Presidential
RamblingsPresidential
Ramblings
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After I finished last month’s column, I discovered a critical error. Even worse, I found that the error has existed for months! It appears that I forgot to increment the version number, and it happened (or more accurately didn’t happen) twice! Since I have no one but myself at whom to point a finger–and none of my joints are really flexible enough to do that. So we’ll just have to correct the situation and move on. My first column as DACS president was version 0.0 in May, 2002. I started with zero because that’s the way computers work and I figured it would take me a year (of “beta”) to get a grip on this job before I got to version 1.0. As you can see I’ve been at this for a little more than 2 and a half years. Time sure flies when you’re having fun. Moving On…The November general meeting was another winner and you can read what Mike Kaltschnee says about it elsewhere in this issue. November is becoming our annual “Microsoft meeting” and I enjoyed it thoroughly. The new Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 (could they get a few more syllables in that name?) is incredibly cool. Unfortunately it was hard to see that coolness in Richard Katz’s presentation because of the hardware Microsoft provided. Go to the Hewlett-Packard Web site to see that this is no ordinary PC. HP calls it the z545 Digital Entertainment Center and it’s not cheap. But when has cool ever been cheap? The HP version is black and is the size and shape of a stereo receiver. When you add the x5400 Media Center Extender the cool extends to another room with interesting layers of control. Now do you think that all this cool has a down side beyond the price? Well of course it does, and the down side is how Microsoft adheres to the movie industry’s definition of your digital rights. For instance, the PC Magazine review pointed out that you cannot use the Media Center Extender to watch a movie DVD in another room–which would seem to be the whole point of the Extender. Instead, you must physically carry the DVD into the room where you sit and put it in a DVD player there. Now I ask you, what are they afraid of? At the end of the meeting we had some goodies from Microsoft to give away. Bob Ehrn took home Office Professional 2003; Bert Goff chose a copy of Microsoft One Note 2003 while Charlie Bovaird received FrontPage 2003. In addition several people are now wearing new Microsoft tee shirts. CompetitionIf you think market forces in the form of competition don’t benefit the consumer (i.e.: you) then allow me to point to the “market place” of free email. Competition has affected this market in several ways. The most obvious of these is the space provided for a free account. When I created my first Hotmail and Yahoo email accounts, the allotted space maxed out at two megabytes on both services. If your messages exceeded that, your mail started to bounce back with the message “mailbox full.” Of course this forces you to go to the email web site frequently where they can show you advertising. And then along came Google. Right from the get-go, Google provides one gigabyte of online email storage. The whole point of Google ‘Gmail’ is that they index it and make it easy to search. They also show you ‘relevant’ advertising based on the content of your email (but then there is no free lunch). Since then, both Yahoo and Hotmail have increased the amount of space they provide. For the last few years, I’ve paid for additional features on Yahoo Mail. For $10 per year I got POP3 access (easily download Yahoo email messages), four (or maybe it was six) megabytes of space and a few other features. I thought this was a good deal but I kept bumping up against the space limit. Last year I upgraded to “Yahoo Mail Plus”. At the time this gave 25M of space (and no advertising!) which was a help. And then along came Google and suddenly my Yahoo mail box became two gigabytes! Immediately I moved several high volume email lists to the Yahoo address. Right now there is 59M of ‘stuff’ in my Yahoo mailbox (nicely organized in folders) and it’s only 3% full! Yahoo Mail Plus has a few other features that I like that we can talk about another time. I’m not sure why I still have a MSN email address, as I dropped the dialup service long ago. I think it has something to do with when I tried to get my mother to use an MSN Companion internet appliance for email so we could send her pictures of her great-grandchildren. That failed miserably (Mom thinks her portable electric typewriter is high tech) but I still have the email address and a few months ago they increased the space from two to ten megabytes. Two was really cramped but ten is more workable for occasional use. The MSN/Hotmail web site has a small item announcing an upgrade to two gigabytes sometime “before December”. It doesn’t say if this will be free or what the cost might be and there is no link to more information. Still this would indicate that Google and Yahoo have Microsoft worried. We can look at another area of the computer
industry to see how this might play out. For instance, let’s
look at office productivity software. Ten years ago we had a
number of really good choices. I was a Lotus Word Pro fan, having
started to use that program when it was Ami Pro–one of the
first word processors on Windows. Of course there was WordPerfect,
Word Star and many more. Where are these programs today? Microsoft
first created the office suite to encourage people to use Excel
which was nowhere as easy to use as Lotus 1-2-3. Then Microsoft
‘encouraged’ PC manufacturers to bundle Ms Office on
their machines at very low (or even no) additional cost. Did
Microsoft ‘discourage’ manufactures from bundling competing
office products? We don’t really know, but who’s going
to buy WordPerfect when they already have Microsoft Word on their
new computer? To Microsoft’s credit, each new version of
Word and Excel got better and easier to use until they ran out
of new features to add. By then it didn’t matter because
they owned the market. And notice that Ms Office is never bundled
for free on new PCs anymore, and the cost has risen dramatically
as its market share zoomed past 50%. The ElectionThe most divisive Presidential election in our history is over. Thankfully, our DACS elections should not generate any controversy at all. We will have a short business meeting during the December general meeting to elect members to the board. We have a great slate of candidates and I look forward to working with them in the future. |
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