Storage Bits

May 5th, 2008

Mac online backup that works

Posted by Robin Harris @ 9:17 am

Categories: Disk drives, Infrastructure, Software

Tags: Apple Macintosh, EMC Corp., Mozy, Data Preservation, Security Mozy, Backups, Robin Harris

Windows users have many online backup choices: Carbonite, Mozy and more. Windows small and medium business users have even more, like Amerivault. Mac users - not so much. Until now.

A long and winding road
I started working with Mozy’s Mac client a year ago, blogged about it for a couple of months (see “Mozy Mac client beta watch” one and deux). But after many continuing bugs and failures I got depressed and stopped.

Progress was slow. Painfully slow.

New! Improved! Now It Works!
Now I can to report that their client is out in v1.0 and it works. You can have unlimited online backup for $50 year - half of what .Mac charges for 10 GB.

Try it for free
Mozy offers 2 GB of free backup. I encourage you to download the software and take advantage of the 2 GB trial size so you can see the software for yourself. Unlimited personal backup is only $5 a month.

The Mozy software
The software isn’t as simple or intuitive as Apple’s Time Machine - but what is?. Mozy’s configuration interface offers 2 windows. One called “Backup Sets” and one called “Files and Folders.”

Most people can simply check the box to back up their user account. But if you store stuff outside your user account - video on a 2nd disk for instance - you need to wade through the interface to ensure you’ve protected everything. The backup sets option is an unneeded and confusing-for-many remnant of traditional backup software.

The Files and Folders interface is clearer. But most people won’t know that they need to backup up their Library folder to save their email. Now that the basic functionality if there, Mozy should tune the interface for real home users, not Mac geeks.

When you go to restore a file you are presented with something that looks like a Finder window. Just drill down to the files you want and click restore.

What about the competition?
Right now there isn’t any. I’ve been hoping that Carbonite - whose software is a little less geeky - would have their Mac client out by now.

I pinged them last week, but no response. I’m not holding my breath.

Online backup is part of this well-balanced diet
I live and work online: BBU on my main system; backup Mac; daily backups to a local FireWire drive; and I’m testing Time Machine. Data preservation is a top priority.

If your data is important to you, I recommend a daily local bootable backup AND an online backup. The local backup gives you the fastest possible recovery while the online backup protects your data from disasters like fire, flood and lightning strikes.

Security
Mozy encrypts your data before it leaves your Mac. They don’t keep a copy of your password, so they can’t access your data even if they wanted to.

And really, with the FBI reading your emails, the NSA listening to your phone calls and Customs riffling through your notebook files, Mozy is the least of your worries.

About Mozy’s parent company, EMC
Mozy was an independent company until last year, when storage industry giant EMC bought them. The backing of a $14 billion company may make you feel better, but I’ve watched EMC for the last 15 years and I wasn’t pleased.

EMC has a well-earned reputation for playing hardball with customers - and the occasional blogger. I angered one of their dimmer execs last year and he sic’d lawyers on me with an incredibly stupid cease and desist letter. And they never apologized.

So far EMC has been commendably hands-off with Mozy. They want to build EMC as a consumer brand - they just bought Iomega as well - so maybe a kinder, gentler EMC is emerging. In the meantime I’ll be watching their Mozy Terms and Conditions like a hawk.

The Storage Bits take
Mac users now have a solid option for online backup. The initial backup can take days or even weeks, so don’t wait.

I do hope other competitors emerge. Online back should be part of everyone’s digital diet.

Comments welcome, of course. Disclosure: I’ve been a paying Mozy customer for about a year and I’ve met Mozy’s founder at a couple of conferences. I have no other dealings with the company.

April 29th, 2008

Apple’s 5 worst hardware flaws - and how to fix them

Posted by Robin Harris @ 2:02 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Marketing

Tags: Headphone, Apple Macintosh, Disk, Mouse, Apple Inc., USB, Flaw, Keyboards, Mice, Desktops

Apple is often lauded for its design chops. And Apple’s post-modern industrial design is lyrical next to Dell’s neo-Soviet brutalism. But Apple makes some really stupid choices. Here are the top 5 - and the best workarounds.

In reverse order:

5) Keyboards
Considered as sculpture Apple’s newest wireless keyboards are stunning. But from the perspective of a writer and touch typist they offer nothing a $5 keyboard doesn’t.

Apple should put it’s design and marketing moxie to work on an ergonomic keyboard. Design a great keyboard and then - and this is important - tell people how it helps them be more productive with less stress.

In the meantime I use Microsoft Natural keyboards. They’re ugly and not as ergonomic as they could be - how about a return to the backward tilt of the early ones? - but the action is good and older models are available online cheap.

One problem: the Windows and Apple keys - the command keys - are reversed.

The workaround is simple. Go to System Prefs -> Keyboard & Mouse. Click on the Modifier Keys button and change the Option key to Command and the Command key to Option in the drop down menus. Click OK and your Microsoft keyboard will now operate like a Mac keyboard.

4) Not enough USB ports
Steve Jobs hates USB. Why else the paucity of USB on Macs? My $2500 Mac Pro comes with a grand total of 5 USB ports - less than most $600 Windows towers.

Wireless keyboards and mice have never worked for me. My wired keyboard, mouse, Contour Shuttle Pro, headphones, iPhone, BBU, card reader, USB Time Machine backup disk, Corsair 16 GB thumb drive, USB speakerphone and flaky IRISCard mini scanner means I am forever plugging and unplugging USB cables.

The workaround? On a Mac Pro there are 2: PCI-e USB expansion card; or USB hubs.

The Sonnet Allegro USB PCI-e card I added has been a bust. At various times I’ve had to unplug every USB device on it to get the Mac Pro to boot. Don’t know whose fault it is and don’t really care - I no longer use it.

That leaves USB hubs. Cheap no-name hubs often hang the Pro on boot. I now use brand name hubs that cost more but work reliably. I plug all the low power USB gadgets - keyboards, mice, card reader, Shuttle Pro, thumb drive - into an unpowered hub and the rest into the Mac’s remaining USB ports.

Given the MacBook Air’s minimalist I/O, I don’t expect Apple to suddenly get generous on USB. But it sure would be nice if they did!

And hey! What about that custom iPhone/iPod Touch headphone connector? Would it have been so hard to make headphone port a little larger so standard plugs would fit? My iPhone is beautiful - but the headphone adapter looks awful!

3) Replaceable notebook drives
Easily replaceable notebook drives are common on Windows - but not on Macs. Given the rate at which drive capacity increases and price decreases, that is an expensive shame.

The easiest way to add extra life to a notebook is to add memory and disk. Adding memory is easy on Mac notebooks - but disk replacement can mean dozens of screws and many delicate warranty-voiding operations.

The one exception: the current MacBook (see my One Minute Macbook Drive Replacement video for details). But with the MacBook design due for replacement I think that Apple will go back to the bad old days.

Apple prefers to spend money on CPUs and displays rather than memory and disk, so easy drive upgrades are more important. There’s no real workaround. You just have to pay Apple’s high prices for a larger drive at purchase or factor in the cost of a disk upgrade every couple of years for your MacBook Pro.

2) Synchronization OK, so this isn’t hardware. Oops, sosumi.
With mobile device leadership and a large share of the high-end notebook market, one would expect that Apple would have synchronization well in hand. Not even close.

Through .mac you can synchronize non-essentials like Safari bookmarks between 2 Macs. But for file synchronization - so a file you work create on the road shows up auto-magically on your desktop - Apple has no answer. And .mac costs $100 a year.

The workaround isn’t quite here yet, but there are several web-based synchronization services, like SugarSync coming to market. I’ll probably buy one of those.

And the #1, all-time, biggest Mac design fiasco: the Mouse!
Ever since Steve decided the original Mac would feature a 1-button mouse, Apple has stubbornly stuck to crippled mice. It is the weirdest thing they do.

Not to worry, you can plug in any mouse or trackball and it will just work. Right and left buttons, scroll wheels, whatever.

I got a Mighty Mouse - Apple’s reluctant concession to popular demand - with my Mac Pro. Tried it for a few days. Dumped it in favor of a Logitech Track Man Wheel.

Between the pea-sized scroll ball - a good idea, except it is too small and thumbs are stronger - the invisible, no-tactile-feedback buttons and the unorthodox pinch motion to activate whatever, the Mighty Mouse is a creative solution to problems no one has.

25 years ago people may have been momentarily confused by 3 button mice. Today everyone uses them. In this case Apple needs to do things Better, not just Different.

The Storage Bits take
Apple does so many things well that its failings are more obvious. But if the company really believes in the value of great design, they need to do what all designers must: submerge their ego for the sake of the client.

Humility doesn’t come easily to Steve Jobs or his company. But the we-know-better-than-you attitudes behind these design failures is self-defeating and off-putting.

Show your customers some love, Apple. They lay out the money. The least you can do is your very best, each and every time. You have the talent and the money. Please find the will.

Comments welcome, of course.

April 27th, 2008

Toshiba making *another* bad storage bet

Posted by Robin Harris @ 8:49 pm

Categories: Solid State Disk, Disk drives, Marketing

Tags:

Fresh off the HD-DVD fiasco, Toshiba execs are stepping up to pursue another expensive flop: notebook SSDs. Memo to Toshiba: flash SSDs cost too much and deliver too little to win that much market share. That won’t change in the next 3 years. Here’s why.

Please sir, may I have another!
Given the multi-billion dollar cost of semiconductor fabs, getting the notebook SSD market wrong would make Toshiba’s $250 million HD-DVD loss look cheap. The president of Toshiba semi, Shozo Saito, recently opined that flash drives will be in 25% of notebooks by beginning 2011.

He is badly wrong.

Same power, same performance and way more expensive - can that be right?
If flash drives delivered what proponents claim there would be no problem. But they don’t and they won’t.

Power: no SSD notebook has gained more than 10 minutes battery life over disks. Apple said 5 minutes for the MacBook Air. One test found lower battery life. Since flash is already power-efficient that won’t change. Disks have multiple opportunities to improve power use - and with over a $1 billion a year in R&D behind them - they will.

Performance: tested application performance hardly changes either - even with a $3,800 flash drive. Notebook I/O doesn’t favor flash drives - and the engineering contortions needed to fix flash aren’t cheap.

Anandtech found one big win for flash performance: boot and app load times. It makes the system feel a lot snappier - if you often reboot or quit and restart apps. Sleep mode makes that much less important.

Reliability/durability: flash vendors tout 2 million hour MTBFs and superior shock & vibe specs. Yet Dell reports that their SSD infant failure rates are about the same as disks. And the return rate higher.

So where, exactly, is the advantage? Beyond that, there is NO evidence today that flash drives will prove to be more reliable in actual notebook use. Only time will tell.

Data integrity? Of all the unanswered questions about flash drives, this is the scariest. Flash has read errors - that’s why vendors implement error detection - just like disks.

But flash has a problem disks don’t: flash drives move your data around with every update. Every time a flash drive writes a page, it has to erase the entire block that page is in.

What happens to the data in the block? It gets read and rewritten along with the new page - to a new location. The map that keeps track of where your data is rapidly gets very complex - and itself is regularly read and rewritten. How well-protected is this critical data structure?

If the flash drive’s physical to virtual block map gets corrupted there is no way to recover your data. And that critical map is getting read, updated and rewritten with every file update!

If flash SSDs are like every other storage product, catastrophic failure modes are hiding in the statistical weeds.

The Storage Bits take
The further I wade into flash issues, the worse it gets. My sense is that the flash industry close to creating a multi-billion dollar fiasco. Why?

• Over-promising on performance, reliability, battery life and data integrity.
• Positioning flash drives as a general replacement for notebook hard drives - when pricing clearly says they aren’t.
• Relying on system OEMs like Dell to market SSDs to consumers is a freeway to failure. The flash vendors need to market flash SSDs directly to consumers.

The flash guys are caught in a vise: big expensive fabs that need to run all year; and seasonal demand that whipsaws their pricing all year.

Notebook flash drives can help even out demand - but only if consumers accept them for the right reasons. Otherwise Toshiba’s new fabs will build chips for a non-existant market. And make them long for the good old days of HD-DVD.

Update: I fixed a broken link and tightened up the opening paragraph.

Comments welcome, of course.

April 25th, 2008

Seagate patents Compact Flash - 10 years late!

Posted by Robin Harris @ 3:35 pm

Categories: Solid State Disk, Disk drives, Public policy

Tags: Patent, Disk Drive, Seagate Technology LLC, Robin Harris

Can “prior art” be too prior?
Dramatic evidence of America’s broken patent system surfaced in last week’s lawsuit by Seagate against STEC, the innovative developer of high-performance flash drives. Imagine winning a patent for something invented 10 years before. Seagate may sue SANdisk next.

Seagate owns a patent on flash-based storage devices. The application was filed in 2000 by HP. Seagate later bought it.

Deja-vu - all over again
Here is a drawing from patent 6404647. It’s described as

. . . a perspective view of a mass memory storage device constructed in accordance with the principles of the present invention

Can’t quite place it? Maybe this will jog your memory:

[photo courtesy of the vendor]

It is all there, even down to the guide rails. Who knew getting a patent could be so easy? Or that patent examiners could be so clueless?

I bought a $400 10 MB CF card in 1993 - so I know that they’d been invented by then.

Size matters
Part of Seagate CEO William Watkins’ pique with STEC is fueled by a suit from 3.5″ drive inventor Rodime that Seagate paid $45 million to settle. Rodime patented the 3.5″ form factor for disk drives - and got the courts to enforce it.

Watkins knows that patenting disk drive form factors is silly - they have to be standard sizes - but if the USPTO grants them and the courts enforce them, why not?

The Storage Bits take
Solid-state drives with the form factor of disk drives long predate the HP’s patent app. What do patent examiners use for research - Ouija boards?

The good news is that the Supreme Court has forced the patent courts to change course. In KSR v Teleflex the Supremes ruled that the non-obviousness is a legal question, not a factual one, which means that lower court findings can be appealed. Rodime would have lost under that rule. While it will take time for KSR to play out, in the short term it almost certainly reduces the value of existing patents - like Seagate’s ludicrous flash drive patent.

I suspect that Seagate’s real goal is to cross-license with STEC for their industry-leading flash translation layer and architecture. I hope STEC fights this and the rest of high-tech gets back to real invention instead of silly patent games.

Comments welcome, of course. What is your favorite bogus patent?

April 23rd, 2008

Is Apple going back to the PowerPC?

Posted by Robin Harris @ 4:22 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Software, Marketing

Tags: Apple Inc., IBM PowerPC, Intel Corp., Processors, Semiconductors, Hardware, Components, Robin Harris

Hardware independence as a strategic weapon
The Forbes magazine scoop that Apple is buying P. A. Semiconductor, a Silicon Valley company that designs high-performance, power-sipping PowerPC chips - the very chips Apple just migrated away from - raises a host of questions. But the people who need to worry aren’t customers. It’s Apple’s competitors who are sweating.

Apple’s hardware independence
Apple has always put architectural elegance ahead of mundane commercial issues like market share. The original 16-bit Macs used Motorola 68000 processors whose architecture was much cleaner - remember the 640k memory limit on the Intel 8086? - than the scaled-up-from-8-bit Intel designs.

But Intel crushed the superior architecture with a full court press on developers that Motorola failed to match. When the IBM PC blessed the Intel architecture, Motorola never recovered.

Apple’s unique legacy
Unlike other personal computer companies, Apple has twice migrated its entire customer base to new architectures: IBM’s PowerPC in 1994; and Intel’s x86 in 2006. In both cases the migrations went remarkably well. I went through both of them.

Announcing the move to Intel, Steve Jobs said that Apple had been porting each release of OS X to Intel for years. Providing a high-performance PowerPC emulator on the Intel Macs meant that for most users the transition was virtually invisible.

But it is clear that Apple learned a bigger lesson: don’t get tied to one hardware vendor.

They put that lesson to good use on the hot-selling iPhone, whose 667 MHz ARM processor runs Mac OS X and the Safari browser. Another architecture with zero impact on users.

P. A. Semi’s claim to fame
Hey, it’s Earth Day, everybody’s green. But PA Semi has been doing it longer than most.

Their PA6T-168M has 2 2 GHZ 64-bit superscalar PowerPC processors linked by a coherent cross-bar fabric, 2 DDR2 memory controllers, 2 MB of cache, and an I/O system with 8 PCI express engines - with 4 GB/sec bandwidth for each engine, 4 GigE protocol engines AND 2 10 GigE engines that include line-rate packet filtering, VLAN flow control and TCP/IP acceleration.

Whew. And the whole thing dissipates just 5-13 watts.

To get into that territory the Intel Core family has to give up clock speed, bus bandwidth and I/O performance. The 10 watt U7600 has a 1.33 GHz processor clock speed, a 2 MB cache running at 1.2 GHz and a 533 MHz bus.

OK, PA Semi has great technology. How will Apple use it?

Gazing into the Storage Bits crystal ball
It’s a phone! No, its a supercomputer!

Some reasonable conclusions:

• No PowerPCs in the iPhone. Those processors sip milliwatts - not watts - of power. The PA Semi skunkworks may have something in that range, but their focus has been high-performance computing - not mobile apps.
• No PowerPC MacBooks either. Too many of the pro apps have been tuned for Intel’s SSE instruction set to appeal to pro users. Intel is competitive at the notebook level - although the threat will keep them honest.
• Apple TV on ‘roids. All that I/O and compute would do wonders for an appliance media server. You don’t want noisy fans and you DO want the ability to process 3D video, which means lots of bandwidth.

Sure, the Apple TV hasn’t been very successful - yet. But as broadband reaches more homes and the studios work through their trust issues, a powerful and easy to use home media center will be a no-brainer.

One other possibility: a notebook appliance with the form factor of a MacBook Air or smaller - but without the option to run Intel optimized pro apps. But that’s a stretch.

The Storage Bits take
While the CPU specs are impressive, Apple has bought a superb design team whose low-power and I/O mojo are even more impressive. This is a media play, not a processor play.

But it is also a warning to competitors whose software is too tightly tied to hardware. Apple’s hardware independence means they can change the game any time they want.

Like they just did.

Comments welcome, of course.

Update: to all who pointed to the public statements of Apple and PA Semi I just have one question: when did the obsessively secret Steve Jobs start tipping his hand in public? I missed that.

I’m sure the statements are true-enough-for-now - but Apple didn’t pay $2 million per engineer just for mobile chip engineering - though I’m sure they’re happy to have everyone believe they did. End update.

April 18th, 2008

Holographic storage ships next month!

Posted by Robin Harris @ 2:47 pm

Categories: Disk drives, Infrastructure

Tags: Media, Hologram, Laser, Data Density, Advertising & Promotion, Storage, Marketing, Hardware, Robin Harris

Even since astronaut Dave Bowman disconnected the HAL 9000’s holographic memory in 2001: A Space Odyssey techies have been wondering when we could buy real holographic storage. Now we know: May, 2008.

Promising super-high density and excellent media flaw resistance, holographic storage has been an ever-receeding technology for years. You can buy nifty 3D skull and crossbones holograms - technically a form of storage - but no one had figured out how to turn a lab project into a product. Until now.

Update: I added a video of the device and media and VP Liz Murphy talks about the company and the product. About 110 seconds. The clear yellow plastic cover on the device is for display purposes only. End update.

How does it work?
Holograms use 2 coherent laser beams - a reference beam and an illumination beam - to create an interference pattern that is recorded on photo sensitive media. Shine a laser on the recorded interference pattern and the original image is reconstructed in glorious 3D. As the laser moves around - or you do - you see the image from different perspectives.

Holographic storage has a couple of neat properties.

1. A small fragment of a hologram can reconstruct the entire data image. The fragment won’t let you move as far around the image, but for 2D images, like a photograph, it means a scratch isn’t fatal.
2. Data density is theoretically unlimited. By varying the angle between the reference and illumination beams - or the angle of the media - hundreds of holograms can be stored in the same physical area.

Another factor: photographic media has the longest proven lifespan - over a century - of any modern media. Since there’s no physical contact you can read the media millions of times with no degradation.

Really hard problems
The first laser holograms were made over 45 years ago. But a storage device needs to be fast, dense and manufacturable. InPhase had to literally invent almost every piece of the system.

• The optical media.
• The manufacturing process for fabricating thick, optically-flat and high-dynamic range media.
• The mathematics and circuitry needed to use digital camera CMOS chips for high-speed and high-accuracy image reconstruction.
• A new method - polytopic multiplexing - for a 10x density increase.
• Holographic mastering techniques for commercial reproduction.

[image courtesy of InPhase Technologies]

Target market
Which gets us to InPhase’s target market: archiving. That’s why they were showing at NAB.

They’ve spec’d the optical media they use - a 5.25″ clear disk in a cartridge - at 50 years. For film and video companies whose data is literally irreplaceable a stable, compact and random access medium is a no-brainer.

Retail pricing
It is that value that justifies a price - $18,000 - that will keep most of us from buying ourselves an early Xmas gift. The quantity 1 media price of $180 for 300 GB looks expensive to us, but quite reasonable compared with the cost of 35mm film stock and long-term storage.

15 years ago a 3x CD reader cost a few hundred dollars. Perhaps in 15 years holographic burners will be $50 and the media less than a $1.

The Storage Bits take
Kudos to InPhase for a magnificent achievement. This is comparable in many respects to the IBM’s original RAMAC disk back in 1957. They all deserve to get rich.

Learn more about the technology at the InPhase Technologies web site.

Comments welcome, of course.

April 14th, 2008

2.5″ disks to become new standard in 2009

Posted by Robin Harris @ 12:12 pm

Categories: RAID, Disk drives, Infrastructure

Tags: Disk, Delta, $/GB, $/GB Delta, Atrato, Storage, Hardware, Robin Harris

When I first started selling storage, 14″ disk drives were all the rage. Then came 9″, 8″, 5.25″ and then 3.5″ drives - where we’ve been stuck for the last 15 years - even though they have gotten thinner.

All this shrinkage is courtesy of drive vendor’s incredible engineering work. You don’t know it - and engineering-dominated vendors hardly think to talk about it - but disk platter feature sizes are smaller than Intel’s latest 45 nm fabs can produce.

And Intel’s chips aren’t rotating 250 times per second, either.

A Lotus Elan vs a Bentley Type-R
Disks are mechanical devices. Making them smaller as magnetic densities increase has many benefits:

• Smaller components have less mass, so motors and actuators can be smaller. Greater shock resistance, less damping and head settling time too.
• Greater disk I/O density per cubic inch - get more work done in less space.
• Power, cooling and packaging are all smaller too. Even though data centers don’t much care about green computing, it is a nice added benefit.

Translation: the Lotus corners better than the Bentley and uses a lot fewer resources in the process.

The industry is quietly preparing
3.5″ drives will be with us for years to come, but the signs of the coming change are unmistakable:

• 3 years ago the capacity difference between volume 2.5″ and 3.5″ drives was 4-5x. 160 GB vs 30-40GB. The delta has come down to 2-3x: 1 TB vs 320 GB - and soon 500 GB.
• High-performance 2.5″ drives, both 10k and 15k, with high-end FC and SAS interfaces are now available.
• The $/GB delta is also dropping. They don’t have to be equal because the lower power, cooling, size and greater durabililty translate into real economic benefits for all but the most price-sensitive users.

The first 2.5″ arrays are appearing
Atrato, Xiotech and RAID Inc. have all announced 2.5″-based storage arrays that offer some compelling advantages over 3.5″ arrays.

• Atrato puts 160 spindles into a 3 rack unit box
• RAID Inc puts 12 15k drives into 1 rack unit pizza box
• Xiotech doubles the number of spindles - with the same power and cooling - over their 3.5″ version of their new ISE

The Storage Bits take
Smaller disks and smaller arrays are Very Good Things. We get more I/Os for a given power, cooling and volume investment. The drives get more reliable. The $/GB goes up, but volume production soon pushes it back down.

So I’m calling it: by the end of 2009 most new storage arrays will be announcing with 2.5″ drives. High-end workstations, like the next-gen Mac Pro, will be both smaller while containing more drive bays.

Low-end consumer desktops will be the last to transition, but even they will by the end of 2011. The last 3.5″ disk will roll off the assembly line in 2014.

Remember, you heard it here first.

Comments welcome, of course.

April 9th, 2008

Why OS X costs twice as much as Windows

Posted by Robin Harris @ 4:05 am

Categories: Software, Marketing

Tags: Apple Macintosh, Microsoft Windows Vista, OS X Upgrade, Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Desktops, Operating Systems, Software, Apple Mac OS

Because people are happy to pay it.
Microsoft’s continuing Vista woes, including price cuts and a retreat to Windows XP on the low-end, obscures an important fact: Mac users pay more than double for Mac OS X than Windows.

Are Mac users mindless robots, buying whatever Cupertino ships, or is Vista really 50% inferior?

Update: What this shows is that people are willing to pay good money - 2X more than Microsoft is currently charging - to get stable, feature rich, user-friendly software. Why can’t Microsoft do that? End update.

Let’s run the numbers.
Since Windows XP’s release in October, 2001 Mac users have had four releases of OS X:

• Jaguar 10.2 released August 2002
• Panther, 10.3 released Oct 2003
• Tiger 10.4 released April 2005
• Leopard 10.5 released Oct 2007

At $129 a pop your loyal Mac user paid $516 for new OS releases. There is no “upgrade” pricing for OS X.

Over the same period the steadfast Windows user would have spent a paltry $219 - had they waited for the Vista price cut - for an upgrade to Windows Vista Ultimate - less than half what Mac users spent.

You can get Vista and an Xbox for less than Mac users paid for OS X alone!

Mac OS 2X
This isn’t an academic question. OS X upgrades are popular with the Mac faithful. Many gladly fork over the money.

Less than 2 years after Tigers release, Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, announced that 67% of the 22 million Mac OS X users were using Tiger. Compare that to Vista’s 15% penetration 14 months after announcement. Ouch!

What accounts for the difference?
Why are Mac users happy to pay double while Windows users are demanding downgrades to XP?

The chief reasons:

• New releases are stable. There is little penalty for buying the latest and greatest.
• Obvious value of new features. In Leopard, for example, Time Machine replaces backup software that might cost $30 - and that most people weren’t buying anyway. Many other features, such as data detectors, Quick Look and PDF editing, make using the system more productive.
• Cool new apps appear with every new release. Software vendors use added OS features to build low-cost cool new apps like Pixelmator, a low-cost Photoshop for the rest of us.
• It’s easy. Buy the box, pop in the DVD, a few keystrokes and your upgrade is underway. No activation hassles. Existing apps still work, as do drivers. What’s not to like?

It’s like getting a new computer for $129.

The Storage Bits take
Microsoft is leaving a lot of money on the table. Apple proves that by delivering value - instead of problems - computer users will happily fork over twice as much as Microsoft can get for Windows today.

Microsoft’s focus on OEM sales is part of the reason they’ve lost sight of what users really want. When Vista slipped past Christmas 2006 all the focus was on how this would hurt Dell and HP - not users.

In fact, users would have been helped if Vista had slipped another 6 months. Instead the PC industry conducted, in effect, a giant paid beta test on millions of trusting buyers.

Microsoft shareholders need to understand that the current management team’s decisions are killing shareholder value. Nothing will change until the management does.

Comments welcome, of course. If you didn’t get Vista on a new system, would you pay to upgrade your current Windows machine?

April 4th, 2008

Vista fiasco continues with retreat to XP

Posted by Robin Harris @ 6:25 am

Categories: Software, Marketing

Tags: Microsoft Windows XP, Microsoft Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp., Vista Fiasco, Linux, Microsoft Windows Vista (Longhorn), Microsoft Windows, Operating Systems, Software, Robin Harris

Fall back! Fall back!
Microsoft’s announcement yesterday of the “Extended Availability of Windows XP Home for ULCPCs” is more evidence that the Windows Vista fiasco is still growing.

Microsoft is scrambling to stay relevant in a world where they are no longer the only game in town. Can’t let Linux become the default OS for low-cost systems, can we?

Why doesn’t software get cheaper?
My 1978 Apple II cost over $3,000 in today’s dollars - with no disk or display - and a primitive command line OS. Today a vastly more powerful machine like the Eee is less than $400 - with a display and an incredibly capacious 4 GB flash drive. Other machines coming soon will be much cheaper. $200 is the magic number for broad consumer acceptance.

Microsoft has lived in a monopoly pricing bubble, selling Windows to OEMs for $50 a copy, while hardware - driven by Moore’s Law - has plummeted in price. That couldn’t last forever. It’s crunch time for Redmond.

Redmond’s nightmare now in the light of day
Microsoft’s announcement created a new market segment - the Ultra Low Cost PC - that it hopes will protect its Vista margins from the low-end Linux attack. Like that could work.

Today’s mid-range Vista PC is tomorrow’s ULCPC. The reasons vendors and customers balk at Microsoft’s $50 Vista tax today won’t change. Consumers will pay $50 on a $600 machine. But $50 on a $200 machine? No way.

People are realizing that for much of what they do - web surfing, email, online video - can be handled by much smaller and cheaper systems. As Linux continue to refine the GUI and simplify its distros, the Windows advantage continues to fade.

The Storage Bits take
First time users who learn Linux will have no reason to ever pay for Windows. Just as I deciphered the Apple II’s CLI 30 years ago, today’s eager, but poor, first timers will figure Linux out.

Microsoft’s Vista is a slow-motion disaster. Bloated and inflexible, expensive and late, Vista is a continuing drag on Microsoft’s business flexibility.

But this isn’t all Jim Allchin’s fault. If Steve Ballmer were as smart as he thinks he is he’d have seen the ULCPC segment emerging and positioned to company to dominate it. Instead they’re playing catchup with a 7 year old product.

Steve, resign. If you can’t do that, at least stop obsessing over Google. Focus Microsoft on building great software. That is a game you can win.

Comments welcome, of course. BTW, there’s an opening at Microsoft for an ULCPC Business Development Manager. Just make sure you aren’t measured on margins. That could be brutal.

April 2nd, 2008

Who uses MS Live Search - on purpose?

Posted by Robin Harris @ 1:46 pm

Categories: Infrastructure, Software

Tags: Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Web Browsers, Storage, Operating Systems, Software, Internet, Hardware, Robin Harris

No one.
Net Applications monthly newsletter posed an interesting question: who uses MS Live Search?

Nobody I know.

One of their engineers theorized

. . . it’s mostly people that are searching for files on their own hard drive who accidentally click the ’search the net’ button.

Hm-m, how could you tell?
If that theory is correct almost all Live Search sessions would come from Windows systems running IE.

Sure enough, they found that an overwhelming 99.82% of all Live Search sessions are Windows machines running IE.

A 90% market share is good for something
It kept the Live Search market at a pathetic 2.4% last month - instead of a humiliating 0%.

IE’s market share is 75%
If Firefox - 18% market share - users were just as likely to use Live Search as any other search engine, you’d expect to see 18% of Live Searches on that browser. Or 1/10th the chance is a 1.8% share.

But the distant #2 OS on Windows Live Search? Mac OS with a 0.17% share. All hail Microsoft’s loyal Mac business unit!

The Storage Bits take
Search is THE problem as storage capacities grow. Microsoft’s weak showing means they aren’t going to beat Google at the current game. MS needs to put it’s substantial muscle finding the Next Big Thing in search.

It also suggests that taking over Yahoo won’t help either - they haven’t had any better luck against Google. Put 2 losers together and you just have a bigger loser.

Comments welcome, of course.