Philip Littlewood, potential switcher writes a blog post about his second thoughts about switching to the Mac.

His reasons are below but ca be summed up as Apple having lost it’s soul. I must say I agree (which, if you know me, is a bit deal).

His criticisms:

Overcharge for the iPhone

Is it an overcharging? The Nokia N800 doesn’t have a phone component and yet cost the same (UK pricing). The smartphones out there are not cheap either. What are we comparing it with? I don’t think it’s too expensive for what it is.

Reduce the iPhone bye $200 after only 2 months

It seems sudden but don’t think the rebate for early adopters was not previously thought of. Apple seldom is caught by surprise. They’ll have had measures in place. Technology will always get cheaper. It seems sudden but you’re talking about some of the fastest moving technology areas.

Charges an extra 99 cents for a ringtone

I hear you but we get charged £3.50 for a ringtone whether or not we have previously purchased the song over here in the UK. That said - I think it’s criminal that we can’t just use GarageBand to whip our own ringtones. But this is like other things - Apple is working with the two most consumer-hostile markets - telecoms and the music business. You can be sure that Jobs both checks for his wallet and for the blood in his veins after negotiating with these people.

Putting a chip in the new iPods that renders nearly all 3rd party video accessories useless.

There’s a lot of fluff here. It’s not quite as cut and dried here. Any why worry about it? I’m not particularly upset about the accessories I’ve bought over the years for my various mobile phones. Sure, I’d love to be able to re-use some of them but it’s not the end of the world by any means. Note - not ALL video products are disabled (as you say “nearly all”) so it can’t just be due to “a chip” and may be more to do with cost-cutting on the part of the manufacturer of the video cable (maybe they’re not using the right pin-outs).

Releasing an update for the iPhone to deliberately break 3rd party apps.

I disagree strongly here. Especially the reason you give. It’s a limited, first generation device with a whole new API. You want to hack it, fine, you change essential system files and voila you have access to the system and can do neat things. Apple releases a software update and expressly says they will not be testing to see if their update breaks applications but will not be deliberately trying to break third party apps. Some apps break. Sometimes they just need rehacked.

I don’t believe Apple is doing this deliberately. They’re just not willing or able to put the time and effort into certifying their software updates with every hack out there.

His main criticism seems to be:

attitude of the sales staff in the Apple Stores, now I don’t know if this just applies to the Netherlands and Belgium, the staff just do not seem interested in whether you buy something or not.

Philip - these people are NOT employees of Apple. They’re employees of small businesses which sell or repair Apple products. You should really take your criticism to the owner of the business and make it known. I own a Apple-Authorised Service Provider and I’m always interested to hear when my employees are not acting in the best interests of our customers. I’m happy to say that the guys will often put themselves out and even lose a sale if it serves the customer best. But then we come from a lineage of people who love the Mac and love to see people making the best of it.

Now he admits he has only tried Mac OS in a hacked X86 version on a third party laptop but seems underwhelmed at how it looks so basic and sees unsure about the everpresent menu bar at the top. And resizing only from one corner - yes, Philip, Apple could make it so you could resize from any edge or corner. It’s not for techical reasons that the Mac OS has always resized from the same corner.

Philip - either you get it or you don’t. Not everyone is going to love the Mac just like not everyone is going to be happy with Windows.

This article documents the startup and stopping and restart of a web-app-based startup.

There’s some good lessons in there for anyone who would consider releasing a web app in the near future.

Physorg.com reports:

Ambitious plans for big Wi-Fi networks to provide free or low-cost wireless Internet access are being abandoned or scaled back by US cities as the economics of the deals turn out to be more challenging than expected.

In Belfast, there were two efforts I was aware of, going back a few years now.

One was spearheaded by BT. They had the money and the locations for the access points (inside the BT telephone boxes. I mean - does anyone use them for making telephone calls these days???). They wined and dined the City Council and went head with their proposal which is why Belfast is blanketed with BTOpenzone at £6 an hour (yes, you can subscribe and get it cheaper…)

The second was from a much smaller outfit. They proposed a mesh network, almost grassroots in it’s uncommon simplicity and solicited information from the City Council as to obtaining their assistance. As a startup providing their own equipment, there wasn’t enough money in the pot to wine and dine and so their pleas went unheeded.

So, we’re left currently with BT. Brilliant.

“Too many municipalities continue to focus on large, ambitious public wireless projects that have no clear path to profitability.”

I don’t think that government bodies should get into this sector at all. They certainly have no understanding of the complexities of technology and even less understanding of commerce.

I know the second group is still working behind the scenes, having secured some funding from a local company to help them buy more equipment. When I asked them about their business model this time they said:

This isn’t about money. It’s about creating a wireless network in our local city that will better enable people to use online services like those provided by Google, Facebook and other companies. It’s our opinion that the current offering is not only a monopoly but one that is dedicated to squeezing every last penny out of the mobile consumer.

From part of O’Reilly’s series Women In Technology:

Startups are—and to succeed, must be—meritocratic. Limited funding, time, and even office space restrictions don’t allow for hiring anyone who doesn’t add real value. Larger companies and firms have internal diversity goals whereas startups don’t have such goals in their early stages.

This is absolutely true.

When I started Mac-Sys Ltd back in June 2003, I made some mistakes - worse, I allowed friendship to define my hiring criteria - I was saving jobs and using my own savings as collateral.

Be honest with yourself and your business.

And, most importantly, if you are not adding value, it may be time for you to try something else.

86-year-old James Sorenson, the largest shareholder in Abbott Laboratories (worth about $4.5 billion) and a junk-food enthusiast, perhaps best captured the fundamental spirit of entrepreneurship. Asked for the hardest lesson he had to learn, he replied: “To spend my energy and resources investing in my own ideas, rather than those of other people. I need to drive my own vision.”

This is exactly how I feel right now.

I’ve posted the announcement from Apple on the release of the iPhone on the Mac-Sys blog. It’s a mix of good news and bad.

Especially bad for those of us in Northern Ireland:

• 30% of O2’s network will be EDGE by launch. Northern Ireland won’t be until the last. (Based entirely on opinion and past experience)
• They offer free WiFi roaming via The Cloud (a UK WiFi provider which doesn’t have any hotspots in Northern Ireland)
• There will be experts on the iPhone in every Carphone Warehouse store as well as the O2 stores. (that’s bound to be a disaster).

Fraser Speirs, developer of FlickrExport writes short piece on “your value” in a company.

One of the most interesting things I find, when going between my various circles in Britain and America, is the differing values placed on the time and productivity of people. Google is, of course, famous for their provision of services at work to their staff.
Investing in the happiness, comfort and productivity of people seems to be a rare attitude in Britain. I’m sure it’s not universal in the US either, but it does appear to be a little more common.

The issue was whether it was better to spend £2000 on a business class flight or £500 on an economy flight with the idea that the former would have you arriving better rested and ready to perform. Daniel Jalkut responds in the comments with:

A good compromise - instead of spending $4000 more on a plane ticket, would have been to pad your trip with two extra travel days. For an extra $1000 you could stay in a very nice hotel for two nights, and eat at fine restaurants. Even get a massage, if it would help.

When I was working for BIGCORP#1, I had the opportunity to fly business class all the time and stay in swanky hotels. I had, however, the choice to fly economy and stay in B&Bs for a fraction of the price with the thought that it would make the travel budget stretch further and, of course, help towards the bottom line of the company. I also refused every attempt to send me to Canada for a week or two simply to “see how they do things over there” because to my mind I had a fast network connection and could speak to these people in several different ways as well as read all of their PPT and Visio documents. Would a “press the flesh”-style meeting helped? Certainly in terms of consolidating cross-Atlantic relationships but it wouldn’t have helped my job any. Hindsight tells me I wasted my time and should have availed of every opportunity. My manager at the time only suggested these trips because he’d have an excuse to go with me…

When working under my own brief, for my own companies, I fly economy and stay in cheap hotels. My reasoning is simple - money is not infinite, unless you work for Google. Will I feel significantly refreshed if I travelled business class? I don’t think so. Will it seriously impact my performance? I don’t think so.

Now, when BIGCORP#2 asks me to travel, I put it off. I don’t feel I need to travel in order to do what I need to do. If something can be done remotely then I’d rather do that. Part of it is due to not wanting to travel overnights or on weekends because of my family commitments and part of it is simply not wanting to waste time or money. I spent the best part of a week doing a meet and greet in Frankfurt a few years back and with the exception of the hardware install I did at the same time, it was a waste of time and money. But, I got to see Frankfurt in the evenings (it’s a Ghost Town…) and sleep in a nice hotel. But the entire week of work was spent trying to hotdesk somewhere where there were no hotdesk facilities, having to find food in a building where I didn’t know the exits well, negotiate the building with my admittedly poor German and, to top it all, amuse myself while my “hosts” busied themselves with their daily work.

Think of this from the point of view of a Bedouin worker. What things do you want if you were truly migratory? Would you need the big double bed of the swish hotel? What about the processed meal of the Business Class airline seat? Do you need the peanuts and free drinks of the business class lounge?

My advice: Travel cheap, travel lots. Bring some computer games

Let me start by saying that I’ve never really been a fan of the GPL based entirely on the zealotry of its proponents. I attended a conference and in a short period was both impressed and filled with admiration for Bruce Perens and, almost at the same time, bored and somewhat disappointed with the rhetoric of Richard Stallman.

Free software has it’s place but I’m watching this debate with interest especially as there doesn’t seem to be ANY effort from the “Linux community” to fix the problem.

Simple Explanation:

There’s some code licensed under the BSD license. It’s possible to use this code as-is because the BSD license is truly Free.

Steps taken by some Linux developers:

1. pester developer for a year to get it under another license.
- get told no, repeatedly

2. climb over ethical fence

3. remove his license
- get caught, look a bit stupid

4. wrap his license with your own
- get caught, look really stupid

5. assert copyright under author’s license, without original work
- get caught, look even more stupid

The FSF would be very quick to scream and shout about a violation of the GPL and indeed were very pre-emptive to grab headlines from the iPhone with spurious claims it may violate the GPL yet when some people violate the BSD license and substitute it with the GPL, they are mysteriously silent.

To wit, Richard Stallman:

“The FSF is not involved in this dispute.”

Stallman’s veracity in trying to make software Free evidently only covers his own interest in the GPL and not in other licenses. In effect the BSD license allows you to do what you want with your code. The GPL allows you to do what the FSF wants with your code.

The facts are: some Linux developers broke the BSD license and are now flubbing, with advice from an ex-FSF lawyer, to cover it up.

Linux groupies are calling this a smear campaign against Linux. In effect they’re saying that code theft is okay as long as it’s someone elses copyright and not GPL copyleft.

I’m not blaming the Linux community for the reprehensible actions of a few zealous developers but unless there’s more of a response in the form of telling these developers their actions are, in fact, wrong, then the integrity of the FSF is in question.

I read this article recently which left me with this mantra:

For common problems use Opensource.
For rare problems use Buy.
For unique problems use Build.

For our email and web hosting systems (for ourselves and for the companies we host applications and sites for), we use purely open source technologies all hosted on FreeBSD, the poster boy for really free software.

For our accounts system, we relied on some tried and tested proprietary software which we bought because we wanted an interface that didn’t suck too badly. We tried some open source solutions and, to be honest, we weren’t familiar enough with the processes of finance to actually start to build our own solutions from scratch. Buying something in made a lot of sense.

For the remainder of our solutions, we’ve had to build. One was modelling a workflow for a local IT company, in effect transforming their paper into electrons. the company had tried all sorts of software and attempted to model their workflow into that of these helpdesk-type solutions which were designed for call centres, for the most part. Their requirements for recording and reporting were such, however, that they needed something custom-tailored to their needs.

I think what it means is to examine what your core business is.

As a technology company it makes sense for us to know about hosting and to have our own servers and the like. For some companies out there, for example, a media company or a small manufacturing company, it doesn’t make a lot of sense for them to host their own email and websites on the end of their DSL lines. A company would have to be a considerable size before I’d recommend they host their own email when they have the choice to do otherwise.

Microsoft’s UK MD, Gordon Frazer, is quoted on the BBC news site as looking ahead to a time when computers do a better job of understanding what we want and when we want it.

He takes Ken Olsen to task for saying “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home”. This was in 1977. In 1977 there was no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home. Computers were only really useful when attached to larger computers in big organisations.

Compare this to:

Bill Gates, BusinessWeek, 26th November 1984

The next generation of interesting software will be done on the Macintosh, not the IBM PC.

and

Douglas Adams

The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led them into it in the first place.

I think it’s frankly ironic that we have Microsoft telling us how the future is going to be when I see them becoming more and more irrelevant every day. This isn’t to say they are irrelevant now but for the last decade they have utterly dominated (and I mean that with every negative connotation) the IT industry. My comment therefore may only show them going from 90% dominance to 75% dominance but the end result is the same.

I still don’t know anyone who raves about Vista on their home machines. I know a few people who use it but they’re all the sort who have for the last decade been bleeding Microsoft blue and flying the Redmond flag. No surprise there then. It’s the normal people. Seems everyone is happy with Windows 2000 and Windows XP.

Sure - Vista is flying out the doors as people buy new PCs but the rate of adoption is truly uninspiring. I usually have a few people who beg me to come round and help them with their PCs. None of them, none of my family and friends, have even bought new PCs with Vista.

And the chance of them buying it off the shelf? Zero percent.