Charlie Brown, Lucy and the Football

Its fame is not what it once was, but most of you will probably still know what I’m talking about when I say that my relationship with Microsoft’s operating systems is best summed up by the interaction between Charlie Brown and Lucy in Charles Schultz’ classic comic strip, Peanuts.

For those of you whose lives weren’t touched by its 50-year run, it’s enough to know that a recurring gag in Peanuts sees Charlie trying and failing to kick an American football, which Lucy always sweeps away at the last second, leaving him flat on his back in the grass. Fortunately for fans of Schultz’ gentle humour, Lucy is always able to convince Charlie to take another run at it – no matter how many times she’s tricked him in the past.

And so to Microsoft, the Lucy of the software world. Every time I encounter a new version of Windows I am gulled into thinking it has genuinely improved, only to take a run at it and find myself sprawled on the metaphorical turf in a matter of minutes. Microsoft’s operating systems have long seemed to me to consist of a cat’s cradle of half-executed ideas, alive with the possibility of spectacular failure. Call me cynical, but I have always felt the assumption underlying Windows is that the user will manage to convince him or herself that it is they who are at fault when catastrophe strikes – as long as the software looks and feels reasonably impressive for the first 15 minutes. In corporate IT they are often assisted in this by the person who imposed the systems on the end users – i.e. the IT administrator. The systems admin went through the same joy/dismay cycle, is indeed convinced it was his/her own fault, but also knows from experience that they can successfully cover it up because the same effect will apply to the end user. Welcome to the maze of twisty little all alike passages that is the Microsoft death spiral of dwindling self-esteem.

Needless to say, when Windows Phone 7 came out I vowed not to fall for Lucy’s tricks again, but with the much hyped release of the first Nokia-Windows device, and analysts predicting that WP7 will be the second most popular platform by 2015, I felt that I could hardly avoid taking a trial-look at the fatal football on here.

The first thing to say is that as far as the enterprise is concerned, Windows Phone 7 is going to have as much impact as the New York earthquake. Lots of field service teams are using Windows Mobile 6.5 (strange but true – it’s because the only ruggedised handsets you can buy in any volume utilise the platform) but this is unlikely to count as an advantage to its predecessor because of what Chris Hazelton calls “the lack of a clear migration path from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 7.” In the last year, the number of enterprises issuing/catering for Windows Phone 7 fell from 6 percent to 4 percent (Hazelton/ChangeWave Research again), and the downward trend is not likely to reverse unless the number of consumers taking up the OS rises dramatically, forcing IT departments to cater for it as they are now catering for Android and iOS.

According to IDC and Gartner there’s a decent chance that that reversal will be felt by the time 2015 rolls around. Their thinking seems to be that WP will pick up a lot of the current Symbian user-base as well as a decent chunk of migrants from RIM’s Blackberry platform. Only time will tell if that presumes a little too much on the brand loyalty commanded by Nokia and too little on the wooing power of future iterations of Android and iOS.

As far as the software goes (*lining up to kick the football*)…first impressions are good. Microsoft has obviously taken a look at Android, said “we can do better than that” (correct) and, unusually, looked at Apple and thought “we need to make it different enough to matter” (again, correct). Although knowing what you need to do is not the same as knowing how to do it, there’s much to improve. The integration of Office goes beyond the tokenistic (but not by much) and the inclusion of an XBOX Live ‘hub’ takes advantage of what is currently Microsoft’s most exciting asset. The Zune software makes iTunes look like the painful fait accompli most of us know it to be and Bing Maps deserves the wider audience that integration with the platform should give it. I won’t go into further detail here – for those looking for a fuller review of the software, this is a good place to start.

Of course, even if Microsoft doesn’t pull the football out from under their users this time round, how far it flies will depend upon a factor that we haven’t even brought into the equation thus far: the vibrancy of the ecosystem. In other words, if nobody is making apps for WP7, it hardly matters how well the platform stands up and we can revise those 2015 estimates down to zero. As of July this year, the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace held 25,000 apps, against 350,000 for the App Store, and 150,000 for the Android Marketplace (numbers via CNET). Incomparable – but not insignificant.

Microsoft has an expensive road ahead of it in 2012. It will need to spend a lot on wooing both consumers and developers, even as it pushes towards Windows Phone 8 (which is looking like an unnecessary distraction at this point) or the take-up of the platform will sputter and die. And with desktop computing in not-that-long-term decline, that is unthinkable.

Do you eat healthy? Do you know what goes into your food? Sometimes I’d rather not know. Take for instance the recent egg scandal around a large producer for McDonald’s. Or this article about everyday food such as potatoes and popcorn that pose hidden dangers.

In this month’s installment of the Mobile Gourmet Review, I have been playing with an app called Fooducate. The purpose of this app is to educate consumers on more than 200,000 packaged food products that we eat everyday. It’s like having a dietician in the palm of your hands. Fooducate provides a letter grade for a food based on the analysis of the food’s known ingredients list and nutritional values.

As a 20-something, I’ve had the luxury of growing up with technology as a bigger part of my life than certainly my parents and their generation did.  There are photos of me as an adorable infant sitting on my father’s lap trying to type on the keyboard while he worked on his Commodore 64 or his work Compaq Portable (for the record – “portable” had a whole new meaning back then).  Later at school I learned to count using games we played on some of the first Apple computers used in education, and at home I split time with my brother and sister on our IBM AT and later the Compaq Presario 425 Desktop.

I bet kids today can't imagine using these in school. Then again I bet my parents couldn't have imagined I'd get to use this either.

In the early 90’s my dad discovered Prodigy, which predated AOL in our house and was my first window in the future of how technology and the internet specifically were going to change our lives. And yet, it shocks me still every time kids and technology collide in amazing ways.

As a YouTube fan, I’ve come across a couple hilarious and adorable videos about kids and technology that I thought I’d share with you all, as a constant reminder of how quickly the new world order changes.  For me, it was helping my dad and mom program digital clocks with ease, or figuring out their Nokia cell phones and what five numbers they should program, which frankly came very naturally to me J. For the next generations there are a slew of 80’s and 90’s pop culture mishaps I’m sure I’ll have to answer for and explain, but technology is definitely not a topic I expect I’ll have to do much teaching about.

Check out this mini-Steve Jobs-esque app developer

Thomas Suarez. App developer, TEDx presenter and 6th grader.

An adorable little boy and his iPad Bridger is adorable, two years old and better at operating an iPad than half of my friends.

And one baby struggling to get the magazine to “go to the next page.” This baby is learning early on that technology creates expectations of the world that can frustrate us sometimes.