Compelling reading on either platform

A couple of weeks ago in The Observer, John Naughton reviewed the state of battle between Apple and Microsoft and revisited Umberto Eco’s 1994 analogy with the Catholic and Protestant religions. Eco saw the Apple Mac as “cheerful, friendly, conciliatory; it tells the faithful how they must proceed step by step” while he said the PC “allows free interpretation of scripture, demands difficult personal decisions, imposes a subtle hermeneutics upon the user, and takes for granted the idea that not all can achieve salvation”.

Naughton argued the continuing relevance of the analogy. But I think the more interesting contest at the moment is that between Apple and Google. It’s a contest at which I’ve been enjoying a ringside seat in recent weeks, as I renewed my contract with T-Mobile and upgraded to their Google Android-powered G1 phone while my wife ditched her nine-year-old Sony Ericsson and signed up for the iPhone. The fast-growing market for 3G touchphones is the frontline of the consumer technology battle.

The motivations for our respective choices are instructive to explore. My wife contemplated the iPhone as a self-standing device. She was drawn to its drop-dead good looks and its intuitive ease of use. She liked the idea of a device which could serve as her diary and address book as well as her phone, but she wasn’t excited by the iPhone’s multimedia capabilities nor did she give much attention to the issues about syncing the phone to her computer (a PC).

I started from the presumption that I wanted a device that would fit my multi-platform life. For the past year, I have been working primarily on an Ubuntu-Linux computer, but also use the PC, and recently acquired an Asus netbook for when I’m out and about. The glue which integrates these various machines into a productive system is the cloud – more specifically, a suite of internet products which store my data online so that I can access it from any device.

I considered an iPhone but was drawn to the Google phone because it seemed specifically designed as the kind of internet appliance that would support my modus operandi. Since much of my life was already committed to Google products, setting up the G1 was a dream. Simply inputting my Google credentials the first time I switched on the phone was enough to populate it with all my diary appointments and contacts.

The iPhone, by contrast, demanded precisely the “difficult personal decisions” and “subtle hermeneutics” that Eco had ascribed to the Microsoft experience. There’s no simple, over-the-air approach to managing data between different devices. Apple offer their own cloud-based products such as calendar, contacts and email. But these come at a hefty annual price, are clunky compared with Google’s products, and lock you into Apple’s ‘me.com’email address. For the PC, the iPhone syncs with Microsoft Outlook but only by plugging in the device to the computer thereby foregoing the grab-and-go appeal of a 3G phone which automatically updates itself with the appointments you’ve added to your calendar before running out to a meeting. Ultimately, we found a way to sync the iPhone over the air with Google Calendar and Contacts using a product called NuevaSync so, barring a few occasional hiccups, it behaves pretty much like a Google phone.

For sheer joy, though, the iPhone wins hands down. It identifies your location with unnerving precision in a matter of seconds which is great if you’re out and about and need to pull up a map to find your way somewhere. It is pleasing to the eye and to handle, sports elegant icons and offers a host of additional applications which you can install and which just work. The G1 steps up with all the style of a 1970s trimphone and it’s too early yet for an attractive ecology of applications to be available. In time, though, I would expect the Google Android platform to pull ahead in relation to applications. For the great strength of Android is that it is an open source operating system, indeed a variant of Linux. This means that anyone can design software for Android phones and get their products to market, whereas Apple inserts itself between the development community and end users.

A final thought concerns how Google seems to have drawn both my wife and me further into its fold as a result of our phone choices. The G1 prompted me to switch my email to GMail and, when I’m at the PC, the Windows-only Google Chrome browser is my default choice for the way it turns my web calendar, contacts and tasks into fast desktop applications.  My wife’s adoption of Google Calendar has enabled us to share our respective calendars and encouraged us to dispense with the paper family calendar that we have always maintained hitherto.

I’ve written in the past about the risks to privacy of entrusting so much of one’s life to one company. The dimensions of this risk become ever more apparent, as Mark Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center pointed out when Google demonstrated its ability to predict flu epidemics. His concerns were reported by The Register:

Google’s Trends service has long used aggregated search data to track the habits of the world’s web users. But health-related data is a particularly touchy subject, and Rotenberg sees Flu Trends as a chance to broaden the public debate over data aggregation – and finally put some meaning into these anonymization claims.

The problem, Rotenberg says, is that data aggregation calls attention to specific data stored on Google’s servers, making it that much more vulnerable to, say, a subpoena or a national security letter. “Let’s say that instead of Flu Trends, Google’s doing SARS Trends – tracking a very serious communicable disease,” he explains. “If there’s a big SARS upsurge somewhere, the government would be at Google’s door asking where did that data come from.”

And that’s just one example. “You can imagine any number of different scenarios where people would be interested in finding who the individuals are making those searches.”

Internet companies are beginning to identify marketing advantage in being responsive to privacy concerns. Yahoo! has upped the ante, setting a maximum period of three months for storing much of the data it keeps on users. If Yahoo! survives as an entity, it seems likely that Google and others may eventually follow suit.

In addition to privacy concerns, though, I’m now beginning to worry about excessive dependence on one company. Andrew Nusca, on ZD Net, is thinking along similar lines – warning that we are creating Google monoculture which may cause systemic problems if it were to collapse. I think this risk may be a little over-stated since Google operates in competitive markets for many of its products and I personally would have little difficulty switching if Google disappeared overnight. I chat to my friends through Google Chat, but they’re also in Linked In and Facebook. I’m a heavy user of Google Maps but Open Street Map or even this would serve me just as well.

The moral? The smartphone revolution is driving us to consolidate our data in fewer and fewer places. But it’s important to have a backup strategy. Your data should always be accessible whatever the agents to whom you entrust it might do.

When I was preparing to go self-employed, one of the things to which I looked forward was breaking free from the shackles of corporate IT and being the master of my own computer setup.

One consequence of this is that, for the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with Linux.  I’ve had an interest in the open source movement for some time and have long used open source software, but always until now on Windows PCs.  As soon as I was working from home, it became necessary to buy another computer since my wife also works at home and demand for the main PC in the house was outstripping supply.  So I treated this as an opportunity to see whether it would be feasible to make the switch to a totally open source setup.

I may have been spurred on to do this by my experience of working with the gentlemen from the Open Source Consortium, during my last job at the BBC Trust.  They were concerned to make sure the BBC was more sensitive to Linux users in its provision of video on-demand and were persuasive in their advocacy of open source computing generally.  I felt I owed it to myself professionally to deepen my own understanding.

The first advantage became apparent at purchase.  I began by looking for a decent, used laptop on eBay to recondition.  Then I realised I could buy a new one from Dell for under £300 with the Ubuntu version of Linux pre-installed.  Everything worked out of the box, the machine picked up our wifi connection right away, and I was ready to go.

Ubuntu comes bundled with familiar programmes like Open Office and Firefox.  On the whole, I’d say these seem to work more seamlessly than they do on Windows.  I thought this might be my imagination, but I’m told there are good technical reasons why this might be the case.  Less appealing is Ubuntu’s bundled email client, Evolution, which is supposed to be compatible with Microsoft Exchange server.  I found the performance of Evolution far too flaky – with the cache having to be cleared out manually more or less every day in order to see an up to date picture of my inbox.  After some weeks of irritation, this actually turned out to be an advantage since it prompted me to ditch the Exchange account I’d been using for email and save myself £80 a year.

I’d been using Exchange largely because it offers push-email to my Windows Mobile phone but I also liked the way my calendar and task list was kept up to date across my phone and computers.  Counter-intuitively, I found these things were becoming less important to me as a self-employed agent.  I like to receive email alerts when I’m on the move, but I resist the temptation to reply to them until I’m back at a computer since emails composed on the move and on a fiddly little device somehow come out terse and abrupt.   My phone now collects my email via IMAP once an hour, and I’m rediscovering the joys of using Thunderbird to manage email on my computers.  Thunderbird can handle multiple email identities with ease and using IMAP means my email is always kept in sync across the PC, Linux machine and phone.

The solution for my calendar and tasks was to switch to web applications which bypasses the need to find software which works across different platforms.  I use Google Calendar and sync it with my phone two or three times a day using OggSync.  I don’t know why I ever thought it was useful to make sure the calendar on my computer was updated as I added events on my phone.  I’m the sole user of my calendar so there’s no danger of anyone adding conflicting events.

I manage my tasks with Remember the Milk which is a thing of beauty when it comes to personal productivity tools.  I’d been aware of this highly-rated service for some time and hadn’t seen what the fuss was about.  Now I’d say the simple power of its lists, tags and search filters has to be experienced to be appreciated.  It also provides a stunningly good scaled-down experience when accessed by mobile phone (which can’t be said of Google Calendar).

Finding a solution to sync my contacts across the different machines is proving elusive, but not a huge problem.  I use a plugin to Thunderbird called Zindus to sync email addresses that I use; not ideal but good enough.

For word processing, spreadsheets and so forth, I’ve switched completely from Microsoft Office to Open Office.  In theory, Open Office should handle Microsoft Office documents with ease and you should be able to use whichever application is available and takes your fancy.  But I’ve never found this to be the case, and Open Office currently can’t even open the Office 2007 format (something which will be rectified in its next major release).  So I find it easier to work with Open Office across my Windows and Linux machines and convert documents which I’m sending to other people.

So for basic computing needs a Linux set up works very well – especially in the context of cloud computing, where much of our data and the applications we use are actually held online.  Good, freely available software means it’s possible to run a comprehensive basic setup without hassle.

But for anything slightly tricky, the benefits of Microsoft’s network effects soon tell and the clunkiness of Linux becomes tiresome.  Linux can talk to Windows XP machines very easily, but it can’t network with our Windows Vista PC which means it can’t share the printer attached to this machine and I have to use a (paid-for) sync programme called Powerfolder to gain access to my files across computers.  I’m also having difficulty getting the Linux machine to connect to the internet through my new mobile broadband stick from T-Mobile [see footnote below].  For these more complicated requirements, you have to program the machine using the command line and the documentation available is not particularly penetrable for a non-technical user.

Ubuntu, with its Windows-like graphical user interface, hides many of the machine’s configuration possibilities behind the command line.  It’s a good option if you want a reliable computing environment and with which you don’t intend to tinker much.  Conversely, if you’re a techie, it presents a highly configurable environment which you can customise completely to your needs.  The problem arises if you fall between these two extremes.  Someone like me, who’s pretty technically minded but by no means a coding expert, has no option but to ascend the learning curve and get stuck in.  So what you save on financial outlay you lose again on the time you have to commit to manage your IT.

The Microsoft computing environment has its own frustrations, but I can’t yet see a scenario where I’d be prepared to say goodbye to it for ever.

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[Footnote: T-Mobile, incidentally, sold this to me with an explicit assurance that it supported Linux so brownie points are in short supply for them.]