What keeps Steve Ballmer awake at night? No, not Mrs Ballmer’s snoring. And probably not the IBM Lotus portfolio. Linux maybe? Well, someone from Microsoft did once tell me that Lotus doesn’t keep Bill Gates awake at night (hence my comment) but Linux does. Why Linux? Because it starts to break down Microsoft’s halo effect… Linux servers replacing Windows servers will hinder .NET and SharePoint deployments and Linux desktops will scupper Windows and Office, which are Microsoft’s main cash-cows.

If the noise of Steve gnashing his teeth over Linux drowns out Mrs Ballmer’s snoring, what effect is Apple’s popularity having? Regardless of how good Zune media players may be, the cool-ness of wire-lessly sharing media with other Zune owners is dampened by the fact that there may be no other Zune owners within a fifty mile radius. Throw a Zune randomly over your shoulder in an urban area and chances are you’ll hit two iPod owners (one directly, and the second when the Zune bounces off the first person’s head).

What about the Mac versus the Windows-based personal computer? From here on I’ll adopt Microsoft’s moniker for the ‘PC’. According to a comment on Cult of Mac, PCs outsell Macs by ten-to-one. This doesn’t surprise me at all. Macs are more expensive (we’ll have the “you get for you pay for” argument later) – that may not be so much of an impact for the private consumer who will have to save a bit longer or dip into more of the savings to cough up £1,500 for an iMac or MacBook Pro, versus £800 for a good-quality Windows PC or laptop. But in business that amount of extra money doesn’t wash when you multiply it across two, five, ten or fifty thousand people. Companies will look for a massively-discounted deal on some fit-for-business kit… not top of the range but it’ll do the job. And that’s not the business Apple are in, although they have some traction in some market sectors. Some companies are indulging in the idea of consumerisation – the idea of giving an employee a sum of money to choose their own computing kit – but if their critical business applications run on Windows only it becomes Hobson’s choice for the operating system.

This makes me wonder what Microsoft are playing at with their PC vs Mac mini-site. Are they worried about starting to lose the corporate market? Probably not. However, consider the fact that Microsoft get a lot of mileage from the fact that people use Windows and Office at home (and college) and then take that advocacy into the workplace… could a growing number of Macs used in personal life start to chip away at the Windows dominance in the business environment? Maybe, but I also think that Microsoft are targetting those people who may be seduced by Apple’s cool factor… people like me… I was seduced and it was the best £1,500 I ever spent (not including money spent on an engagement ring to secure the hand of the current Mrs Adams).

Microsoft put forward a number of compelling arguments to halt that seduction…

You can’t get a Mac that ships with a Blu-ray player, TV tuner, Memory Stick reader, or built-in 3G wireless.

Some of that may be true, but you can get a Mac with a built-in SD card reader. Whatever, none of those omissions have bothered me in the slightest.

Macs can’t connect to an Xbox 360.

Why would I want to connect my Mac to my Xbox?

Things just don’t work the same way on Macs if you’re used to a PC. For example, the mouse works differently.

Indeed, that’s why I clicked on the option to make my Mac mouse behave like a PC mouse… so now the mouse works in the way I got used to on a PC. The Mac is a different beast to a PC in many ways, so why would everything work the same? This statement implies that Windows is perfect in every way, and to deviate from that is a step back. And that’s complete garbage, because there’s loads of things that Windows does badly that the Mac does better.

With a Mac, it’s harder to set up secure sharing for your photos, music & movies, documents, and even printers with other computers on your home network.

That’s a statement totally lacking in any evidence. I’ll give you one example… I have an Archos media player, and it was a hell of a lot easier to set up media streaming from the Mac than from Windows. In fact I wouldn’t even say “set up” because from the Mac it just worked. Windows required some tinkering, encouragement and a small amount of swearing.

If there’s a Mac version of a program you need, you’ll have to buy it again and relearn how to use it on a Mac. [Note the 'If' in italics].

What do users of GarageBand and iMovie for Windows think about this statement?

Macs only come in white or silver. PCs are available in a full spectrum of colors across a range of price points.

This is clearly Apple’s biggest mistake. They made iPods available in a range of colours but failed to do the same with the Macs, a decision that could ruin the company </sarcasm>. Ironically in this one statement, they mixed the most ridiculous reason (the colour choices) with the strongest factor of PCs… the fact that there is a great variety of choice in specifications, price, vendor and ultimately quality. Apple’s offerings are more expensive and more limited in choice.

But do you get what you pay for? After using an iMac at home for over a year, and now a MacBook Pro when out and about, I’d say yes. Even on a well-specced ThinkPad I’d experience an awful lot of egg-timer in a day. On the Mac everything is almost instantaneous. Bear in mind that on the iMac at home there’s usually two other people logged in and I’m running a lot of applications, but it never goes into one of those disk-thrashing death spirals of unresponsiveness. Yes, it’s better specced than the ThinkPad and it cost more, but that’s why I do say that you get what you pay for and (in my humble opinion) it’s worth it.

This article from TechRepublic is nearly two months old, but remains an interesting read. I’ve observed that, in the past year, interest in iPhones and Android has grown significantly but I’ve yet to meet a customer with a serious strategy around those devices. The trend, as pointed out in the article, is for end users to enthusiastically bring their shiny new devices into work and then ask (expect?) the IT team to get it working with the company’s solutions – mainly e-mail of course.

Right now for me it’s a case of deja-vu (which I’ve experienced before, ho ho)… in the early days of the iPhone, and sporadically ever since, I received numerous e-mails from excited IBMers asking how they can get their iPhone connected to the Domino e-mail infrastructure (I’ve checked my job description, there’s no mention of this responsibility). Now I’m seeing the same with iPad owners. Our official mobile e-mail solution in IBM UK is the BlackBerry but Traveler is starting to gain a foothold, mainly due to the Apple devices.

The article does a good job of pointing out the major advantages of the BlackBerry solution… and solution is the right word. I’ve heard people say that Blackberries are expensive to own, but the infrastructure does provide what an enterprise needs with little or no requirements to add extras in order to make it enterprise-grade and extremely secure.

Since the article was written the iPhone 4 has been announced and I’m sure this will put more pressure on RIM and the other device providers. Consumers will lap it up, and IT departments may groan as expectant iPad / iPhone owners crave to get connected. Whether that trend gets traction in the enterprise space is yet to be seen, but one thing is for sure – consumerisation and end-user-power grows stronger every year.

While a large percentage of the world has been staging a love-in with the iPad, I’ve been falling in love with another of Apple’s devices. A couple of weeks ago I received an iPod nano as a gift, and as I already had an iPod touch I wondered what use it would be to me. I had, previously, pondered Apple’s strategy for this device (albeit the 4th generation device, not the 5th) but now I find myself eating my words… absolutely feasting on them in fact.

For something so packed with features it’s incredibly thin and light – I worried about snapping it when removing it from the box. The first issue I hit was the only negative – it’s the 8 gb model, so realistically has about 7.3 gb of storage. My music collection weighs in at 11.2 gb, so I had to de-select a number of bands and artists. Goodbye Coldplay (mind you, I should remove them anyway).

Now the positive points. As I said, it’s thin and light – incredibly so. It barely registers any weight in your hand. A gnat’s lunch weighs more. So in the last week I’ve tucked it into a suit and shirt pocket, and used it when I wouldn’t normally consider using one of the bigger devices.

Now, I keep going on about how thin and light it is, because it’s not just a music player. It’s amazing enough that they can fit 8 gb of storage, a battery, and the gubbins for a 2.2 inch (240 x 376 pixels) screen into it. But that’s not all – it has an external speaker, a radio and a video camera (complete with microphone). Okay, it’s not high definition video, but considering what it’s squeezed into I consider that an amazing feat of micro-engineering. And the quality is pretty good.

This now means I’m a three-iPod guy. My original 20 gb white 4th generation classic (complete with a monochrome LCD screen) provides music in the car, the iPod touch caters for games, e-mail, videos, Twitter and many other applications… but the nano looks set to be my primary device for music outside of the car.

It’s a busy week for announcements in Lotus-land, but that tends to happen around the time of DNUG (which is this week, so there you go). Already this week Stuart McIntyre blogged about the new version of Lotus Quickr 8.5, which we have available internally with IBM and is a major upgrade (and a great product). More about that another time.

The other big announcement this week is the support for IBM Lotus Notes Traveler on the iPad. This momentarily had me scratching my head, because I set up Traveler on an iPad a couple of weeks ago – it’s a great e-mail, calendar and contacts experience, and simple to get running. So what’s the announcement? It’s official support for Traveler on the iPad, and also for the Traveler Companion which manages encrypted e-mail.

In time other applications will be supported… LotusLive Meetings and SnappFiles for Quickr. Both of these work fine on an iPad today, they’re just not supported yet. And I’m sure there’ll be more iPad applications to come.

The Apple iPad… it’ll never catch on. But we (i.e. the IBM Lotus team in the UK) decided to see what all the fuss is about – and kudos to my manager Sian, she set out to acquire one for demos and succeeded. Today Sian handed me the box and gave me the honour of opening it, setting it up and looking after it until someone came on bended knees with a good-enough reason to borrow it.

It wasn’t the first time I’d handled an iPad – my frolleague Lewis (he of the disposable income) already had one, and my first impression was that it was much lighter than I expected. The user experience was very familiar… after all, it’s just a big iPod touch, right?

One of the reasons for getting it out of the box today is that I’ll be demonstrating it at Polymorph’s Lotusphere Comes To You event tomorrow. So this morning I set up Lotus Traveler. As I don’t have an iPhone (I have a BlackBerry and Traveler on the Nokia E72) I hadn’t been through the Apple-based Travleler set-up before. Talk about easy – I connected to the IBM wi-fi network (more on that later), installed the VPN client, and then browsed to an internal web page. I clicked on the install option, entered my user-name and password, and it was done.

Obviously the iPad has a bigger screen than the iPhone, so the e-mail experience is much better. Simple but very effective. But the killer improvement is the calendar – great layout for all of the day / week / month options. I also tried LotusLive Meetings – apparently not supported on the iPad yet, but it worked and the presentation content scaled up perfectly.

The web browsing experience, with the bigger screen, is very good – but it’s applications like TweetDeck and Maps that really benefit.

Looking at the screen now, I’m glad my Archos 605 is operated with a stylus – after a day being passed around eager geeks in the office the iPad’s screen sports enough dabs and DNA to keep a forensic team busy for a year.

So, what’s the verdict? It’s a beautifully-crafted device, it’s a good size – light but big enough to ensure things like e-mail aren’t a chore as they sometimes are on smaller devices – and it’s easy to use. But I have to admit, it doesn’t fill me with a burning desire to own one personally. If I had a lot more disposable income (these days I have even less thanks to the taxman) I’d buy one tomorrow, but right now I can think of many better uses of £500. However, I can see the attraction of being out and about with a 3G iPad, so maybe in the future…

As a footnote, while in the Staines office today I connected to the IBM wireless network using the iPad, the MacBook Pro and the ThinkPad W500 with a Ubuntu Linux 10.04 install. All of these connected without complaint or coercing. But there was one operating system which refused… Windows XP (also on the W500 after I swapped hard disks). Is the wireless networking improved in Windows 7?

One other thing I noticed… on my iPod touch I access music by pressing the ‘music’ button. Pretty obvious. On the iPad, music is accessed by pressing the ‘iPod’ button. If there’s some cunning reason behind that, I don’t get it.

LotusLive Meetings is now available for the Apple iPhone and iPod touch… click here to visit iTunes and download. The application is free, so for LotusLive Meetings there’s no charge to be a meeting delegate whether you’re using a web browser, an iPhone or a supported BlackBerry device (client still in beta).

This iPhone application is incredibly easy to use – simply add the details of meetings you want to join (those details consist of your user name and the meeting ID). Then just click on the meeting name and you’re in. During the web conference you’ll see the shared presentation content and screen-sharing, and you’ll be able to view the participant list and take part in an instant messaging conversation. Of course I’ve already tried it this evening, the updates to the device are very quick, and it’s just a great application.

Thanks go to Paul Mooney for discovering a useful WordPress plug-in. WPtouch adds a mobile theme to a WordPress blog – a theme that is optimised for the iPhone or iPod touch. So rather than trying to navigate around the plethora of interesting content on dadams.co.uk using the standard look and feel (which can be a challenge as there’s so much to enjoy), you get a simplified and easy-to-navigate interface. If you prefer the full dadams.co.uk experience you can switch back to it.

Got an iPhone? Give it a go.

Normally I’d be writing blog posts on my iMac or ThinkPad upstairs, but as WordPress for the iPhone / iPod touch is now available I can now write blog posts and (if necessary) approve and reject comments from the comfort of the sofa or in the kitchen. It won’t make dadams.co.uk any more interesting, but it might make the blog posts a bit shorter.

WordPress for iPhone is basic but very easy to use. It’s free (which is nice) and can be downloaded from the iTunes App Store right now.

Yesterday I blogged about the fact that the whole world had convinced itself that Apple were going to announcement a tablet device. And unless you live in a cave or are appearing in a reality television show where you get locked in a house for forty days, you’ll probably now know that Apple did just that.

In a rather puny attempt to set myself up as an observer of future technology trends, I speculated that early adopters would probably wish they’d waited for the next iteration. Clearly others agreed… Wired published Ten Things Missing From the iPad while Gizmodo could appear to only manage eight things but carried on to eleven and positioned them as things that suck.

The business world was also unimpressed, as Apple’s share price fell by around $7. So, here’s my tip (now that we’ve established my credentials as a gadget futurist)… buy an iPad the moment it hits the stores. Queue for three days if you need to. Can you imagine how awesome that airplane landing game will be on a big screen? That’s gotta be worth the money. Also, Florida Steve has some Apple shares, and he’s banking on them reaching $270. So when the iPad 2 ships with some of the fix-list ticked off, throw away your iPad 1 and get the new one. I know this makes sense because I live in a house that contains three people and eight iPods.

It must be nice to work for Apple, knowing that the slightest rumour of Steve Jobs breaking wind will generate a billion news articles. Apple have trained the industry well, and now we’re all waiting for their announcement events knowing that that something desirable will be unleashed upon a waiting world. You may not need it, but you’ll want it… which reminds me of one of the best ever news spoofs to hit the Internet, the MacBook Wheel video on The Onion. I guess we’re meant to laugh at the nerdy devotee who says “I’ll buy almost anything shiny as long as it’s shiny and made by Apple”, but the scary thing is that there’s a bit of him in many of us – and that would include me if I could afford to do so.

With this in mind, today the world is waiting for the expected announcement of an Apple tablet. To my knowledge, no-one from Apple has said it will happen, but various bits of information and speculation have been pieced together to the point where we’re all expecting the iSlate / iSlab / iTablet / iWantOne to be announced. The combined world of technology media could end up looking pretty stupid if Apple’s announcements for today consist of a retractable tape measure being added to the iPhone and an LED torch being added to the iPod nano. But assuming the hype is correct, who’s going to buy a first-generation Apple tablet? History shows that early Apple adopters are often rendered green with envy or red with rage when an improved model is released six months later. Given that Apple products aren’t cheap (well, okay iPods are a pretty reasonable price) the initial market for the Apple tablet could be restricted to the stupidly wealthy or the hopelessly devoted.