Hope You Enjoy the Smell of Napalm in the Morning

Friday, 19 March 2010

This lengthy New York Times story on the escalating rivalry between Apple and Google hit while I was at SXSW; I didn’t have time to do much more than point out the curious choice to describe Apple employees as Steve Jobs’s “underlings”. (Perhaps “minions” is next.)

My quick impression of the story based on the first few paragraphs was that there wasn’t much meat to it, that it was the sort of “conflict makes for a good story so let’s play up any bit of conflict we can find” report that we often see. But the story actually has some interesting details that were news to me. For example: Apple nearly bought AdMob, but Google snatched them away with a higher offer. And, regarding Bill Campbell, who is co-chairman of Apple’s board and a long-time advisor at Google:

While Mr. Campbell has tried to be a diplomat and smooth over the problems between Mr. Jobs and Mr. Schmidt, the task hasn’t been easy. Mr. Campbell declined to comment for this article, but people briefed on the matter say that throughout last fall, Mr. Jobs and Mr. Schmidt each lobbied Mr. Campbell to sever his connection with the other’s company, at times even giving him ultimatums to do so.

Finally, Mr. Campbell was forced to choose, and according to a person with knowledge of the situation, he dropped his formal responsibilities at Google, although he is still informally mentoring executives there.

Regarding meetings between Apple and Google executives during Android’s gestational period:

Many of those meetings turned confrontational, according to people familiar with the discussions, with Mr. Jobs often accusing Google of stealing iPhone features. Google executives said that Android’s features were based on longstanding ideas already circulating in the industry and that some Android prototypes predated the iPhone.

At one particularly heated meeting in 2008 on Google’s campus, Mr. Jobs angrily told Google executives that if they deployed a version of multitouch — the popular iPhone feature that allows users to control their devices with flicks of their fingers — he would sue. Two people briefed on the meeting described it as “fierce” and “heated.”

And lastly:

Inside both Apple and Google, employees say, the sense of rivalry is intense and a peacemaker is sorely needed. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it in my life,” one Apple employee says. “I’m in so many meetings where so many potshots are taken. It feels weird.”

That last bit, regarding a general belief that Apple is gearing up for war against Google, echoes what I’ve heard lately from several sources who work at Apple. I know that conflict between companies — particularly big companies, and even more particularly big interesting companies like Apple and Google — tends to get played up in the press, often to the point of sensationalism, because conflict is interesting. But I’ve got the growing sense that there’s nothing sensational about it. I think Steve Jobs genuinely sees Google as threatening Apple’s core business. It doesn’t really matter whether he’s right (although the more I consider it, the more I think he is). Jobs believes it, and so Apple is going to war.

Hence the patent suit against HTC. That’s all about Google — about creating a situation where Android is no longer a free operating system for handset makers in the U.S., because the cost of using it is an expensive legal defense against Apple.

Then there are the little things. Last week, for example, Apple hired R.J. Pittman, Google’s director of product management. Apple and Google are big companies with a lot of directors and managers; I very seldom find personnel moves to be newsworthy. But, as Jason Kincaid pointed out:

We’d previously heard that Google and Apple had a gentlemen’s agreement not to poach each other’s employees. Obviously, that’s no longer the case.

I.e. it’s not particularly interesting that Apple hired Pittman, or that Google lost him, but it is interesting that Apple poached a director from Google, period. That didn’t use to happen.

The whole Google-Voice-iPhone-app-rejected-from-the-App-Store thing? The easiest explanation I see now is that Apple declined it out of competitive spite with Google. Apple doesn’t want Google’s “phone stuff” on the iPhone.

Google, clearly, knows what it’s getting into. This story from The Times on Wednesday reports that Google, working with Intel and Sony, is also working on a competitor to Apple TV (and thus the iTunes Store for video). The unofficial partnership Apple and Google forged a decade ago grew during a period when the two companies were focused on very different markets. Now, their sights for the coming decade are on the same markets: mobile computing devices and entertainment. Post-PC computing, if you will.

Further, I suspect that the time for peacemaking is over. The cold war has ended and the shooting war has begun. One can argue about whether the seal was broken by Google with the Nexus One or by Apple with the HTC patent lawsuit, but at this point, it’s on.

Apple faces more decisions than Google in such a war, because Apple has products that use Google services; Google doesn’t have products that use Apple services. Those rumors that Safari and/or MobileSafari might switch to Bing as the default search engine? I give more credence to them now. The problems for Apple there are that (a) Microsoft is every bit as hell-bent as Google to take on the iPhone; and (b) Bing, improved though it may be, is not as good a search engine as Google.

I can’t see Apple building its own search engine, but perhaps they really are building their own maps service — hence their purchase of PlaceBase last July.

Perhaps the “war” analogy is stretched. But the situation has gotten past the usual level of competitive vigor. Patent lawsuits are not usual. Poaching employees is not usual. Forcing a mutual advisor like Bill Campbell to choose sides is not usual. Jobs’s widely reported remarks at a company-wide address last month (“Make no mistake, Google wants to kill the iPhone”) are not usual. Eric Schmidt’s dismissal of the iPad as “a large phone” is not usual.

I’m not sure what to expect next, other than for things to get uglier. ★

Mozilla, Video, and Mobile Computing

Thursday, 18 March 2010

With Microsoft’s announcement this week that IE9 will support H.264 HTML5 video, three of the big four browsers — IE, Safari, and Chrome — will soon support H.264. The only major browser holdout is Firefox.¹

Mozilla is couching their position in terms of ideals: H.264 is an open industry standard but patent-encumbered and has licensing fees; Ogg Theora is open, not patent-encumbered, and free of licensing fees.

Brian Crescimanno has written a fine argument that this is a situation where pragmatism should win out over idealism, and that Mozilla should include support for H.264 (in addition to Ogg Theora) in Firefox. As he points out, it’s not as though Mozilla has never before supported proprietary formats (e.g. GIF). But Crescimanno’s best point is that Mozilla’s support for Ogg Theora is doomed because it’s technically inferior to H.264:

People and businesses are willing to embrace free software when it provides an equal or better product than the proprietary alternatives (see the success of Linux on the server). However, when free software doesn’t keep up with the best non-free products, people stay away (see the lack of success of Linux on the desktop). Simply put, there just aren’t that many people who share the same moral imperative as the Free Software Foundation; most of them just want it to work.

Put another way, “open and better” is a recipe for success; “open but worse” is a recipe for obscurity. Popular video publishing sites aren’t going to use Ogg Theora instead of H.264, and I think they’re very unlikely to support it in addition to H.264, either. Encoding and storage are expensive; supporting both would at least double those costs.

The practical effect of Mozilla’s current position will not be to drive adoption of Ogg Theora. What’s going to happen is that Safari, Chrome, and even IE9 users will be served HTML5 video, and Firefox users will get Flash. Publishers will support both HTML5 video (for Safari, Chrome, and IE9 users) alongside Flash (for browsers that don’t support HTML5 and H.264) because they already have the Flash video publishing infrastructure in place, and because Flash can be used to publish H.264-encoded video. Publishers don’t have to encode (and store) video twice; they can encode (and store) it once and serve it two different ways. The sites that are the most popular — YouTube being number one, obviously — would bear the most expense to support an additional encoding format. It isn’t going to happen.

So, even those using the latest version of Firefox will be treated like they’re using a legacy browser. Mozilla’s intransigence in the name of “openness” will result in Firefox users being served video using the closed Flash Player plugin, and behind the scenes the video is likely to be encoded using H.264 anyway.

There’s another factor that occurred to me recently: mobile computing. Apple, Google, and Microsoft all seem to view mobile computing as a top-level priority. H.264 video playback on mobile devices is aided by dedicated H.264 decoding hardware. That’s how the iPhone and iPods get such long battery life for video playback. I believe this is also true for Android devices, and will be true for Windows Phone 7 and Zunes. Relying on the CPU for video playback simply isn’t practical on mobile devices. There are no hardware decoding chips for Ogg Theora. If you want to send video to mobile devices, H.264 is the only practical encoding for the near future. (I think this explains why Microsoft is throwing its support behind H.264 rather than some proprietary video codec of its own — Microsoft knows a winning position when it sees one.) Ogg Theora may well be “good enough” for desktop computers, but it’s completely unacceptable for mobile devices.

Mozilla, as an organization, doesn’t seem to value mobile computing as a top priority. Yes, they have mobile initiatives. But the only platform they have a mobile browser for is Nokia Maemo. All of you using a Nokia Maemo, please raise your hands. Crickets. Compare and contrast with WebKit, which I suspect will soon have more mobile than desktop users.

The needs of mobile computing are driving the adoption of H.264 HTML5 video more than anything else, but Mozilla doesn’t feel that pressure because it isn’t a mobile company. And at this point, “not a mobile company” is getting hard to distinguish from “not a relevant company”.² ★

An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox

Monday, 15 March 2010

Three weeks ago the hard drive in my MacBook Pro went bad. So far as I can tell, I didn’t lose a single byte of data. Here’s how.

First, what happened. I was on vacation for a few days with my wife immediately after Macworld Expo. Thursday 18 February was my first day back at home for a normal day of work. When I woke the machine up from sleep, everything was terribly slow. Closing windows. Opening new windows. Switching between apps. These things were all taking 30 seconds or longer. (I’d last used the machine on the airplane on my way home the night before. I noticed nothing wrong then.)

This was bad news, of course. So I saved everything that was open and rebooted. I gave it some time but the login screen didn’t appear.

So, I forced the machine to shut down and rebooted from my Snow Leopard installation disc. I ran Disk Utility and attempted to verify the MacBook Pro’s internal hard disk. Disk Utility reported that the disk was damaged in a way that it could not repair. This is extremely bad news.

I rebooted from an external hard drive, which was a clone of my internal hard drive made using SuperDuper. From this, I ran DiskWarrior against my internal drive. It took a long time (three or four hours, perhaps), but DiskWarrior was able to create a new directory for my internal startup drive and mount it as a read-only volume. It looked like everything was in order, and it contained everything up to the point where I started seeing problems.

I then used SuperDuper to make a complete clone of this volume — the read-only volume reconstructed by DiskWarrior — to another external hard drive.

In many cases, DiskWarrior is able to replace a damaged volume’s problematic directory with the new repaired directory that it creates. In my case three weeks ago, however, DiskWarrior reported that it could not. It reported:

DiskWarrior has successfully built a new directory for the disk named “Jiminy.” The new directory cannot replace the original directory because of a disk malfunction.

A disk malfunction is a failure of or damage to any mechanical component of the disk device, or any component connected to it. The malfunction will likely worsen. Therefore, recovering your files from the DiskWarrior Preview as quickly as possible is essential.

So at this point I had:

1. The MacBook Pro’s internal hard drive, which Disk Utility stated could not be repaired, and which DiskWarrior stated was likely permanently damaged at the hardware level.

2. An external hard drive which contained a SuperDuper cloned version of the entire contents of my internal drive. Normally, the contents of this backup drive are one day old, because I run SuperDuper every night. However, in this case, the contents were over 10 days old, because I had been away from home — Macworld Expo followed immediately by a vacation.

3. A second external hard drive, which contained a fresh SuperDuper clone of the read-only version of my internal drive that DiskWarrior was able to restore.

#3, the second external drive, in theory should have at this point contained everything up until the moment I noticed the problems. But, having made this copy from a volume with serious underlying hardware problems, I considered it deeply suspect.

The best case: I’d reboot from volume #3, verify that everything seemed OK, and lose nothing.

The worst case: some or all data on volume #3 would prove to be corrupt, and I’d lose about 10 days of work, including my Keynote slides, notes, and research for my presentation at Macworld.

But even that didn’t concern me, because I use Dropbox. That’s where I save all files I’m working on. My Keynote project was there. My OmniOutliner document containing the written version of my presentation was there. I wouldn’t lose email, either, because all my email accounts are IMAP, so they’re all backed on servers. The only truly important thing I could think of I might lose would be the last 10 days of data in my Yojimbo library (which, as a database rather than a collection of small files, doesn’t play well with Dropbox and therefore isn’t stored there). Needless to say, though, I tend not to create many Yojimbo items while on vacation. [Update, 18 March 2010: Ends up you can safely store your Yojimbo library on Dropbox].

I was lucky: volume #3, cloned from the directory recreated by DiskWarrior, was just fine. Thanks to DiskWarrior, I lost nothing. Thanks to Dropbox and SuperDuper, though, the whole process was stress-free, because I didn’t have much to lose even if DiskWarrior had not been able to salvage a non-corrupt image of the failed drive.

I’m sure the most commonly-used backup/recovery software for Mac users is Time Machine. I think the addition of Time Machine to Mac OS X is one of the best things Apple has ever done. It has saved data that would otherwise have been lost. And it’s great because you don’t have to invoke it manually, you just set it up and from the point forward it does its thing automatically. And, unlike SuperDuper, which only provides you with a snapshot clone of a drive, Time Machine provides a historical archive of each modification to every file.

However, I find terrific value in SuperDuper’s model. SuperDuper creates a bootable clone of your startup drive. With Time Machine, if your startup drive goes kaput, you’ve got to go through a lengthy restore process (and, in the case of hardware failure on the kaput drive, you need an extra bootable volume to restore to). With SuperDuper, you just plug in the clone, reboot, and you’re back up.

Here are the things I would like to impress upon you:

• Hard drives are fragile. Read as much as you can bear to about how they work, how incredibly precisely they must operate in order to cram so many bits onto such small disks. It’s a miracle to me that they work at all. Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.

• Buy a bunch of large external hard drives for use as backup volumes. It’s not enough to have one. If I only had one, I wouldn’t have been able to clone the volume DiskWarrior restored for me without taking a terrible chance and overwriting the known-good 10-day-old SuperDuper clone. It is no fun at all to spend money on hard drives whose only purpose is to be used in case one of your regular drives fails. But when you need them, it feels like the best money you’ve ever spent.

• Seriously, buy a few external drives, not just one. Buy another one to store off-site in case your home is burgled or there’s a fire or other catastrophe. Don’t use backup drives for any other purpose.

• Use SuperDuper to clone your startup volume (or volumes, plural, if you have several volumes used for primary daily storage). Run it every day. Use it even if you also use Time Machine. You will thank me when a drive fails and a few minutes later you’re right back where you were the night before. There are other apps that serve a similar purpose. I haven’t tried them in years because SuperDuper has never let me down.

• Test your backups. Try booting from them once in a while just make sure they work.

• Use Dropbox. In addition to the fact that Dropbox is fast and reliable at copying files saved locally to Dropbox’s remote servers, Dropbox also remembers each version of each file you save. Dropbox provides syncing, remote storage, and simple versioning backup all at once. You can trust it. All you do is save your files like you normally do. And unlike all my other recommendations here, you can use Dropbox for free. I suspect the only people who aren’t using Dropbox are those who haven’t tried it.

• My strategy for disk repair software: try Apple’s Disk Utility first, then, if it doesn’t fix everything, DiskWarrior. If DiskWarrior fails assume the drive is toast. If you don’t own DiskWarrior, buy it immediately. It has worked wonders for me many times over the past decade, and has never once made a problem worse. There are other disk utility apps. I haven’t used them, and consider myself so well served by Disk Utility and DiskWarrior that I see no reason to try.¹ ★