July 7, 2008
Apple, Opinion, Rant, Rogers, iPhone
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Why I won’t be getting an iPhone on July 11th or anytime in the near future?
Well, it’s simple. Blame Rogers.
Being a webmaster, I would love to get an iPhone. The internet access that it provides gives me a lot of convenience with regards to checking the health status of my servers and other internet related stuff.
When the iPhone’s arrival in Canada was finally announced by Apple and Rogers, I was very excited, although, not exactly hopeful.
See, I’ve been dealing with Rogers for a long, long, long time. I knew their philosophy. Rogers philosophy has been very consistent and simple: Let’s see how much we can screw our customers.
With that knowledge, I had predicted (in a comment posting on another blog) that Rogers’ iPhone plans would give something like 200 MB of internet bandwidth for $60. I was a bit off and fairly surprised that they provided double that bandwidth for that $60.
However, when the official plans were revealed I got to read the fine print, my suspicions were confirmed. Rogers had created awesome f*%k-the-customer plans.
See, to get that 400 MB for $60 plan with reasonable features, you actually have to pay:
- $60 for the plan
- $15 for “iPhone value pack”
(who would use their cell phone without call display?)
- $6.95 ‘System access fee’
(a bogus fee that they used to make people believe it was a government thing.)
- $0.50 for mandatory 911 access
(why is this not buried in the price to begin with?)
And everything is taxed at 13% (in Ontario).
($60 + $15 + $6.95 + $0.50) * 1.13 = $93.17
$93.17 For basic iPhone service that includes a measly 400 MB of data access with a paltry 150 anytime-minutes. If this is not a f*%k the customer plan, I don’t know what is.
$40 (+taxes) more per month gets you 2 GB of data and 800 anytime-minutes.
The kicker is that these plans come only with a three years contract. So Rogers gets to screw you harder for much longer.
$93 per month won’t bankrupt me, but I have this thing called principle: I refuse to get screwed willingly by a monopoly.
I survived without an iPhone so far and I will continue to do so.
I have five friends and we were set to get an iPhone each, but with these ridiculous cost plans, our minds have been changed. Well, except maybe one of us who is more of an attention whore than the rest - he would pay that ridiculous price just to say ‘hey look at me, I have an iPhone’. So right here, Apple has lost 5 (maybe 6) potential iPhone sales.
Today, around the web, there are plenty of articles about how Apple is reprimanding/punishing Rogers for those atrocious plans by reducing the iPhone shipments to Canada.
I don’t think it is punishment nor retribution. Apple is a business and they must have realized that Rogers would never sell that many iPhones with those rates, so they redirected those phones to places that are more likely to sell them than Rogers.
So the question at the end of my previous article ‘Apple’s iPhone coming to Canada’ has been answered:
The answer is a big fat “NO”.
The predictions that I made in my other article about the reasonableness of Rogers upcoming plans in my other article ‘Has Apple met its match in Rogers?’ have come true.
Sometime I hate being right.
Yes, Rogers sucks.
May 14, 2008
Apple, Mac, Opinion
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Microsoft has got the Mac community and the Mac press hoodwinked. Again!
Yesterday, while announcing Office:mac 2008 SP1, Microsoft announced that they’re bringing back VBA functionality (Visual Basic Automation/Scripting) to the Mac version of their Office suite in its next major upgrade. Microsoft mentioned that they’re comfortable with an upgrade cycle of 3 - 3.5 years. Mac Office 2008 came out at the start of 2008. So the next version should be expected around the start or in the summer of 2011.
After this announcement, various Mac sites and blogs expressed elation and happiness at this fortunate turn of events. The mighty Microsoft has smiled upon us and made a grand gesture towards the poor, poor users of the Mac. Microsoft loves us!
What a bunch of bullsh*t!
There is nothing particularly good about this. This is nothing more than the next step in Microsoft’s effort to keep the Mac as a second class citizen and to keep people from finding real alternatives.
Let’s review.
The Mac version of Microsoft Office has always been hobbled by the lack of feature parity with the Windows version. This is done on purpose to sideline the Mac as much as possible.
First Microsoft never ported its Access database to the Mac. In the 90s, that missing piece was a great reason for businesses to discount the Mac as a possible business platform.
Next, when collaboration in business became more important, Microsoft yanked its Outlook client and replaced it with an inferior sibling: Entourage. Up till Office 2008, Entourage couldn’t really be used as a full Exchange client. There is no technical reason for that. Microsoft owns and defines the Exchange protocols, if they wanted, they could have implemented the functionality in Entourage, or even simpler, kept the same Outlook client. Why didn’t they?
When Apple started working on an Exchange alternative with its open source iCal server, Microsoft moved to give Mac users a much better Exchange compatibility. With this better compatibility, businesses don’t need to start considering an Exchange alternative (despite its high cost). But to keep the Mac at a disadvantage, Microsoft took away VB scripting completely. Their excuse was that porting this functionality to Intel Macs would have delayed the suite by another year.
When asked about VBA a couple of months ago, Microsoft said that it’s not a big deal since they’re removing it from Office for Windows in the next version too and replacing it completely (with something based on their .Net technology). Now they seem to have changed their tune. Or if they haven’t changed courses, to me it means that the next major functionality in Office Windows would be this new scripting capability, which the Mac version would lack and be stuck with VBA.
So for now, anybody needing VBA compatibility can’t use the current Mac version of Office. If business users insisted on moving to the Mac, but had no choice in using VBA in Office, then they would have to spring for a full license of Windows and Office for Windows and use them in a VM like Parallels or Fusion. It’s a win-win for Microsoft.
The sad part is that Microsoft has been able to blind Mac users and the Mac press easily from this strategy by offering them unique —non-critical— features in Office for Mac. Misdirection at its finest.
And now, Microsoft announced that VBA is slated for a grand comeback in the next major upgrade. Why?
One point to address: Many journalists over the years expressed real concern that Microsoft would kill the Mac version of Office for various reasons. Reasons ranged from wanting to punish Apple to wanting to kill the Mac, to the Mac market being not worth it. I don’t think Microsoft had the intention of killing the Mac version of Office ever, unless the Mac died first on its own.
Why wouldn’t Microsoft kill the Mac version you ask? It’s simple, it’s keeping it around first to make a ton of money, and second to make sure that nobody else creates a viable alternative.
Microsoft has been smarter than Adobe in this regard. Witness the Final Cut issue. In the late 90s, while Apple was trying to transition to Mac OS X, Adobe announced that they’re discontinuing support for the Mac in their video editing program Premier and rebuffed Apple’s requests/pleas to keep supporting the Mac in Premier. That move cost them dearly. It forced Apple to acquire and develop its own video editing package. With Final Cut, Apple managed to pull a large (majority?) chunk of the video editing market from Adobe’s control.
Same thing with Microsoft and Office. If Microsoft pulls the Mac version, it would leave a huge vacuum in its place. Vacuums are not desirable. Wherever there is a vacuum, somebody is bound to fill it. Whether Apple itself or some other 3rd party developer; either way somebody would. The Mac office suite vacuum would be filled within a year and not longer.
A strong office suite in the Mac space is a double threat to Microsoft. Anybody with a profitable package on the Mac can easily port it to Windows and compete with Microsoft. So Microsoft would lose its own Office:mac income and would risk to lose a bit of its Office:windows income to this potential competitor from the Mac world. Microsoft would never let that happen.
That brings us back to yesterdays announcement of VBA’s comeback in the next major upgrade of Office for the Mac. In my view it’s not a good thing in general for Mac users.
It’s simply Microsoft’s way of keeping the competition away. Microsoft has always had a strategical policy of selling the future, either to kill the market for possible competitors, or to move the focus from current product deficiency to an ideal hypothetical future product. Who would invest in developing a Mac program, let alone a whole suite, if they know or even think that Microsoft is working on the same thing?
If you read the online forums since Office 2008 came out, you’d see that there is a great restlessness in the Mac community over this lack of VBA and a subtle move towards OpenOffice.org. This move is starting to gain traction especially that, now, OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta has support for the Mac’s Aqua interface and doesn’t rely on X Windows anymore. OpenOffice.org has a great chance to gain big market share within Mac users in the next few years due to this critical functionality.
So what do you think:
- Is Microsoft’s move to bring VBA back to the Mac version of Office genuine?
- Is it because Microsoft listens to its users or to simply protect their market?
- Do you believe that the Mac version of Office would ever have feature parity with MS Office for Windows?
- Considering the intense onslaught of competitors in the office suite field on Microsoft, can they risk hobbling their own software to erect an artificial barrier for Macs in business?
April 19, 2008
Apple, Opinion
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As you may or may not be aware, with the release of Safari 3.1 for the Mac, Apple started offering Safari for Windows as an optional install through its Windows updater for iTunes/Quicktime.
Initially, Safari was offered in the Updates list, with the selection check box already selected. So if the user simply clicked ‘Install’, Safari would be installed. It looked like this:
When that happened, many of the usual Windows/Microsoft shills got up in arms against this ‘heinous crime’. Most vocal however was Mozilla’s CEO, and of course he got the most attention.
Initially, I agreed that it’s not exactly good to offer new software as an update.
With the release of Safari 3.1.1, Apple modified their update panel to have a separate pane for new software and it was clearly labelled as ‘New Software’.
As far as I’m concerned, this change addressed all the concerns that I had about the previous behaviour. Safari is now labelled as New Software for those who hadn’t previously installed it. So it’s now completely up to the user to decide and opt-out of the install. And even if you install it by mistake, there is no harm done to you as a user. If you don’t actively launch it and mean to use it, it just sits there on your hard drive doing nothing. It wouldn’t affect your system in any way (other than the miniscule space it occupies on the hard drive). It doesn’t launch automatically and it doesn’t set itself as the default browser without your knowledge.
However, it’s still not all well in Mozilla-land (and quite a few other blogs). Few of Mozilla’s people spoke up about this recent change and they’re still not satisfied. They want Apple to set the check box as unchecked by default and make it up to the user to opt-in on the install.
The recent whining makes me almost sure that if Apple were to make this small change and unchecks the box by default, Mozilla people would still whine and would probably want Apple to stop offering Safari altogether.
In the early days, Mozilla with its Firefox browser was perceived as the underdog or the David that is standing up to Microsoft’s Goliath with its default Windows browser IE. Many, many webmasters like me pushed Firefox and managed to convince their visitors to switch to it. Firefox’s browser share rose and now it’s reported to have a world market share of 17%. I pushed Firefox on my site too. At one point, the site sat for three whole days on the top of Firefox’s referrers list. I still have the link to Firefox on the site’s home page. The effect of this support shows in my logs. According to my stats, Firefox users comprise 38% of the site’s users, double the average that Firefox enjoys. So my efforts have been very effective in supporting the Mozilla Foundation.
However, this recent whining and bitching by the Mozilla people is starting to annoy me. They are being selfish, greedy people. You may not know this, but Mozilla makes a ton of money from having people use its free browser. They make that money from search engines (like Google) that pay a referral fee to browser makers that send their users to Google’s search engine.
Obviously, Mozilla’s people are afraid that if Safari gains market share, that would mean that it could take some of that share from Firefox.
Personally, I don’t care about one company or the other. Apple has billions in the bank and Mozilla is making tens of millions of dollars per year (for a supposedly non-profit organization). So neither is poor and neither needs my support.
I’m supporting alternative browsers (alternative to IE) for purely selfish reasons and I believe you should too.
I’m a webmaster/developer. I create websites. I would absolutely love it if each of the four major browser engines (IE, Safari’s Webkit, Firefox’s Gecko and Opera) gets an even 25% market share. This way, no single browser would have a commanding market share, and web developers like me wouldn’t have to cater to a specific browser.
In a world where all the browsers have an equal market share, it wouldn’t make sense to cater to any one of them. Web developers would create websites according to standards and it would be the browser’s job to be compatible with these standards. This equality would benefit the internet community as a whole. It would take away any control that any browser maker would have on any part of the internet.
This benefits the users in an indirect way. As a user, you would have the choice of whichever browser you would prefer to use and all sites would work with it equally well. It would push browser makers to compete for your attention. Competition would mean better browsers and better features. When Microsoft had 90%+ market share, it stopped developing its browser and disbanded its IE group. The browser market stagnated and there was nothing new until Firefox came into the equation.
So think about where you stand.
To help my wishes come closer to becoming true, I’ve changed the way I support Firefox. It’s still linked to on my site, but now it has to share attention with a link to Safari’s download page.
For those of you who haven’t tried Safari for Windows, I suggest you give it a try. It’s fast, very fast. It’s elegant and the most standard compliant browser out there. It renders pages like Safari for the Mac, which in my opinion is the most beautiful web page rendering style there is.
Download Safari
February 22, 2008
Apple, Mac, Opinion
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Now that HD-DVD has officially lost the HD format battle, and Blu-Ray has emerged the victor, many Mac sites are speculating that Apple will soon implement Blu-Ray playback support into its system and start selling Blu-Ray drives in its computers.
I’m not sure Apple will implement Blu-ray playback into OS X any time soon.
One thing most people don’t know is the requirements to get the license to playback HD stuff on computers. The rules require that the playback device makes sure that the chain from the computer’s DVD drive, to the RAM, to buffers, to the graphics card, to the cable, to the display are all encrypted. That is all in order to close the ‘Analogue Hole’.
Did you know that Vista checks for chain encryption integrity for every frame when it’s playing HD contents? That’s 30 times every second (talk about paranoia). Try to buy a Vista system that can play HD stuff and see what onerous requirements you’ll find. You’ll have to buy specific graphics cards, specific monitors etc…
For Apple to implement Blu-Ray playback it has to do a lot of work to be compliant; and the requirements would put quite a burden on the system. I believe that’s the reason that currently, with iTunes rental service one can get HD rentals on the AppleTV only and not on one’s Mac. The AppleTV is a closed unit with an HDMI connection, meeting the stringent requirements for HD playback. Many people don’t expect this, but if you connect the AppleTV to your HD TV using the component video connectors instead of HDMI, the AppleTV won’t display rented HD contents in HD, you’ll get an SD version of the rented movie.
I’m not sure I want Apple to implement that kind of crap into the system that I use every day, in order to do something that I couldn’t care less about.
I mean really, does it make any difference if the stuff is true HD on a computer screen considering that the largest one currently is is 30″?
I would guess that Apple would implement Blu-Ray as a storage device on the Mac in order to take advantage of the huge capacity that it provides, and would leave HD playback to downloads and the AppleTV.
February 4, 2008
Apple, Opinion, Rant, Rogers, iPhone
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It’s now February 4th, 2008 and the iPhone has been out in the US for more than seven months already.
Here in Canada, there is no mention of it yet. Not even rumours that it could be coming any time soon. I believe it will be a very long time before Canadians could buy an iPhone legitimately and use it in Canada.
This is due to the nature of the Rogers company in Canada.
For those outside of Canada, Rogers is one of the telecom giants in this country. It is a cable and cellular provider and it is the only cellular provider in Canada using the GSM system. So that makes it the only company that can have the iPhone on its network.
And for those fortunate enough to never have had to deal with Rogers, Rogers is one of the worst companies here in this country. When they were my cable providers, they had the worst service, worst customer service and they jacked up their prices regularly. It’s hard to believe, but when I was with them, they jacked up the price of the good channels package by $1 every four months. The package was basically any channel other than the local ones and it started at $8.95. Four years later the price for the package had reached $21.
I had vowed to never deal with them and I changed from their cable service to Bell’s satellite service, which while isn’t the greatest, is still better than Rogers. However, Rogers went and bought my cellular provider Fido, the only other cellular provider here with GSM. So now, I’m back with Rogers involuntarily. Bell’s cellular service sucks, so it’s not even a choice.
So now with Rogers the only cellular provider able to carry the iPhone, the chances of the iPhone coming to Canada, on any reasonable terms, are almost slim to none. Rogers doesn’t have any incentive to give Apple any good deal and doesn’t have any incentive to give its own customers a reasonable deal on its data plans.
Why would it want to? Nobody else can have the iPhone currently and Apple can’t offer the iPhone advantage to anybody else in the country at this time. So Rogers can take their sweet time to get the deal that serves them best.
However, if Rogers stay stubborn, they may lose big time.
I heard whispers that Telus (the third cellular provider in the country) is in the early stages of switching from CDMA to GSM; mostly to get the iPhone.
Let’s hope that this rumour is true and that it happens fast enough to get the second generation iPhone. It would be sweet. It would allow me to get an iPhone (without having to buy one and crack it) and move away from Rogers at the same time.
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