missing and the installation could not proceed. After several attempts with different versions of the x86 7000 build, I finally decided to try a clean install of the x64 build – and voila – success!

My first impressions are that Microsoft has done a really nice job with Windows 7 so far. After a couple of hiccups with apps and making changes (freeszing up and BSODs) I got the installation stablized, and I am very pleased with it. Windows 7 is very pretty, and I’m really liking the “everything” task bar…even though it took me a few minutes to figure out. It seems to be pretty stable now too, although its only been half a day. Finally, it is smokin’ fast! Yes, a nice clean Vista install probably would have seemed pretty snappy too, but it just seems like Windows 7 is snappier and more responsive than Vista was. All in all, I highly recommend it, and I’m using it as my primary OS (I know, you’re not supposed to use a beta OS as primary, but what the hell).

Oh, and I lost 4 pounds last week, which is a good start on my quest to drop 65 pounds by mid-May (my 42nd birthday).

Later (or sooner…won’t be 2.5 months again)

Mark