We communicate over email, so email functionality is part of it.  To communicate, you need a contact list, so an address book of some sort is part of it.  And you typically arrange meetings with people so you need a calandar as part of it.  But the calendar needs to be capable of sending invitations over email (and of course accepting them), so it needs to also tie in with your address book and email program.

Bored yet?  You should be.  The concept has been around for almost 20 years.  To date, only two companies have got it right: Microsoft and RIM.  And Google will be next.

Technically, only email really knows how to work over the Internet.  Calendars and Address books don’t, although CalDAV is beginning to change that for calendars only.  Why is working over the Internet important?  Simple: syncronisation with your mobile phone.  The whole point of the PIM is to carry it with you – away from your computer. You should be able to read and send email, accept and send calendar invites, and add or change address book entries any time, anywhere, and those updates need to be syncronised over the air to your “home base”.

For many people, “home base” is a computer, and this doesn’t really work for over the air sync, because most people’s computers are behind firewalls or even powered off while they’re on the road.  For these people, there is nothing to sync to until they are sitting at their computer anyway, so maybe it’s not so bad to sync the phone with bluetooth or a cable “once you get back to your desk”.  Maybe this is good enough for some people.  Their data isn’t available from more than one computer, and their PIM data might not be replicated for short periods of time when they make updates to it while on the road.

For those of us who want over the air syncronisation, we use cloud services.  Our PIM data’s home base is not on our desktop computers or our phones – it’s on a server somewhere on the Internet, and it’s available all the time.  Let’s count how many companies offer services like this, and check out the general availability of their services across devices…

1. Microsoft Exchange.  Typically if you are working for some enterprise, they have an Exchange server.  Exchange uses proprietary tech for sync, but there’s alot of support for it from the smartphone market.  Even Nokia and the iPhone have Exchange sync support.  Your Exchange admin may not have enabled this support, or your Security admin may not have allowed the access through the company firewalls, but I haven’t met too many on that side of the table.  For the most part, devices that sync with Exchange keep all three datasets (email, contact, calendar) up to date with your device over the air.
2. RIM’s Blackberry.  The Blackberry is the golden child.  They made a device in the mid-90’s that very thoroughly mimicked the desktop PIM, and made syncronisation a breeze with their Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) software, which was responsible for the syncronisation with your company’s email system (such as Exchange).  Since then, they’ve only gotten better, and now have Blackberry Internet Service (BIS), which allows individuals to take advantage of cloud syncronisation without the need for Exchange or BES – though I don’t think there’s a way to sync anything other than the Blackberry itself (such as other desktop PIM applications) with the cloud data.  But I don’t know much about it so I could be wrong.
3. Apple’s MobileMe.  From what I can tell, this isn’t so much a service that hosts your PIM data in the cloud, as much as it is simple cloud sync between devices.  Pretty cool, but also $99/year for individuals.  As with BIS, I’m not sure what you can sync to this other than the iPhone, iCal, and the Apple Address Book.
4. Google.  This includes Google Apps for Domains, as well as plain-vanilla Gmail.  Both support IMAP and POP3 for email sync, and CalDAV for calendar sync.  Unfortunately, they don’t implement any standard for contacts sync, because no standard exists (yet…).  They do have a program for syncing with Microsoft Outlook, though I haven’t tried it and don’t know whether it syncs contacts.  Zindus for Thunderbird syncs contacts with Thunderbird’s address book, and I’ve seen some other pay-for options to sync various programs with Google contacts, such as Spanning Sync 3, which is $65 one-time (and it syncs the Google calendar with iCal too).  BTW, with their maturing Android platform and cool new phones, Google’s going to give Microsoft and RIM a real run for their money in this space.  Or should I say a run for their revenue streams?

…and that’s about all.  So from a standards perspective, or in other words, something that should work with any service provider and almost any client device/software, we have IMAP for mail and CalDAV for Calendaring.  While IMAP is mature and awesome, CalDAV is both new, and sparsely and poorly implemented.  Both Thunderbird and iCal *supposedly* support CalDAV, but I’ve tried it, and it sucks.  In iCal, you can’t accept meeting invites into a CalDAV calendar, and you can’t move an existing meeting from a local calendar to a CalDAV one, or vice-versa.  This alone makes it entirely useless as a PIM solution, as I can’t get meeting invites from my email into my CalDAV calendar.  Minor oversight, there Apple.

Using Lightning for Thunderbird allowed me to accept meeting invites from email into a CalDAV calendar (note – using Mozilla’s stand-alone Sunbird does NOT, nor does it integrate with any address book whatsoever), but, erm, how do we describe this… ah – it’s FLAKEY.  It seems every time you go to add something to the calendar, you get a MODIFICATION_FAILED message, which you can only recover from by restarting the entire application.

MobileMe and BES are not options.  MobileMe is retardedly expensive.  Simple as that.  $99/year is just a ridiculous price point for sync.  BES is not an option because a) I don’t have a Blackberry, and b) my work doesn’t run BES.  They do, however, run Exchange.  So what’s wrong with that?  Why don’t I sync with Exchange?  Well, I was.  Until I ran into this one, ridiculous, annoying, impossible bug.

We have both Exchange and Gmail at work (don’t ask – why and how we have both is an entirely different topic), and I have a Mac, and an iPhone.

I run OSX, not Windows.  Although you CAN run Windows on a Mac, things just don’t work properly.  Like the webcam, and sound.  Or the mouse/trackpad.  I don’t want to run Outlook in a VM because that’s an incredible amount of overhead just for Outlook, so I run Entourage.  Unfortunately, there’s a timezone bug, so all of my meeting requests go out in UTC, meaning that they appear on non-Exchange calendars (such as Gmail) 3 hours ahead.  This is the bug, and it means I can’t run Entourage.

I can’t stand Mail.app or iCal, and even if I could, iCal and the Address Book aren’t stored on Exchange, meaning I can’t do sync of any sort.  And if I can’t sync it to Exchange, I can’t get it on the iPhone over the air – instead I have to plug the iPhone into a cable and sync over USB with iTunes.  Although I can sync ical and the Address Book with Entourage, which in turn syncs with Exchange, this means I need to run Entourage.  See paragraph above for why we won’t be doing that.

I’ve also tried Thunderbird with the Lightning Extension and Zindus – to sync the mail with Exchange and the calendar/contacts with Gmail.  THAT doesn’t work because IMAP is blocked to the outside world on our Exchange server, and because the CalDAV support in Lightning is flakey as mentioned above – even with the Google Calendaring plugin.  Which is very unfortunate because this was turning out to be a sweet, cross platform setup until I hit upon those two problems.  The other problem with this is that the iPhone only supports one Exchange connection, and Google requires you to use the Exchange connector on the iPhone for syncronising contacts and calendar over the air.

To wrap up a long and boring story, my point is that it’s surprising to me that we can be almost 20 years into the digital PIM universe, and still not have a mature framework for multi-device, over the air sync.  If anybody’s got any good suggestions, I’m all ears and game to try it out, but you can leave out the “get a different device” argument, because I’ve got what I’ve got.  And you can leave out Apple’s craptastic $99/year option too, and running a VM just for Outlook (although I might have to resort to this in the meantime, unfortunately).

Although digital content has been around for years, the method of distributing that stuff around your house is still in gestation.  DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) is a seed struggling to sprout in the desert sea of the Sahara.  Even with DLNA, we still have proprietary rogues Apple and Microsoft (among others) going it alone with iTunes via DAAP and Windows Media Player via WMC.  DLNA is more of a compliance statement than a protocol, which is likely part of the reason many DLNA-compliant products do not behave predictably with one another.  WMC apparently fits within the DLNA spec and qualifies, but iTunes doesn’t.  On top of this, some products are only DLNA servers, and others are only DLNA players, and all too often the vendors don’t specify which role their products occupy.  The DLNA seed was desperately needed, but the current state of confusion and mis-information shows just how much farther it has to go/grow before it can be considered a standard/sapling.

I’ve been playing with various Home Media Networking (HMN) setups over a few years now, and have run into all manner interoperability and functionality issues, pros, and cons – but I’ve never found that “perfect” setup.  I’ve questioned whether such a setup was feasible, and have even started to question if I knew what my own definition of what “perfect” was.  So I set about on a bit of a quest.  I’ve started documenting my requirements, and my experiences of various setups and products.  Although there’s bloggable story to it, I wanted to keep a living document on my wiki instead, which I can expand on and refer to down the road, when I inevitably forget why I chose not to use Product X, and to help reach for that “perfect setup” utopia.  Please check it out, and feel free to leave comments there.  I will update it from time to time, so it might be worth adding to your RSS feed if you’re interested.  Let me know if you want to add stuff to the wiki page, and I’ll be happy to give you access… the more input I have on this challenge, the better.

I’ve got a few good topics brewing to talk about, including a new perspective on Twitter; the problem with region-protection of media, and the anti-competitive practices of the mobile phone industry.  I also had a brilliant idea that I’m starting to work on in the background, which I won’t talk about much if at all here – but if I refer to “Project 00″, that’s what I’m talking about.

Anyway – looking forward to these posts and your feedback.  Talk to you soon!

For the uninitiated, SuperAtomic is a name that was created by a friend of mine, that we adopted as teenagers to mean “beyond awesome”.  It had latched itself into our vernacular for years, until we finally bestowed on it a rightful place in our lore, never to be used verbally again.  And so superatomic.com was born, way back in I-can’t-remember-when, as OUR domain.  …to the extent that the last time I renewed it, I renewed it for a 9 year period – the maximum available at the time.

When we created the domain, we were doing geeky things like creating websites, and at that time I was into computer 3d modelling/rendering/animation.  Doing volumetric lighting in 3d rendering was a bit of a fascination of mine as well (just ask Bryan, and remind him of a certain concert we went to where volumetric lighting was the star of the show… literally, unfortunately).

I created the image used in the new header using Truespace 3D 4.x, a program which was extremely unique in that industry, and although quite buggy, also quite groundbreaking and intuitive.  I paid – I can’t remember – probably 300 or 400 CAD for this program back in the day.  Now it’s available for free at version 7.6.  Get it while you can, because rumour has it that Microsoft bought the company, and then quickly fired all employees and terminated development on the programme.  (Does this remind anyone of MS buying Homer’s company?)

The image is of the classic “Radiation Hazard” logo, which we adopted as the logo for SuperAtomic productions (capitalisation sic). It was one of the volumetric renderings.  I have another animated one of it spinning, which looks fantastic, but is unfortunately a .mov file, and not suitable as a header image (and probably a bit annoying after a few spins anyway).

While not really topic-pertinent, it’s SuperAtomic-pertinent, and pretty cool, and the colours match (well enough).  So I hope you like it!

Today I read Techtroniks’ tweet that Silverlight 3 was out of beta, so I hit the link and checked it out. It wasn’t “Silverlight 3″ that interested me, it was the reference that it “joins forces with your CPU for HD streaming” (HD = High Definition, for you neophytes).  Now, I’ve previously thought of Silverlight mostly as a Flash competitor, but being a fan of digital distribution, and hobbyist of home media networking, I found this intriguing.

There are two links in that article, one of which is a link to a demo showing this technology in action (albeit done in Silverlight 2 somehow), and another to their download web site.  Here’s how the demo blew me away:

• absolutely zero buffering = instant streaming
• absolutely zero stuttering for 90% of the video, except for a brief minute in the middle where it was only as bad as any other Internet streaming I’ve ever seen
• the resolution was about 4x what you’re used to for Internet streaming (such as MSN Video), about 2x YouTube, and about the same as YouTube in HD
• I’m only on an 800 kbps link, and Silverlight adapted the video quality to approximately 400 kbps to compensate – the quality was approximately equivalent to an Xvid-encoded DVD rip

One thing to be clear on – the resolution of this (as well as YouTube `HD`) is NOT high definition.  It`s about DVD resolution, which is still quite impressive for Internet streaming. Especially when that content is coming in with zero buffering and almost zero stuttering at 400 kbps.

Admittedly, we`ve already got digital distribution, and this technology doesn`t fundamentally change that.  However, it makes it a nearly-transparent experience, which has the potential to change people`s perception of what digital distribution is.  And that, potentially, is revolutionary.

Google’s home page for search should be pretty familiar to everybody.  What might be unfamiliar to many people is that the domain part of the URL in the address bar of their web browsers changes from “google.com” to a more location-specific domain when they hit this page.  (Perhaps this is untrue in the US, however I didn’t make observations of this behaviour last time I was there)

For example, in Canada, when you type in “www.google.com”, you will be redirected to “www.google.ca” (again, it’s been a while since I was there, and this might not be the accurate domain).  I live in Qatar.  When I type in “www.google.com”, I get redirected to “www.google.com.qa”.  It’s country-specific.  It’s “location aware” (cue oohs and aahs).

Google takes the location awareness one step further, and changes the language of this page based on, well, your location.  So in Qatar, the page comes up in Arabic.  This is swell if you can read Arabic.  I can’t.  Many expatriates can’t either.  Fortunately, Google has addressed this issue by ensuring there is a “Google in English” link, written in English, on the Arabic page.  By clicking on this link, a cookie is set in my browser that ensures that I will always get the English version of the page from then on.  The page reloads, in English, yet I still get the google.com.qa domain in the address bar, along with whatever benefits that brings me.

Google Qatar's Default Page

Google Qatar's English Page

This is as much thought that Google has put into this wonderful feature.  (FYI, the rant is starting now…)

Google has dozens of wonderful services. Blogger. YouTube. Google Reader. Docs and Spreadsheets, etc.  …and something called “knol” which I wanted to check out.  It would be acceptable if these services looked at the cookie which was set by the Google search page, and subsequently changed their own language based on that cookie.  Alas, they do not.  Nor, it seems, do they have any partially-intelligent mechanism for a new visitor to change the language.

Instead, I am at the mercy of my location, as well as Google’s location-awareness technology, and consequently I cannot use these services.  This is not only bad application design, it’s bad architecture, period.  It seems simple enough, however this is the type of concept that so many application developers and solutions architects fail to grasp: usage scenarios that fall outside the obvious.  In Google’s case, they have created a service that ONLY satisfies the “obvious usage scenario”: where a visitor from a country MUST be able to read the primary language of that country.  This is a ROOKIE mistake.

Google, I am simultaneously LAUGHING at you and FRUSTRATED with you.  Fix your mess.

On top of this, Google has provided no means to contact them for support or feature requests (…that I’ve been able to find).  If anybody has discovered Google’s support contact information, please leave a comment with it.  I’ll be ever so grateful.

In the meantime, here are how some of their pages look in Qatar.  (I also invite you to try and find the “View in English” button…)

Google's Blogger Bar - not available in English in Qatar, apparently

A Google Blogger Profile Page (John Rogers - cool - aka Kung Fu Monkey) also not in English, except for the parts written by John

Knol. I can't even find out what this is about. Google English FAIL

As mentioned in an even earlier post, I have never had an Ubuntu install (or any Linux install) go 100% perfect, and this was no exception.  To be clear, I’ve never had 100% perfect functionality after installation.

I will say this: Ubuntu 9.04 x64 on this laptop has been the cleanest install yet, with the nearest to 100% of functionality and “correctness” after installation. Considering this laptop is a fairly new product, which meant that my expectation was pretty low for approaching that 100% target, I am simply blown away with the level of success.

On top of that, I’m further blown away by how sweet and slick of an OS this is.  It might not be as polished as OS-X, but it’s smooth and fast and fun to use for a computing interface.  I almost want to reach into the screen and squish it between my fingers.

Just how close to 100% was it?

The first problem was the screen resolution.  This one seems to get me every time – especially on laptops.  It didn’t take long to discover that the Nvidia graphics (GPU) in the laptop use a vendor-provided driver, which Ubuntu isn’t allowed to load by default because it isn’t open source.  Figuring out the correct driver wasn’t easy, because the Nvidia GPU is newer than the most recent driver.  Fortunately, it was pretty easy to determine the general generation of GPU’s and select the correct driver based on that, and after a reboot I not only had the correct resolution, but snappy new desktop effects to boot. (Compiz FTW!)

It would be nice for Ubuntu to walk you through this after install.  A little hand-holding goes a long way.  It would also be nice for them to use a standard installation interface.  I’m not clear why they don’t use Synaptic for everything.  However the Nvidia install had to be done though a completely different “Add Programs” interface.

This is the Interface you have to use to add the NVidia drivers

This is Synaptic, the application you use to add and remove "packages", which is where I would have preferred to see the NVidia driver.

That, as far as base functionality is concerned, is about it.  I have not tried to burn a CD or a DVD, nor have I ever done this on Linux, so I have no idea whether or not this works.  Same goes for the built-in webcam.  However, both wifi and bluetooth work (wifi definitely does, and although I can see a bluetooth icon, I haven’t tried to pair anything yet).  I can read and write to NTFS partitions without any effort as well.

That’s pretty damn good for Ubuntu and for Linux in general.  I applaud their efforts and for once I find myself spending time in the OS.  Now, if somebody could help me get Adobe Air working, I might be able to spend more time in it (they don’t have 64-bit Ubuntu support yet, and although I can get it installed using their instructions, I can’t get it to work).

Any takers?

I’ve been on Vista for a while now. It’s the first MS OS I’ve ever bothered to pay for. Despite negative criticism of it in the media, it is terrific in many ways, and lays the foundation for Windows 7, for which media criticism is positive.  With a blank slate to play with, I figured to give Windows 7 a try to see what all the fuss is about.  I also wanted to have a clean install (avoiding trialware and software I wouldn’t use), but my retail Vista DVD wouldn’t work with the Laptop’s OEM Product Key (this is apparently something you can resolve by calling Microsoft and paying a small “upgrade” fee to correct).

I ran 7 for about a day, then decided to switch back to Vista.  Here’s why…

Windows 7 doesn’t ship with Windows Movie Maker.  They’re intending to bring “Live” Movie Maker out of Beta before 7 ships, but I can’t wait for this, and the current Beta is severely lacking.  I have a load of DV footage I want to edit, so I needed Vista’s included Windows Movie Maker.

There are also some HP drivers and utils which don’t work under 7, such as the thing that parks the hard drive if you drop the machine, and runs the soft buttons above the keyboard.  Not a deal-breaker, but better to wait until they come out with 7-compatible versions

And I quickly hit a bug which reminded me why I prefer to stay with production software instead of betas and release candidates.  After disconnecting an external monitor (HDMI), and locking the computer so I would have to enter my password to resume, the screen resolution of the laptop suddenly changed to what I assume was the same resolution as the external monitor, and the login process wouldn’t work.  This prevented me from saving any work or shutting down cleanly, and was ultimately the straw the broke the camel’s back.

So I went back to the OEM Vista.  The restore only took an hour, and I simply uninstalled the software and trialware from the factory image which I didn’t want to use.  I also setup a dual boot with Ubuntu 9.04 x64 just for kicks.

I’m extremely happy with this machine and with Vista (also the x64 variant), but was really impressed with Windows 7.  In my 24-hours with Windows 7, I discovered the new taskbar, “Libraries”, far less UAC annoyance, and speed improvements; four things that impressed me to the point of wanting to pay for another Windows OS.  Of course, I’ll try to take advantage of their $50 upgrade programme, but won’t be too bothered if I don’t qualify.

I’ll write about the nucleii I’ve discovered in another post.  As for the lag, aside from being busy, I’ve been a bit conflicted about what I want to write about.  Professionally, as an Enterprise Architect (the department in which I`ve most recently committed my services, but in all practicality, one of the most appropriate places for me, I think), I’ve been concerned with the intersection of ICT and business.  But personally, as a technologist and geek, I’m not, really.  Personally, it`s more about the consumer and the service to the user.  I it’s kinda that way in business too, however there’s a distinct parallax here.  And to me, this has been causing a bit of confusion, because I see the Consumer and Business Viewpoints in more or less the same terms and outcomes, even though traditionally they share very different priorities.

In real terms, in ICT we have only a few base verticies with which we can shape our viewpoint of the world.  These “verticies” are weighted differently, depending on the opinion-holder, and thus form different “viewpoints”, or opinions.  Above, I’ve basically described two viewpoints – one with a heavier weight on the “business” vertex, and another with a heavier weight on the “service” vertex.  “Viewpoints” is actually a major theme or even meme in Enterprise Architecture, so it’s perhaps apropos that I find this to be a sticking point.

In ICT, our verticies include the end user, who is also known as the consumer of the service.  We have the service, which is the manifestation of ICT by the business (and also the manifestation of business by ICT), and then we have ICT, which is the “technology”, and ultimately we have the business.  There is a phrase some of my colleagues choose as a bit of a mantra which goes, “technology for technology’s sake”, or specifically that they dislike this viewpoint and want their contributions in ICT to reflect a greater perspective.  I’ve seen this viewpoint realised often, and believe now that it’s simply a result of a viewpoint constructed of few or misaligned verticies – eg: it is absent of the “business” vertex.

All of this leads me to the realisation that I naturally perceive things from multiple viewpoints.  It turns out that this is essential to be effective in the role of Enterprise Architect, as that role is responsible for both the communication of and interpretation of the differing viewpoints of any particular ICT paradigm.  In other words, it’s not a weakness, but a strength.  However, it will certainly bring (and hopefully not turn away) a mixed audience to this blog!

So I believe the identity crisis is over.  You’re in for a dynamic ride through multiple viewpoints of how I perceive the evolution of Information Technology.  Like or hate what I have to say (I’m more interested in casual debate, actually), I hope you don’t find that I write about the same thing all the time, and I hope you keep coming back, because I’m sure the topics and conversation will interest you – if not always, then at least from time to time.  And with any luck, “time to time” won’t mean that I’ve been sitting on my hands for two months. 

Canonical has done a commendable job with Ubuntu.  Since October 2004, Canonical has maintained Ubuntu as a free-to-download Linux distribution that has made massive gains in useability and hardware support – two key areas where Linux has traditionally represented a rift between those casual users that expect their computer to “just work”, and those that prefer to stay up until 4am recompiling their kernels.

To be fair, I’ve tried Ubuntu several times since “Dapper Drake” (don’t remember the version, only the nickname), and I’ve had mixed success.  On some computers, it would install like clockwork with full hardware support.  On other machines, I would have problems with either the wifi or sound devices (more so than other hardware types).  This experience has improved with every new version, but was rarely 100% painless.

Unfortunately, over the years I’ve slowly drifted towards the side of the divide of those who want their computer to “just work” (actually I think that inclination was always secretly there).  And as painless as Ubuntu has become over the years, that painless experience is not “assured”, which in part keeps me away.  “Assurance” is the arena of Microsoft Windows’ and Apple Macintosh’s / OS X’s dominance.

The “assurance” of hardware support comes in large part through market share and therefore vendor recognition, which is the aspect of Linux which I mention above that can’t catch a break.  According to Berkeley Linux Users Group, Linux market share on the desktop has passed 1% for the first time in history.  But for an operating system that must work on the myriad of hardware that exists in the wild, market share is the key ingredient.  Think of all those laptops on which you’ve seen that unmistakable “designed for Windows” badge, and you’ll get the idea.  It means that all of the hardware inside the computer has a Windows driver available for it.  Hardware support remains one of the key drawbacks to Linux, as drivers for most hardware is written or adapted by the user community – often poorly or months after the hardware is released.  When’s the last time you saw a “designed for Linux” badge on a product?

Well, actually, if you’ve been paying attention in your local consumer electronics shop lately, assurance has recently emerged through the launch of netbooks.  Most of the major netbook manufacturers started with and continue to release versions of their netbooks with Linux pre-installed.  The limited utility and performance of netbooks has encouraged vendors to forego Windows due to its heavy CPU/RAM requirements in favour of the much lighter requirements of Linux.  The end user benefits by getting a fully functional netbook with smooth performance, and even lower cost (in theory) because the vendor hasn’t had to pay Microsoft for a Windows license.

The Linux community benefits from this “assured platform” with an opportunity to gain market share and support from hardware vendors.  Canonical / Ubuntu recognise this opportunity and seek to capitalise on it by applying the concept of “assured platform” in reverse.  With Jaunty, Canonical has provided a “netbook remix” version, complete with a list of supported netbooks.  The increase in adoption of netbooks plus the existence of an assured platform for Ubuntu and other flavours of Linux will theoretically drive its market share up, and increase the chance that more mainstream hardware vendors will begin to support the OS by offering Linux drivers.

By the way, Apple doesn’t have the same market share problem.  Their OS will always work on the hardware it was designed for – the Mac.  Their market share problem impacts their bottom line and their share price, but not hardware support.  I believe a large part of their success in recent years has to do with that simple fact – the Mac just works.  Apple’s main issue in earlier years, other than convincing the market that the Mac was relevant, was application availability (which may have contributed to the relevance issue).

Application availability remains Linux’s second major hurdle.  Linux advocates will argue that the plethora of open source software exceeds in quantity and often in quality software that is available on other platforms.  However true this might be, the brand recognition isn’t there, even in the more common software packages such as the GIMP and Open Office.  And these two packages don’t exactly win awards for user interface design.  In other words, as a new Linux user, the learning curve is steeper to find and learn new applications.  This has to change.

Apple addressed this challenge by writing their own software.  iTunes, iWork, iPhoto, iMovie, etc.  Stellar, “home user” stuff with unparalleled simplicity, functionality, and price.  Microsoft is trying to keep up, but making a slow go of it, with their bundle of Live applications currently under various stages of redesign (Movie Maker beta is practically useless at the moment).  To the best of my knowledge, no group in the Linux community is doing the same thing.  In fact, I challenge the Linux community to tackle this problem.

As much as I love recompiling my kernel at 4am, I’ve got better things to do.  And the majority of desktop computer users are in the same boat.  No matter how slick Ubuntu becomes, it will continue to have the issues of hardware support and application availability to battle against until the market share situation for Linux improves.  A bit of a catch-22, but not insurmountable given the track they’re currently on.  But Linux – even Jaunty Jackalope – is not a Windows or Mac killer yet.