BusinessWeek & John Dvorak Weigh In On The “Apple Tax”…… Microsoft Is Sorry Now

Microsoft is likely wishing that it didn’t open this can of worms. Why? Let’s start with an article in BusinessWeek where Arik Hesseldahl jumps into the fray by pointing out a bunch of things that are flawed about Microsoft’s argument:

First, there’s security software. The PC in question comes with a 60-day trial Norton Internet Security 2009 from Symantec (SYMC). After the trial runs out you’ll pay Symantec $50 a year to protect your PC (and up to two others in your home) from all the nasty viruses, worms, and other malware lurking on the Internet. That’s $150 over the three years Lauren is likely to hold on to her PC. No need for antivirus on the Mac.

And this:

Next, let’s say something goes wrong on the computer once the warranty expires and that it requires the intervention of a third party. Geek Squad will charge you $129 just for a diagnosis. A diagnosis from the Genius Bar in Apple’s retail stores? Free.

And the fact that iLife comes with every Mac, but is absent on the PC:

It’s hard to replicate that bundle if you’re a Windows user. The Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) machine in Lauren’s case does ship with discs for Muvee Reveal, a video-editing program that usually costs $80, and CyberLink DVD Suite, which runs $104. But if she wants Adobe’s (ADBE) Photoshop Elements, including a membership in Photoshop.com Plus, she’ll need to shell out about $140. Sonic Solutions’ (SNIC) Roxio Creator 2009, which combines video-editing and DVD-creating tools, will cost another $100. And the closest equivalent to Garageband on Windows is Cubase Sequel and it goes for another $100.

So, what’s the total price tag of the PC when you take all that into account?:

Add it all up and it’s not hard to imagine Lauren’s $699 computer costing something closer to $1,500.

As if to add insult to injury, PC Mag’s John C. Dvorak who hates Macs with a passion states the following:

A report such as this would have cost Microsoft anywhere from $2,500 to $25,000, depending on the deal. For this sort of money you can get anyone to say anything. The hope is that people will take this seriously and buy more Microsoft products. But Microsoft always gets burned by these things, as pundits and critics jump all over the company for the blatant bullcrap in these reports. The company ends up with negative publicity that’s just not beneficial.

No kidding. And that’s from a guy who doesn’t like Macs (albeit for self serving reasons).

Sorry Microsoft. Game over. You lose. Thanks for playing. Please don’t ever do this again. It’s not worth it for your image (or what’s left of it).

Time Warner’s Usage Based Billing Hits A Speed Bump

You might recall that Time Warner had decided to go down the road of usage based billing. Now they’re thinking twice about it. Check out this post from Time Warner COO Landel Hobbs. First, he claims that this is all a big misunderstanding:

Some recent press reports about our four consumption based billing trials planned for later this year were premature and did not tell the full story. With that said, we realize our communication to customers about these trials has been inadequate and we apologize for any frustration we caused. We’ve heard the passionate feedback and we’ve taken action to address our customers’ concerns.

Sure dude. Whatever. But I’ll humor him and give him the benefit of the doubt. Here’s his olive branch to pissed off consumers:

• To accommodate lighter Internet users and those who need a lower priced option, we are introducing a 1 GB per month tier offering speeds of 768 KB/128 KB for $15 per month. Overage charges will be $2 per GB per month. Our usage data show that about 30% of our customers use less than 1 GB per month.

• We are increasing the bandwidth tier sizes included in all existing packages in the trial markets to 10, 20, 40 and 60 GB for Road Runner Lite, Basic, Standard and Turbo packages, respectively. Package prices will remain the same. Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.

• We will introduce a 100 GB Road Runner Turbo package for $75 per month (offering speeds of 10 MB/1 MB). Overage charges will be $1 per GB per month.

• Overage charges will be capped at $75 per month. That means that for $150 per month customers could have virtually unlimited usage at Turbo speeds.

That must have went over really well with consumers because protests are now planned in Rochester N.Y. and Senator Chuck Schumer is planning make a point of his own. Not to mention that there’s a Facebook page that is organizing a similar protest in the Greensboro, North Carolina area.

Here’s the bottom line: Users don’t want this, and if there are alternatives (such as Frontier who has said that they are ditching caps in Time Warner markets), Time Warner is going to be bleeding customers like a gunshot victim in South Central L.A. in short order.

Other ISP’s who want to go down the road of usage based billing (Cogeco, are you paying attention) may want to take note of that.

RIM Co-CEO Gets Interviewed By Laptop Magazine…. And It’s A Trip

Mike Lazaridis sat down with Laptop Magazine recently and had a lot to say. For example when asked to address Jim Balsillie’s quote that buggy software is the “new reality” of making smartphone software, this is what he said:

“That’s our first touch product, and you know nobody gets it perfect out the door. You know other companies were having problems with their first releases.”

Translation: If you want something that works out of the box, come back when version 2.0 ships.

Lazaridis also took shots at Apple and they way they plan to do push e-mail:

I think for years I’ve kind of been shouting in the wilderness. You can’t do push in a sloppy way. It has to be optimized for wireless, and that takes a great deal of investment and a great deal of evolution. You know that’s one of our core strengths, and you know there’s a lot of value in the BlackBerry push technology that we’ve got running. It works across any device, anywhere in the world, any technology and between devices. Now that’s quite an accomplishment. That was deliberately engineered and innovated over the last fifteen years.

As well as multi-tasking:

If you don’t do it right. If you don’t make the right trade-offs, you have what we call a catastrophic effect on battery life. Unlike voice, data usage is growing exponentially. There just never seems to be enough bandwidth for Internet-based applications. So all the optimizations and conservation techniques we have developed for the BlackBerry system over the years are now paying huge dividends to our subscribers and carrier partners. The fact is that the BlackBerry was designed to multitask from day one. I think our operating system has constantly been underestimated.

But here’s the killer. Read this statement about RIMs browser technology:

I look at it this way. I say that our browser technology was developed with very different requirements. By writing our browser in Java, that provides our CIOs and wireless managers the assurances they need, to allow the browser to access internal information at the same time it accesses external information.

What the hell does that mean? Can someone explain that to me? It makes no sense.

Please read the rest of the interview and see what you think. Leave a comment with your thoughts as well.

Woman Gets Mugged For Purse… Google Latitude Gets It Back And Puts The Muggers In Jail

Here’s another case of Google technology defending the free world from the forces of evil. A woman in San Francisco got mugged while wating for a bus. Her house keys, wallet and BlackBerry were inside. The evil doers hopped into a car and drove a way. Usually that’s game over for the Mugging victim. But not this time. The BlackBerry inside the purse had Google Latitude installed on it, which with the help of her sister in L.A. allowed cops to hunt down the muggers and put them in jail where they’ll become someone’s prison bitch in short order. CBS 5 in San Fran has the story.

So now Google technology has helped to save a kidnapped child, bust potheads, and expose ISP’s who throttle. Is there anything that this company cannot do?

eBay Hangs Up On Skype… Plans IPO

I guess that eBay finally concluded that they overpaid for Skype as they are planning an IPO for the VoIP provider sometime in the first half of 2010:

The IPO could raise $500 million to $1 billion for EBay, depending on how much equity it gives up, Bard said. Skype’s market value could be $3 billion to $5 billion, he said. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. will lead the underwriting.

Not bad, but eBay paid $2.6 billion for Skype. I guess they’re okay with that. Then there’s always the possibility that the guys who sold Skype to eBay will buy it back:

Skype’s founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, had approached several private-equity firms about buying the company from EBay, the New York Times reported last week, citing people familiar with the matter.

My guess is that Skype may be sold long before it gets to an IPO. I really don’t see that this is the sort of economic environment for an IPO. But perhaps things may change in 2010. I guess we’ll see.

I Got A Call From A Customer Of Mine Last Night…..

Apparently he was getting a prompt for a anti-virus scanner called System Protector. The thing is that he never purchased it and it is telling him that he has to pay for it to get rid if all of viruses that it was finding. This is clearly a rogue application. Wikipedia defines a rogue application as:

Rogue security software is software that uses malware (malicious software) or malicious tools to advertise or install itself or to force computer users to pay for removal of nonexistent malware. Rogue software will often install a trojan horse to download a trial version, or it will execute other unwanted actions.

Pretty sneaky. I’ve dealt with a lot of this sort of thing over the years. Sadly, this is becoming more commonplace.

So I was pretty sure that my customer had somehow gotten a trojan horse (or more than one) onto his Windows XP computer, and it downloaded this rogue application. I made arrangements to look at it today as this isn’t the sort of thing that can wait.

Once I got my hands on the computer, it was worse than I thought. It disabled any security software that was on the computer, plus I couldn’t use basic Windows functions such as bringing up task manager. So this was very serious. I researched the rogue application that was on the computer (as in this situation Google is your best friend) and came up with a plan to deal with the situation:

1. By using Google, I used instructions from a variety of sources to disable the rogue application. I always read a variety of sources to make sure that whatever method I use to kill stuff like this is the correct course of action.
2. Once the rogue application was gone, I had to tackle the trojan horses that were on the system. I use at least three anti-virus scanners that are up to date to make sure that the system was clean. That’s no joke. I use three scanners because each will get stuff that the others will miss. By the time I was done, I had removed 30 trojan horses.
3. I then had to fix Windows. The trojans had done some work to stop things like task manager from working. So I had to repair that damage.
4. I then had to figure out how all this stuff got onto the system. Since the system was pretty much up to date in terms of security patches, I knew it came from an application that was installed on the system. From interviewing the customer, I was able to deduce that the likely source was a file sharing application that the customer’s son had installed as the issue started within 24 hours of the application being installed. I removed the offending application. I wouldn’t want to be that kid who installed that file sharing app tonight.

Total time: Four hours. I only charged the client 2 as most of my time was spent waiting for scanners to be finished. So in my opinion it isn’t fair to charge the client for that “waiting time.”

So as you can see, I had an interesting day. But far from atypical for me.

I wonder what the next phone call will bring?

Microsoft’s COO Says Vista SP2 “Most Secure OS On The Planet”…. Really, He Did Say That

You know that this is going to end badly. As if to invite trouble, Microsoft’s chief operating officer Kevin Turner decided to open his mouth at the MidMarket CIO Summit last week:

Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we’ve ever built. It’s also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It’s the safest and most secure OS on the planet today. Everything that we’ve learned in Vista will be leveraged in Windows 7, but certainly when we broke a lot of the compatibility issues to lock down user account controls, to lock down the ability to manipulate states and all the things, that was a very painful process for us to grow through, but we had to do it. And the reason that Windows 7 will be successful is because of the pain we took on Vista. Because from a compatibility standpoint, if it works on Vista, it will work on Windows 7. If it doesn’t work on Vista, it won’t work on Windows 7.

Great job Mr. Turner. You’ve just invited every 1337 h4x0r on planet earth to prove you wrong. Which you know they will. Do not be shocked my friends if Mr. Turner is found dead in a ditch due to chair induced trauma in the near future, or at the very least made to eat those words.

The “my OS is better than your OS” debate is usually pointless due to the fact that the fanbois on each side of the debate will stop any rational discussion from taking place. But let’s go once more unto the breach shall we? When Mr. Turner says that his OS is more secure than Mac OS X or Linux, he’s smoking some serious drugs. All my Windows machines are beefed up with  firewalls and antivirus applications to keep them safe, on top of regular patching (which you should do with ANY OS and not just with Windows). Other than running software update once in a while to patch the OS, I’m completely happy to leave the Mac without virus protection at all and the built in firewall isn’t even turned on. Trust me, I sleep soundly. My LINUX box hasn’t been touched in months and I’m pretty sure it’s not going to get pwned anytime soon for the same reason as my Mac. Which is that there isn’t any need to beef it up from where I stand. Then there’s the fact that more 1337 h4x0r types target Windows boxes because it’s the dominant OS out there. Of course, that’s not to say that LINUX and OS X can’t be hacked. ANYTHING can be hacked. It’s just more likely to be a Microsoft box that gets pwned at the moment.

For his sake, I hope that when Mr. Turner says “Most Secure OS On The Planet,” he means by Microsoft standards. Then in that case, it would actually be an improvement.

83% Of Businesses Won’t Move To Windows 7 For At Least A Year….. Microsoft, You Have A Problem

You might recall that in this article about mainstream support for XP ending, I said the following:

“…..Plus if Windows 7 isn’t the home run that they think it is going to be, then they’ll have to scramble to keep the revenue stream going. That means XP.”

It seems that I might have called that one. A survey of more than 1100 IT professionals seems to paint a rather gloomy picture for the son of Vista Windows 7:

The survey, of more than 1,100 IT professionals, is one of the first extensive looks at Windows 7′s early sales prospects. It found that a whopping 83% of enterprises plan to skip the OS in its first year. While the business market typically tends toward caution when it comes to new products, the figure is nonetheless surprising given that almost no large companies migrated to Vista and as a result most have been using XP much longer than planned.

Ouch. You have to imagine that when Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer reads this, a chair or two will will be tossed in anger. This picture actually gets worse for Microsoft:

The news for Microsoft doesn’t get much better in Windows 7′s sophomore season. Less than half of the IT pros surveyed, 42%, said their organizations planned to deploy Windows 7 within 12 to 24 months of release. 24% said they would wait 24 to 36 months, and 17% said they would wait more than 36 months to migrate to Windows 7.

If those numbers are even half way accurate, I would expect to see XP rise from the grave to save the day… Again. The real question is why do these people feel this way? The answers won’t surprise you:

“The majority of participants do not plan to upgrade to Windows 7 in the next year. Economic factors are contributing to the delay in Windows 7 adoption for almost half of all participants. Software compatibility is the most frequently cited concern with Windows 7,” notes the study…

With Apple starting to gain marketshare as people ditch their Windows computers and head to the Temple Of Steve Jobs Apple Stores for a MacBook or iMac, not to mention gains from LINUX and other options in the open source community, I seriously doubt that the PC market can afford another stillborn OS from Microsoft.

The question is, is anybody in Redmond listening?

iTunes 8.1 Screws Over 2nd Gen iPod Shuffle Users

If you’ve got a second generation iPod Shuffle, you may want to put off upgrading to the latest version of iTunes. That’s because Apple’s latest version of iTunes causes a number of issues for owners of these iPods and Apple’s own discussion boards are littered with the postings of pissed off users. The symptoms are:

• It dupes existing files on the iPod
• It copies podcasts out-of-order
• It doesn’t remove deleted podcasts,
• It won’t play when connected to the computer
• It has issues with Smart playlists

Perhaps this is a not so subtle hint sent by “The Steve” that these users should buy the third generation iPod Shuffle? Or perhaps this is an oversight in the rush to get the third generation iPod Shuffle out the door? Either way, Apple better come up with a fix for this fast. Until then, downgrade to iTunes 8.

Microsoft Says An Independent Study Proves Macs Are Expensive…. Too Bad They Fudged The Numbers [UPDATED]

Microsoft has fired another shot in their war with Apple. Besides the attack ads that they’re running, they got Roger Kay of Endpoint Technologies Associates to document the “Apple Tax” (Warning: PDF). The report does a price comparison between Apple and PC products and the relative difference between the two. The report argues that Apple users pay a huge premium for their computers.

Too bad the numbers are fudged.

CNet’s Ina Fried took a closer look and found the numbers are padded in favor of the PC:

Microsoft first started touting this idea of an Apple Tax in an interview last October. I’d argue, as I have, that the tax exists, but it is one that the average buyer knowingly pays for what they perceive as the differences between the PC and Mac experiences. In any case, the economic differences, while large, aren’t as big as Kay and Microsoft make them out to be in this study.

I think this shows the desperation level that exists in Microsoft at the moment. They are clearly afraid of Apple despite the fact Apple computers have a sub 10% market share.

Perhaps the reign of Microsoft is coming to an end and Microsoft senses this?

UPDATE: Ina Fried posted an update to this story. Microsoft has made changes (which shows who’s really behind this), but…:

However, the main points I (and others) made last week regarding Microsoft’s bad math haven’t changed. Kay’s report (and Microsoft’s accompanying tax return) still put charges in the Mac column that they fail to account for on the PC side when it comes to both software and services.

Sounds like Microsoft is still fudging the numbers to me.