computers | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

ABC Nightlife Computers – The end of Windows XP

Windows XP, the Privacy Act and an Internet Magna Carta are what we’ll be looking at on Tony Delroy’s Nightlife.

Paul Wallbank joins Tony Delroy on ABC Nightlife across Australia to discuss how technology affects your business and life.

For the March 2014 spot we’ll be looking at the end of Windows XP, Australia’s Privacy Act, the web turning 25 and the call for an Internet Magna Carta.

If you missed the show, you can listen online at the Tony Delroy’s Nightlife homepage.

One of the show’s listeners, Linda, called in about asking for Apple Mac security software; two free products for OsX users are Sophos Home Edition and Avira Free. While Macs are less prone to malware than Windows systems, it’s still a good idea to be protected.

Another listener, Grant, described a problem with his computer which sounds like it’s infected with something. We recommend the free Malwarebytes as the first step to fixing the problem.

The end of Windows XP

After 13 years, Microsoft is retiring Windows XP; what does this mean for those of us still using it, or for our banks who still use it in their ATMs? Some of the questions we’ll cover include;

why is Microsoft pulling the pin on Windows XP now?
what happens on April 8 when Microsoft stops support?
are Windows XP users still protected from viruses?
what’s this story about bank ATMs running Windows XP?
the web turned 25 last week. Didn’t it turn twenty a year or so back?
inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, called for an Internet Magna Carta last week; what does he mean?
could such an idea work in today’s globalised world?
on similar topic, the new Privacy Act came into effect last week; what does this mean for the average person?

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on the night on 1300 800 222 within Australia or +61 2 8333 1000 from outside Australia.

Tune in on your local ABC radio station from 10pm Eastern Summer time or listen online at www.abc.net.au/nightlife.

You can SMS Nightlife’s talkback on 19922702, or through twitter to @paulwallbank using the #abcnightlife hashtag or visit the Nightlife Facebook page.

IT becomes the plumbing

As the internet of everything and cloud computing takes over, IT is becoming just like the plumbing. This is a good thing.

One of the things that jumped out of last week’s smart city tour in Barcelona is that Nicholas Carr’s IT Doesn’t Matter is coming true — IT is now the plumbing.

That’s not to depreciate IT, it means the technology is now becoming so embedded in society and business that people no longer notice.

Like roads, electricity and water people assume it will be available but don’t notice the massive effort or investment required to make sure these services work.

With cloud computing, pervasive internet and connected devices, most business never need to see an IT worker.

For telco executives, IT managers and tech support people this is a blow to their egos as they always wanted their industries to be more than utilities.

In one way being a utility legitimises IT as it makes the industry more important than just a bunch of geeks playing with computers.

That also means that things have to work, ‘best effort’ services no longer cut it when you’re a utility and things have to work 99.99% of the time. Just like in plumbing.

Becoming the plumbing could be the best thing that happened to the IT industry.

Intel’s challenge to find a new message and market

Can Intel adapt to the post PC marketplace where the old Wintel dominance no longer matters

Twenty years ago people cared about the specifications of their computers and chip maker Intel led the industry with its marketing of 486, Pentiums, Pentium Duos and Pentium IIs.

As we come to the end of the PC era, the consumerisation of technology and the rise of cloud computing mean customers no longer care about what’s inside their systems and Intel is struggling to find a new message.

Over the last few months Intel have been showing off their latest range of Central Processing Units (CPUs) to enterprise and small to medium business (SMB) groups. Last week the company hosted an SMB event in Sydney that illustrated how Intel is struggling to cut through the market.

Speaking at the event was Steph Hinds – an evangelist for cloud computing – who told the story of how her Growthwise accounting practice was flooding out during storms.

Because her systems were on the cloud Steph and her staff were able to work from home and local cafes while the landlord fixed her offices. Had Growthwise been using a server based system the business would have been crippled while her IT people implemented a disaster recovery plan.

Steph’s story in itself illustrated the Clean, Well Lighted Place argument for cloud computing and also showed how Intel is struggling to sell its PC and server upgrade cycle message in an era where that business model is dead.

This didn’t stop some of the other speakers at the small business event trying to sell the idea that upgrading computer systems and retaining an IT support company were essential to small business success but it’s a message that was valid a decade ago.

For Intel the challenge is to find a new message – it may well be that the company’s future lies in supplying the powerful CPUs that run data centres, or maybe the low energy and maintenance chips required to control the billions of intelligent devices that will run the internet of everything.

The company’s launch of their Galileo board – a tiny computer designed to compete in the intelligent devices market with the likes of the Raspberry Pi – is a step in the latter direction and shows Intel is exploring the possibilities.

Wherever Intel’s future lies, it doesn’t lie in trying to sell a business model that is quickly going the way of the Brontosaurus.

During most of the PC era, it was the Wintel partnership that dominated the computer industry, now Microsoft have realised this fundamental market change and started their journey to become a devices and services company.

The challenge now lies with Intel to decide where their journey will take them in a post PC world.

Google and Microsoft show how online business is changing

Google and Microsoft’s quarterly reports show how all businesses are vulnerable in times of change.

Both Microsoft and Google yesterday reported their second quarter earnings for 2013 and both missed the targets expected analysts. Does this really mean anything?

Microsoft’s earnings were particularly notable as they included a $900 million dollar write off on Surface RT inventories, this almost certainly means a key part of the company’s tablet strategy has failed.

What’s striking in Microsoft’s earnings report is the terrible performance of the Windows Division which saw sales increase 10% year-on-year to 4.4 billion dollars, but earnings collapse by over 50%. Excluding the Surface RT write off, the division would still have seen a ten percent fall.

The company’s statement emphasised how the division is struggling with increasing costs.

Windows Division operating income decreased $1.3 billion, primarily due to higher cost of revenue and sales and marketing expenses, offset in part by revenue growth. Cost of revenue increased $1.2 billion primarily reflecting product costs associated with Surface and Windows 8, including the charge for Surface RT inventory adjustments of approximately $900 million. Sales and marketing expenses increased $344 million, reflecting advertising costs associated with Windows 8 and Surface.

At Google, the company’s 2nd Quarter report show trend is still upwards but the core business of online advertising is showing some cracks as the total number of paid clicks grows, but the value of each falls. At the same time traffic aquisition costs are rising at the same rate as revenues.

This could indicate that advertisers’ appetite for online links is fading. For smaller businesses, the cost of adwords campaigns has been escalating to the point where the old days of newspaper classifieds and Yellow Pages listings start to look cheap.

Couple the cost of advertising with the inevitable ‘ad blindness’ that web surfers have developed and a worrying trend for Google starts to appear. Overall Google’s net profit margin was 26%, down from 31% a year earlier.

While both companies remain insanely profitable – Google earned $14 billion this quarter and Microsoft $6 billion – both businesses are showing stresses as their markets evolve. It proves no business can afford to be complacent in these times.

How form factors evolve as tech affects design

Technology often dictates design. As tech evolves, we can rethink the design of many things we take for granted.

While out helping a friend shop for computers this morning, it occurred to me how the keyboards of laptop PCs have changed.

For many years, notepad keyboards were restricted to roughly 80 characters as the 4 x 3 ratio of screens have dictated the dimensions of of the keys. Here’s an example.

In recent times though the wider screen dimensions of laptops has seen the resurrection of an older layout — the 102 key layout with an added numerical pad.

What’s interesting about this is how technology form factors evolve.

Not so long ago mobile phone manufacturers were competing to create the smallest handset. Cellphones like the Motorola Razr pushed the limit on how small phones could be.

With the arrival of the smartphone, the size and shape of mobile phones changed. Now the limiting factor was a screen big enough to read the internet on and display a thirty key keyboard.

Now reliable handwriting recognition software means that some phones can eliminate the use of keyboards at all, which means we may start to see the race to create smaller cellphones restarting.

The layout of all of the items we use, from cars to computers, is largely determined by technology limitations. As the tech evolves, we can start to rethink how a device is designed, just as the laptop and iPhone designers did.

With whole new display, input and sensing technologies being developed, there are many household items that may well look different in the near future.

ABC 702 mornings – Storage and your computer

How we deal with the information explosion in the age of Big Data is the topic of today’s 702 Sydney segment with Linda Mottram

This morning on 702 Sydney I’m talking to Linda Mottram on the decidedly unsexy topic of storage – hard drives, cloud computing and the struggle to keep up with ever expanding file sizes of documents, photos and downloads.

It’s an opportunity to revisit the How Much Data Does The Internet Need topic which I covered for Radio National last year, although almost certainly that needs updating.

Earlier this year networking vendor Cisco released its 2013 Virtual Networking Index which forecast global data traffic growing fourteen fold over the next five years.

Those bytes slopping around the internet have to come to rest on someone’s hard drive and this is what’s driving the storage crisis.

Yesterday US business site Venture Beat had an op-ed by an executive from Seagate, the world’s biggest hard drive manufacturer where he discussed the storage challenges with a claim from industry consultants IDC that worldwide computer storage is 2.7 zettabytes.

A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes, or ten followed by twenty zeros – it’s the equivalent of a billion one terabyte hard drives that are standard on most cheap desktop computers.

Where those hard drives are located is the big challenge, is it on your laptop, smartphone or on a somewhere on a cloud service?

The other big challenge is what do you do with all this information – which is where the Big Data discussion comes in.

While data storage is a mundane topic, it’s a big one that matters. I hope you can tune in.

We’d love to hear your views so join the conversation with your on-air questions, ideas or comments; phone in on 1300 222 702 or post a question on ABC702 Sydney’s Facebook page.

If you’re a social media users, you can also follow the show through twitter to @paulwallbank and @702Sydney.

Sunset on the laptop market

Does Toshiba’s release of their Kira laptop mark the beginning of the end for portable computing?

Yesterday Toshiba released their Kira laptop computer – a premium device aimed at the ‘aspirational’ market.

The Kira is a fine device with good specs, little weight and an ambitious $2,000 price point. It probably also marks the laptop computer’s decline.

As tablet computers and smartphones become most people’s preferred computer devices, the laptop computer is becoming a niche device and increasingly less relevant to most technology users. The Kira is fighting for the share of a marketplace that has moved on.

Losing the Aspirationals

Unfortunately for Toshiba, those aspirational customers are locked into their Apple iPads and Sumsung smartphones. Laptops are seen as work devices more valued for their portability and cost.

“We have to give our customers a reason to upgrade their computers,” said Mark Whittard, the Managing director of Toshiba Australia.

The problem is computer users have little reason to upgrade, as nice as the Kira is the price point is just too high for customers who’ve been groomed to expect sub – thousand dollar systems and there are few compelling reasons to buy such a device.

Caught in a pricing pincer

Price points are probably the biggest problem for computer manufacturers – one of the reasons for the tablet computer’s success is they delivered an easy to use, portable computer for half the price of a portable computer.

At the same time the rise of netbooks and the rush to dump unwanted Microsoft Vista and Windows 7 stock onto the market groomed customers to expect cheap computers – few computer buyers are interested in spending more than a thousand dollars on a device.

These factors have squeezed the margins of the major manufacturers like Dell, HP and Asus.

Those pressures are going to increase as volumes fall. For much of the 2000s, laptop computers were fast moving consumer goods – pricing and profits were based on moving large numbers of the devices.

As manufacturing volumes fall, those devices are going to lose their economies of scale which will put further pressures on vendors’ margins.

Laptops aren’t going away, they still have a role for power users – particularly for those, like this writer, who need a tactile keyboard and media editing capabilities.

However those feature rich devices with their nice keyboards are going to cost more as parts become more expensive.

For laptop vendors the challenge is to find the profitable market niches and exploit them. In some ways Toshiba probably has a better opportunity than most with its range of premium and gaming portable computers.

Those in the market hoping the happy days of big volumes and good profits will return to the laptop PC market are in for a painful future. It’s something retailers, resellers and vendors need to understand.

Hurtling into the post PC era

The latest computer sales figures are not good for those businesses who depend up personal computers.

Consulting firm IDC quarterly report on PC shipment figures this quarter shows a stunning 14% drop of global computer sales. On those numbers, the PC era is definately over.

Across the board the figures are horrible with double digit declines across the board. Market leader HP reported PC sales had fallen by nearly a quarter yet they retained their market lead as all of their competitors reported similar falls.

What’s also notable is the PC industry’s ultrabook attempt to wean consumers off cheap nebooks has backfired terrible, as the analysts note;

Fading Mini Notebook shipments have taken a big chunk out of the low-end market while tablets and smartphones continue to divert consumer spending.

Instead of buying higher priced ultabooks, consumers have abandoned portable PCs altogether and gone to smartphones or tablet computers.

The PC manufacturers must be rueing how they let the tablet computer market slip through their fingers during the 2000s.

Failing to ship decent tablet computers is symptomatic of a bigger problem for the PC manufacturers – their inability to innovate.

The PC industry is struggling to identify innovations that differentiate PCs from other products and inspire consumers to buy, and instead is meeting significant resistance to changes perceived as cumbersome or costly.

As IDC point out, even if they do introduce new products, consumers are wary that any “innovation” is going to be cumbersome. Basically the PC manufacturers have lost their customers’ trust.

How this affects Dell’s proposed buy out remains to be seen; it’s hard to see how investors would not be concerns at a 10% fall in sales, although Dell was one of the better performers.

For Microsoft, this news should further accelerate their moving products and customers to their cloud and enterprise products. For their Windows division it looks like there are tough times ahead.

The decline of the PC market is itself a study in product and innovation cycles. It could well be that the personal computer is going the way of the fax machine.

For some businesses that will be tragedy, but the market – and the opportunities – move on.

The Five Stages of abandoning a product

Microsoft show us how to kill a product with the slow abandonment of Windows 8

Killing a technology product is never a clean process, as Google well know. Microsoft show the way to deal with a failed project and we’re seeing their five stages of abandoning a product as they prepare to retire Windows 8.

The stages of Microsoft are abandoning a product are well known – the failure of Microsoft Vista is the best example, but not the only one.

As Microsoft smooths Window 8’s pillow and prepares for its imminent demise we can see the process at work.

Denial

At first the company denies there is a problem, the flashy advertising campaigns are boosted and the various ‘in the camp’ commentators get informal briefings from company evangelists to fuel their snarky columns about people getting Microsoft’s latest product all wrong.

This usually goes on for around six months until the market feedback that the product is dog becomes overwhelming – usually this happens at the same time the first reliable sales figures start appearing.

Anger

As the consensus in the broader community becomes settled that the new product isn’t good, the company’s tame commentators turn nasty and lash out at the critics for ‘misrepresenting’ the new product.

This is usually a touchy period for Microsoft and other vendors as they can’t risk being too aggressive but they have to allow their allies to both let off steam and try to recover the credibility they lost in hyping what’s clearly been a market failure.

Bargaining

Once it’s clear the perceived wisdom that the product isn’t very good isn’t going to be shaken, the vendor comes out with special offers and pricing changes to try and coax users over to the new service.

With Windows 8 Microsoft tried something unusual, rather than cutting prices, Microsoft announced they would increase the cost of Windows 8.

The idea was probably to panic people into buying the product and giving Microsoft a revenue and market share bounce for the quarter.

It didn’t work – the consensus that Windows 7 is a better product meant people stayed away.

Depression

As the realisation that pricing tweaks and promotional stunts won’t work sends the company, and its supporters, into a funk.

For experienced industry watchers, the silence around a product that’s been heavily hyped and defended for the previous year or two is a good indication that the next version is being accelerated.

Acceptance

Eventually the vendor accepts the product has failed and starts working on its own exit strategy – hopefully one that doesn’t see too many executives sacked.

With Microsoft’s this process starts with a quiet announcement that the replacement version of Windows is on the way, in this case Windows Blue.

At the same time, the tame commentators start talking about ‘leaks’ of the wonderful new system that is in the pipeline. Early beta versions of the new product start popping up in developers’ forums and file sharing sites.

Eventually you get stories like this one that appeared in The Verge yesterday – Windows Blue leaks online and we can be sure the Microsoft public relations machine has subtly moved onto the next version.

Vale Windows 8

So Windows 8 is coming to an early end. In one way this is a shame as it was a brave gamble by Steve Ballmer and his team to solve the ‘three screen’ problem.

Computer users today are using three or more screens or devices – a desktop, a smartphone and a TV or tablet computer.

Microsoft were hoping they could develop a system that unified all these platforms and gave users a common experience regardless of what they were using.

It appears to have failed, probably because the different devices don’t have the same user experience so a keyboard based system doesn’t work on a touchscreen while a touch based system sucks really badly on a desktop or laptop computer – which is Windows 8’s real problem.

Unrealistic expectations

Another problem for Microsoft were the unrealistic expectations that Window 8 would halt the slide of personal computer sales.

PC manufacturers have been baffled by the rise of smartphones and tablet computers – vendors like Dell, HP and Acer have miserably in moving into the new product lines and they hoped that Microsoft could help arrest their market declines.

This was asking too much of Windows 8 and was never really likely.

So the cycle begins again with Windows Blue, the question is whether it will be the last version of Windows as we move further in the post-PC era.

Would you know if you’ve been hacked?

With 200,000 new malware threats each day, keeping ahead of the online bad guys is impossible. We need to be smarter.

“I report to head office in Moscow” is a line which either means you’re in a James Bond movie or at a lunch briefing with the Russian security company Kaspersky.

While the James Bond movie would be fun, the Kaspersky lunch was an interesting briefing on their new security product.

A notable aspect of the discussion was the explosion in malware – there are over a hundred million malicious programs circulating on the internet with over 200,000 new threats every day.

“We struggle to keep up,” says Kaspersky Lab ANZ Managing Director, Andrew Mamonitis.

That a security company with 2,700 specialists struggles to keep up with the evolving threats emphasises the scale of the task facing a network administrators and IT managers.

It’s a task beyond all but the biggest companies.

Sometime ago I suggested every computer user should assume their computers are compromised and managers should work work on limiting what intruders can do to system.

With staff bringing their own devices to work, those risks are multiplied as some devices will almost certainly be infected with malware.

There are some basic things that computer users should do to make their systems harder to break however it’s almost impossible to protect against a zero-day exploit or the efforts of a sophisticated and determined hacker.

With our homes and motor cars, we realise it’s almost impossible to keep determined thieves out, so we take precautions like alarms, immobilisers and basic security such as keeping valuables out of plain view.

That attitude is what we now need with our computer technology, any hope of keeping your office server impregnable from outside attack is long gone.

Blind faith in the algorithm

Putting too much faith in computer programs may cause problems for the unwary.

It’s fairly safe to say Apple’s ditching of Google Maps for their own navigation system has proved not to be company’s smartest move.

The humiliation of Apple was complete when the Victoria Police issued a warning against using the iPhone map application after people became lost in the desert when following faulty directions to the town of Mildura.

Mapping is a complex task and it’s not surpising these mistakes happen, particular given the dynamic nature of road conditions and closures. It’s why GPS and mapping systems incorporate millions of hours of input into the databases underlying these services.

Glitches with GPS navigations and mapping applications aren’t new. Some of the most notorious glitches have been in the UK where huge trucks have been directed down small country lanes only to find themselves stuck in medieval villages far from their intended location.

While those mishaps make for good reading, there are real risks in these misdirections. One of the best publicised tragedies of mis-reading maps was the death of James Kim in 2007.

Kim, a well known US tech journalist, was driving with his family from Portland, Oregan to a hotel on the Pacific Coast in November 2006 when they tried to take a short cut across the mountains.

After several hours driving the family became lost and stuck in snowdrifts and James died while hiking out to find help. His wife and two children were rescued after a week in the wilderness.

Remarkably, despite warnings of the risks, people still get stuck on that road. The local newspaper describes it the annual ritual as find a tourist in the snow season.

Partly this irresponsibility is due to our modern inability to assess risk, but a more deeper problem is blind faith in technology and the algorithms that decide was is good and bad.

A blind faith in algorithms is a risk to businesses as well – Facebook shuts down accounts that might be showing nipples, Google locks people out of their Places accounts while PayPal freeze tens of thousands of dollars of merchants’ funds. All of these because their computers say there is a problem.

Far more sinister is the use of computer algorithms to determine who is a potential terrorist, as many people who’ve inadvertently found themselves on the US government’s No Fly List have discovered.

As massive volumes of information is being gathered on individuals and businesses it’s tempting for all of us to rely on computer programs to tell us what is relevant and to join the dots between various data points.

While the computers often right, it is sometimes wrong as well and that’s why proper supervision and understanding of what the system is telling people is essential.

If we blindly accept what the computer tells us, we risk being stuck in our own deserts or a snowdrift as a result.

Unprotected computing practices

The news that many medical computing systems are infected with malware doesn’t suprise those working in the field

A US study finding malware is rampant on medical equipment shouldn’t come as a surprise to those running industrial computer systems in their businesses.

It’s notoriously difficult to update medical equipment or other sensitive systems as a security patch could have unintended consequences. Unlike a home or business computer, these patches have to be thoroughly tested beyond the precautions vendors take.

So it isn’t surprising that these systems aren’t kept up to date although some equipment suppliers are more tardy than they should be in updating the servers they supply.

A few years ago I came across CCTV systems running on the original version of Windows 2000 which were hopelessly compromised. This is an unacceptable situation for the customer and was more the result of vendor carelessness than any concern that customers could be affected by these unsecured machines.

Not having the latest software patches creates a weakness in any computer device as most common way viruses find their way onto networks is through systems not being updated – Australia’s Defense Signals Directorate rates unpatched systems as being the number one cause of corporate security breaches.

This is what caught out the Iranian nuclear program with the Stuxnet worm as the Siemens SCADA devices used by the Iranians were running older, unpatched versions of Windows. The designers of Stuxnet took advantage of a number of known weaknesses in the software and were able to damage the equipment being controlled by the systems.

Obviously systems should be patched wherever they can be and there’s no excuse for not patching most office and home computers. It’s also worthwhile carrying out a number of other security steps to ensure an infected computer can’t damage your network or catch a virus through your Internet connection.

The survey looking at these medical systems is a good wake up call to all of us that we need to take computer security seriously in our businesses.