Posts tagged with predictions

Mac OS X 10.7—the OS that no one is talking about—should be the next major release of the venerable Mac OS X (since 1989!) So, what will it look like? Seems like nobody knows. All of the focus has been iPhone and iPad for so long that it seems like everyone has forgotten about the old desktop/laptop computers.

Frankly, although Mac OS X is easier to use than Windows or Linux, it's still not what I would call "easy to use". I see not only my parents but even programmers bumble around with trying the locate the right window, the invisible application with no windows open, and lots of UI fragmentation (for example, should you have a "start screen", or open a blank document, or open the last document, or what).

As far as things went in the past, Apple was stuck with that system. For example, if they had moved the menu bar from the top of the screen to the top of the window (like every other operating system ever) there would have been howls of protest from the Mac clan back when they introduced OS X. Believe it or not, OS X was actually a step backwards from OpenStep in many ways. Steve Jobs and the NextStep clan were forced to adopt many old Mac conventions even when they didn't work particularly well.

Remember that the Mac interface was designed for a strictly one-app-at-a time system. That's right, the first Macs did not have multi-tasking, not even fake "co-operative" multi-tasking. So the whole idea of having menu and windows separated wasn't so confusing at first. But then System 6 came along with the MultiFinder and things started to go a little wacky (and note, that was after Jobs left the company).

The iPhone was a blank slate, and so Jobs and the UX gurus at Apple could go back to square one and design an OS that was well and truly proper. Don't doubt that they spent many years on it prior to the public even hearing about the iPhone touch UI, probably since circa 2003, maybe sooner. There were always tablet dreams circulating in the company. I had conversations about it there in 2001.

The blank slate meant they could get rid of all the broken things in Mac OS X. And indeed in all window-based operating systems. Like, floating windows. The original "windows" designs at Xerox PARC didn't float, they were just arranged in a grid. Much simpler to understand. And that indeed is the paradigm used on the iPad, where they are called panels instead.

So... what comes next? I predict that the next step for Mac OS is going to be a major revamp of the UX for desktops and laptops to bring back the best ideas from the Touch UI. I would personally be glad to see the last of the Apple Menu, the File menu, all of the submenus. Most of the Finder I could scrap as well (keep the column view of course :-). No application should ever NOT have a window visible—that's just crazy. It would be nice if they could sort things out so that I don't have to care which applications are running vs. not running. Maybe they could even—somehow—eliminate floating windows. Maybe that's too much to ask.

Since they've been able to break with the past in the iPhone/iPad, I hope that they'll be able to find a way to bring the best parts of the new and integrate them with the old Mac OS X ... the user interface that hasn't changed in any major way in 20 years.

(PS: and I wouldn't count on it being called 10.7 either...)

Nokia looks to be in serious trouble. They've delayed Symbian^3, which was supposed to be the sort or basic catch-up version of their main smartphone OS. Symbian^4 is supposed to be the move ahead again version and who knows when they'll release it. Meanwhile, Maemo or whatever they're calling it these days is more like vaporware even though theoretically it's out on a couple of devices.

Hey, you know what? Maybe Nokia just can't write good software.

Think about it ... when was the last great release of software from Nokia. The first version of Symbian S60. Which, if you remember your history, was actually written by PSION. Symbian has not improved in any major way since then. The first Symbian smart phones were epic—the Nokia 7650 was way ahead of its time in 2002 and make Nokia the smartphone kings. But after that they didn't seem to be able to put out a really substantial upgrade.

Big companies have a long history of not being able to complete operating system upgrades. Back in the late 80s early 90s Apple managed to fail to create a new OS not once but twice—Pink and Copland—were both epic failures of massive proportion. Making software is hard.

The question is, can Nokia learn how to do it. One option - which I have advocated in the past - is to simply ditch Symbian and get on to the Maemo train full stop. But it's not clear if Nokia has the guts to do something so drastic.

Well, they'd better grow some, because they haven't put out a competitive smartphone since the N95 three years ago. Their current offerings are jokes. Android, Blackberry and iPhone are way ahead of them. And, the investors are starting to figure it out. Hopefully Nokia's shareholders will beat them up until they take the drastic measure before it's too late.

This is their idea of a good new logo.

After the previous new logo got crapped on because it totally sucked.

The new new one? Looks like a beer glass being poured out.

While that may be appropriate reflection of the student body, it's not my idea of a good image for the school. Please UW, fire your graphic designers and hire new ones who can draw. Maybe go to Toronto to find some good ones? Or New York?

Prediction: this is going to go on for a long time...

So Dubai isn't a wonderland and actually is a vast petrol- and credit-funded nightmare that is on a knife's edge of sinking into the sands, forever gone? I'm shocked! Who could have thought it.

If a recession turns into depression, Dr Raouf believes Dubai could run out of water. "At the moment, we have financial reserves that cover bringing so much water to the middle of the desert. But if we had lower revenues – if, say, the world shifts to a source of energy other than oil..." he shakes his head. "We will have a very big problem. Water is the main source of life. It would be a catastrophe. Dubai only has enough water to last us a week. There's almost no storage. We don't know what will happen if our supplies falter. It would be hard to survive."

— The dark side of Dubai (in The Independent) via The Cartoonist (see also Laid-Off Foreigners Flee as Dubai Spirals Down)

Here's a thought. Don't build a big city in the middle of a desert. And here's a prediction: Dubai will be gone in 50 years.

I absolutely hate the latest Facebook redesign. And, for the record, I loved the last one, so I'm not some kind of knee-jerk negativist. The new facebook removes the single most important feature, the live news feed. Facebook's major contribution to the online world was the live news feed. Everything—updates, pictures, interests, links, notes, etc. etc. etc. all in one time-sorted feed. It was brilliant, and obviously I think so since I make some kind of minimal replication of it on my own front page.

And now they have removed it. The new... thing ... whatever it is .. that I get is more like twitter. I don't need another twitter. I already have twitter. What I want is my live facebook feed. Now, if I want to see what photos people have been tagged in, what apps they have been using, etc., I don't know what to do. The right hand side seems to have some stuff there ... but I can't filter it.

Now what kind of idiot would destroy their company's chief asset in an eyeblink? When you've got something that good, you don't change it, you nurture it. Look at google's home page. They are so careful in making changes. They do statistical A/B tests on every single change they ever make, and only keep the ones that make people's results better. When they make a change that sucks, it's also minor and gets rolled back quickly. So my point is this: for FB to ruin their own user experience is really out of the ordinary and insane.

Who would do such a thing? Only a tyrant who's lost touch. Which means Mark Zuckerberg has become a tyrant and lost touch. For evidence that he's become a tyrant, we can look at the following evidence:

Gawker: A tipster tells us that Zuckerberg sent an email to Facebook staff reacting to criticism of the changes: "He said something like 'the most disruptive companies don't listen to their customers.'" Another tipster who has seen the email says Zuckerberg implied that companies were "stupid" for "listening to their customers."

TechCrunch: Facebook says this is about getting a CFO with public company experience ("We have retained Spencer Stuart to lead our search for a new CFO and will be looking for someone with public company experience."). Which is complete nonsense (and poorly thought out nonsense at that), because [Gideon] Yu, after a short stint at YouTube and an even shorter stint at Sequoia Capital, was the treasurer and SVP Finance at Yahoo. Which is very much a public company.

For evidence that he's lost touch, well, there's plenty. As of now over 1 million users have gone to the trouble to install an app specifically to complain about the new layout. I know that facebook has ~ 175 million users, but that's still a HUGE user backlash.

Now apparently they are going to roll back some of the changes... we'll see how that goes. Presumably at a company of that size the investors are going to force Zuckerberg to back down. See this Joy of Tech comic for an idea. But people are also going to compare Zuckerberg to Steve Jobs of the 80s, when he was forced out of Apple for being an asshole.

Let's be completely clear on this. Steve Jobs WAS an asshole in the eighties! My impression is that the film Pirates of Silicon Valley is quite accurate. And from working at Apple during Steve's second coming, I can say that he still could be a real asshole, the kind that gets things done and doesn't have patience for idiots. The difference is, that Jobs never did anything really stupid to his user base.

So, what's going to happen now? I suspect that Z won't back down very easily, and that we're going to see more conflict, clashes and problems in the future. It's unfortunate, and I hope that wiser heads prevail and FB recovers the truly awesome user experience that it used to have.

Update: Gawker thinks Zuckerberg should go. Strong stuff.

And Business Insider: Mark Zuckerberg has begun "believing his own hype," a source says. He believes he is the genius the magazine covers say he is. Mark has always been an executive who made life difficult for those he disagreed with. "Mark is a very demanding person to work for, if you screw up, one day you are in, the next day out, persona non grata," says one former employee. Now that he thinks he's Steve Jobs, he's unbearable.