Why Blogger is better than Wordpress

I am an oddball for moving my blogging from Wordpress to Google's Blogger.  Most people go the other way.  They start with blogger - because it is a great starter platform - and then eventually move to Wordpress.  In fact, I did that, but now I'm moving back to Blogger. Here's why I'm an oddball for doing it, and why more bloggers should be oddballs.

Wordpress Vs. Blogger Compare & Contrast

This compare is based on a self-hosted wordpress blog(i.e. wordpress.org). I won't compare the wordpress.com hosting with blogger because Blogger is just SOOO obviously better than wordpress.com.  If anyone wants to argue otherwise, I will gladly squash your counter-points in the comments :)

Blogger is Free!

Blogger is free.  I do not have to pay any hosting costs for it. It is hard to argue with free. Wordpress, on the other hand, requires you to purchase shared hosting or better. That can start around 50$ a year and go up as your blog becomes more popular and has to deal with traffic spikes.

Some might say that you have to pay for a domain name or a 'premium' theme.  However, you'd have to pay for those things on a wordpress blog in addition to hosting.  So that's no argument.

Blogger is Easy to Maintain

With Blogger, I do not have to deal with updates or maintenance. If I have a wordpress blog, I have worry about keeping the software up to date, plugins up to date, even my theme. Admittedly, this only requires a small amount of time... that is... until something goes wrong with the update.  Then your must spend hours - maybe days fixing it. It can mean that your website is down, or have reduced functionality while YOU have to figure it out.

Blogger Scales with Your Traffic

Most bloggers dream of getting a blog that is popular and gets a lot of web traffic. This dream can turn into a nightmare though once the blog's loading time starts climbing as your cheap hosting fails to keep up. At that point, you then have to detect that it is happening and upgrade your hardware. Which means more money and possibly a migration.

Blogger, on the other hand has a literally effortless process for upgrading. It just handles it. Period!  Your blog runs on Google's hardware which means they do all the monitoring and upgrading(probably not the correct word for what they do) for you.  There are no changes you have to make or pay for if your blog goes from 5 hits a day to 5 million hits a day.  The performance and page load times never change.

With wordpress, you could spend time fine-tuning your website, but again, that is time you spend on technical issues instead of blogging.  I know I would spend days testing out page cacheing, Content Delivery Networks, and trying to figure out which plugin is taking so long to load.

Blogger is Robust (Crashproof)

Another dream for a blogger is a big popular site links to one of your articles. This means a huge traffic spike. But, your website is running on cheap hosting and can't handle the spike and it instead crashes.  A lot of people call this the "Reddit" effect.(I'm old enough that I still refer to it as slashdotting.)  Now your blog instead of getting hundreds or even thousands of new readers, gets a bunch of fickle readers who now just know your site as being that slow and\or crashed site.

With Blogger, just like how it scales, it can handle big spikes and Google keeps your website humming.  Another benefit of running on Google Hardware.  And did I mention that it is free?  Of course, I suppose one might say that they will just pay for a higher level webhost for wordpress so they can stand-up to sudden traffic spikes.  But now it is just costing you more money in anticipation of an event you can't predict.

Some might argue with this point by pointing out a few instances in the past wher ethe entire blogger website went down. It has happened  But let me turn this around.  What about your cheap webhost?  How often has your host had a server go down, get taken down for upgrade or maintenance, and other piece goes down. I'm pretty sure that, on average, Google is coming out ahead in terms of uptime.

Blogger Security is a breeze.

One thing to worry about websites is hackers and other types of attacks.  With Blogger you can pretty much just sit back and relax.  Google engineer handle it.  As long as your google account is secure(At the very least, this means 2-step verification), you pretty much don't need to do anything else.

With wordpress, security means, first of all, making sure all your software is up to date.  And I do mean ALL of your software.  Wordpress, plugins, and themes. Plus, you need to make sure you're set to use the latest software of backend software your provider allows like php, apache, and MySQL.  They usually update these, but sometime you have to opt-in. Of course, this assumes your provider is keeping the backend up to date.

With wordpress, you also have to make sure every password is secure.  Your wordpress password, database password, and blog password.  If any of those is too easy, you're done.

Third, a lot of time, those free plugins and themes can offer hackers a fresh backdoor into your blog.  Not on purpose, but Wordpress can't guarantee the safety of every plugin.  So watching for security alerts on those is neccesary.

Fourth, security means setting up monitoring for hacks and the time it takes to monitor it.

Fifth, security can mean paying for extra protection from your cheap webhost.

But, But, Wordpress is Customizable

Customization and add-ons is the only place where Wordpress really shines.  But I think most people really overstate the case.  For the purpose of blogging, there are few things that can be done in Wordpress that can't be accomplished with Blogger.  The most common features like popular posts, display ads, analytics, Category\tagging, Pages, etc... are all there.  And further, are easier to setup in Blogger.  Also, both have tons and tons of free and premium themes.

If you want something beyond the basics, Blogger lets you edit your html directly and offer programming like tags that you can use.  Also, Blogger lets you include javascript on your page.  Between those 2 things, you can do a surprising amount with your Blogger blog.  So dont let anyone ever tell you that Blogger isnt very customizable (like most wordpress vs blogger posts claim).

Wordpress is customizable, but at what cost.

Granted, Wordpress is more customizable, and pretty easily so thanks to plugins. But that cuatomization comes at a cost.  Every time you add a plugin, you run the risk of slowing down your blog, opening a security risk, and one more thing that has to be maintained.  The net effect of this is that every time you make usr of the one advantage that wordpress has over Blogger, you excerbate the disadvantages of Wordpress.

But, But, Non Blogging ad-ons

You got me here. Because of plugins and themes, your wordpress blog can, in theory, do anything that any website can.  It can be a wiki, issue tracker, image organizer, etc...

Blogger cannot compete with that.  Because Blogger... is a Blogging platform!

In Conclusion

Most of my likes of Blogger over Wordpress is all about maintainability.   Wordpress takes away time from blogging as compared with Blogger.

I am not saying i would never use Wordpress again, it is an amazing piece of software.   The only time i would use it however, is when my budget allows me to pay for Managed Wordpress hosting.  That is costly,  however.  And meanwhile, ive got Blogger for free.  What a steal!

Show Hidden File on CPanel for any Web Host

cPanel Example

So here is the situation.  You've purchased inexpensive web hosting.  Like most hosts, they use cPanel to setup your website.  cPanel even lets you browse your web files directly.  But after using it for some time(or perhaps, even from the beginning) the file browser won't show your hidden files - those files that start with a period(.).

This is disastrous, the .dot files are where you can do advanced configuration for your website, but you don't see any of them.  You google it and there are some instructions for a few web hosts. Unfortunately, you can't find your host, the instructions didn't work, or the instructions require resetting your carefully cultivated settings.

If this has ever happened to you, here is the simple way to show your hidden files within the cPanel FileBrowser.  The procedure is simple enough.

The Procedure

Step 1. Open up the FileBrowser

Step 2. Look at the url for the page you're on. (That's the long text at the top of your browser, but you probably knew that being a webmaster.)

Example URL for the cPanel File Browser

Step 3. Add the following text to the end of the url "&showhidden=1" so it looks like below

Alternative step 3) If the url contains the text "&showhidden=0" then we just need to modify it.  Change the "0" or "false" to "1".

https://host316.hostmonster.com:2083/cpsess9099661848/frontend/hostmonster/filemanager/index.html?post_login=83061240832053&showhidden=1

Step 4. Press Enter (so as to reload the page)

Voila!  The file browser will now show all of your hidden files.

Why does this work?

In case the procedure above doesn't work, i will go into some detail of what it is we are doing in the procedure  That way, it may help you solve your problem.

So, what is going on here? Websites as advanced as cPanel often use what are called "Get parameters" or "Get variables".  They can do anything from configuration, keeping track of you, or provide other options for rendering.

These "get parameters" are easy to see.  They will be in the url.  They always have the following format.  After the rest of the URL there will be a question mark(?) to indicate the beginning of the "Get Parameters". After the question mark will be the name of the parameter, an equal sign, and then the value.  If there are more than 1 Get Parameter in a url they will be separated by a ampersand(&).  A value for a Get Parameter can be text, like "Game-of-Thrones" or can be a number like "314" or "1.34".

Together it all has the following layout

[first part of url]?[firstParameterName]=[firstParameterValue]&[secondName]=[secondValue]&etc

So when you add the text &showhidden=1, you are telling cPanel that the value of "showhidden" is "1" for the page you are loading.  But, you may ask, why set it to "1"?  That doesn't make any sense!  Here's the explanation:

The parameter showhidden is called a "boolean" value. That's jargon meaning the only values it can be is "true" or "false". For arcane and historical reasons, programs can also use "0" to mean false and "1" to mean true.  So when we set showhidden=1 what we are telling cPanel is showhidden=true. Which is a true statement. It is true that we want cPanel to show hidden files.

Hope this article was helpful!

Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited App is Still Terrible

MDCU App Crashes Again

The Android Phone App for accessing Marvel's Digital Comics Unlimited service is still awful as of June 2014.  Marvel seems to come out with new updates all the time, and I just wanted to warn people who are considering the app.

For those who haven't heard, Marvel Digital Comic Unlimited (MDCU), is a Netflix-like subscription service, but for comic books.  The company that brought us Spiderman, X-men, and 100s of other comics is offering their fans access to over 15,000 comic archive(and growing) for a low monthly price.  The cost is about the equivalent of 2 comics a month.  It's a great idea, and for people like me who have never been into comics, it gives me a chance to try lots of comics or read the large history of Marvel Super-Hero history.

Like Netflix, Marvel is understandably concerned people will take their streaming content, save it, and spread it and destroy their business model.  So, they create custom, encrypted apps that alone can access the MDCU content.  The problem is that, the app on android is so fucking terrible.  On every android phone I've tried it, and every update of the app, the usability ranges from frustrating and completely unusable.

Until this last April, my MDCU subscription was a complete waste of money.  When I first got the service, the app slightly worked for me for a couple months, but then an update came by and made it unusable.  I couldn't even view a comic.  I must have contacted support 4 or 5 times trying to get help.  The only response I got was "we know, we're working on it".  I got no response when I asked for more details or asked for my account to be temporarily suspended\escrowed until they got their act together.

I was excited  when I found a new app update as I was hoping to actually make it work.  Fortunately, the app is now usable, but still damned frustrating.  When I start it up, half the time my login credentials are lost, but then suddenly show up when I change screens.  When downloading comics to view later, the whole app freezes up.  And When I close the app and come back, I'll get a message that it crashed  and for about 5 minutes, really weird stuff happens.  Also, when displaying my comics that I place in my library, half the information isn't displayed unless I do a "refresh", but as soon as I leave the screen it all disappears again.

I am not the only person to complain.  Marvel forums and other blogs\forums around the internet are full of people complaining about it as well.

I will say that the Website interface has worked pretty well.  However, I enjoy reading on my smart phone or tablet.  They are easier to hold than a laptop.  Also my phone is more portable and I always have it with me if I'm suddenly in a "waiting" situation like at a Doctor's office or DMV line.  Chances are you won't have your laptop with you, but will have a phone.  That's why I think the phone\table App is important to work and is the real value to the service.

All that being said, I still think the service is a pretty good deal.  I'm currently trying(with all the frustrations) to work my way through Marvel's vast super hero history starting with old comics starting in 1961.  However, I just wanted to warn future potential customers that are planning on purchasing MDCU:  Be prepared for the Android Phone App to be a frustrating experience and maybe even unusable.

Why is Bookmarking Getting HARDER!?

Why do I feel like bookmarking is getting harder?  You would think that creating an easy to use interface to save, backup, retrieve, search, and browse bookmarks would be a problem that was solved a decade ago, wouldn't you?  But here it is 2014 and not only do I feel like bookmarking links has stagnated, I feel like it's actually going backwards.

I am a bookmark junky.  I admit it.  I have over a thousand bookmarks.  That many bookmarks is useless unless they are organized, sortable, and searchable so that I can find what I need.  And I need it across multiple devices and browsers.   The solution I've been using is an old, but still useful one:  Del.icio.us bookmarks

When delicious  first came out it was brilliant.  First of all it gave a FREE place to store your bookmarks online so that you weren't out of syn across multiple browsers.  The second innovation was replacing stodgy hierarchical folders with tags.  (Another innovation was sharing and early "social networking" but that's not important to this)

Now that the information was tagged and stored in the cloud, one still needed a user interface to browse, search, and find the bookmarks when you needed them.  Things didn't really improve right away on the U.I front.  Delicious had a website interface, but it wasn't(and still isn't) the fastest way to go.  Other programs and add-ons would take your list of bookmarks and arrange them just like your browser does.  It would take each of your "tags" and treat it like a folder with all your arrange them, it just made all your labels a "folder".

But then came... the delicious firefox add-on.  This add-on was the epitome of bookmarking User Interface.  It was fast, easy to use, and makes finding my obscure bookmarks fast, easy, and accurate.  More on the brilliance of this add-on later.

Delicious was king of cloud bookmarking, but then I it stagnated as other sites came along and innovated new features.  Features like grabbing a screenshot of a bookmark, or grabbing a copy of the whole page.  Others would remember how far down you had scrolled.  The whole time though, Delicious just stayed the same.  Why did Delicious stagnate?  I don't know.  Maybe it was yahoo's fault?  Maybe it the underlying technology that kept it from being further improved, I don't know.

But even as others got better bookmarks, none (in my not so humble opinion) ever created as great a U.I. as the official Delicious Firefox add-on.  Therefore, over the years, I have continued to use the Delicious service despite the stagnation.  I have remained content with it even though the add-on has also stagnated because it's still the best U.I. I have found.

But disaster struck.  Yahoo sold the Delicious service to AVOS.  At first, I was overjoyed at the news.  I thought that it might mean they would start investing in improving the add-ons(like maybe a Chrome add-on that's as good as the firefox one), and start making the bookmarks better.  They even took the existing add-on and rebranded it in the mozilla store.  Unfortunately, my experience with Delicious since AVOS took over has been a fucking nightmare.

One of the first things AVOS did was change the add-on to a web-based pile of shit.  I clung to the old add-on like a cat trapped in a tree.  I installed the old version and just kept using it.  But then AVOS started mucking around with API and it quit working.  Fortunately, some heroic netizen saved the old add-on and somehow modified it to keep working.

But, this month, my luck has finally run out.  I can't find the old version anywhere, and AVOS has mucked around with the API again.  This time by launching a new website.   My old add-on is dead, it'll never add, update, or remove a delicious bookmark again.  And the new "service" that AVOS offers really is a piece of shit.

So what was so great about the old one?  I'll show you.  This is a picture of the add-on.

The first thing that I like is that I can choose to always display my bookmarks in a sidebar.  Since most websites limit their width and I work on a widescreen, I lose no website real estate by having it there.  So it's always there that I can quickly go to it when I need something that I know I'd already found before.  But if I did want it to go away I could use either ctrl+b or click the "x" on the window.

The second thing is the separation of the Tag list from the bookmark list.  I can select a tag, and below it displayed the bookmarks under that tag.  This is far different from the traditional stodgy tree view where the bookmarks are inserted into the tag tree and it actually makes it more difficult to find other tags.

The third thing is the 1 layer of nested labels.  As you can see I have 3 sites under the tag "SQL", but 1 of the sites also has the tab "join" and another the tag "Programming" so that if I'm browsing for something I can further narrow down my search.

The fourth thing is the Search.  I can Search just Tags or tags and bookmarks.  And the search checks the bookmark URL, title, and description for matches.

The fifth thing is choosing how the tags and bookmarks are sorted in the display.  I can do oldest to newest, most frequently used, etc... and I can quickly change the option within the interface without opening a cludgy "options" page.

The sixth thing is the easy add bookmark integration.  There is a button that pulls up a new popup window to add the current page to a bookmark.  If text on the page is highlighted, it automatically adds it to the description page, it recommends tags for the page(if any) and also an easy check box to make the bookmark public or private.

Finally, the auto saving of the site's "favicon" is a great visual indicator when looking for a specific bookmark, and gives my eyes something to look at besides text.

The new integration isn't technically an "add-on" it is a "service" so I was able to leave the old one on for comparison sakes.  If you're like me, you took one look at the AVOS delicious "service" and said "What. The. Fuck. AVOS?"

Going down the list of things that I liked and compare.  First, It is a sidebar so that's good.(I don't care if it's on the left or right)

The second thing is that tags and bookmarks are separated.  I can choose a tag, but they are in a weird "word cloud" format that I have trouble looking at.  Also hard to look at is the giant text of the bookmark titles make it so that I can't easily scan the titles.  Oh and there is a bunch of junk at the top of the widgit so that I have to scroll half way down just to see the tags and bookmarks.  So this is mostly(but not totally messed up)

Third thing, no nested labels so that's completely busted.  Fourth, the Search option I have to scroll up and I can't choose just tags - so that's completely busted.  Fifth, can't sort tags or bookmarks - completely busted.  Sixth, the "add bookmark" feature is a clunky interface and it doesn't insert my highlights into the text - mostly busted.  Finally, no favicons.

The awfulness doesn't end there.  The "settings" button just takes me to a page where I can update my profile.  At the bottom it has a link for feedback(oh AVOS, don't even go there!  Maybe I'll send them a link to this post.)

I was DONE with Delicious when this happened and was going to finally make the move to google bookmarks since it had the most add-ons.  You know what I discovered, while it's add-ons (both for firefox and Chrome) are better than the new AVOS ones, they are all the old stodgy treeviews.  None of them are as streamlined as the old official Delicious firefox add-on.  None!  (if you find one, please let me know because it'll save me a TON of work)

So here is what I'm going to do dear readers.  I am taking matters into my own hands.  I am going to write a google Chrome Add-on for delicious bookmarks that works like the old Delicious Firefox Add-on.

I'm going to start with a Chrome Add-on since I've been meaning to move to it.  I'll have the U.I. work with Delicious first since that's where my bookmarks are still being held.  I am just going to recreate the features of the old one first.  Once that is up and ready I'll release it to the world and hopefully will get some feedback.

After that, my pipe dream would be to add some features to it.  I'd also like to make it work with google bookmarks since I don't think AVOS and delicious will be around for much longer.  And finally, maybe make a firefox add-on so that I can easily switch between the two browsers.

If you have an idea what to call my new add-on, leave me a comment.  Right now I'm leaning towards "Easy Bookmarks" with the tagline: "bookmarking done right".  But I bet some reader will come up with a better name.

Just in Case you Thought Patents protected the small from the big.

I strongly object to all forms of software patents. I also believe other patents need to be reformed or even outright abolished.  When I tell people this I usually get a lot of pushback.  One of the arguments I hear is that Patents are there so that big companies can’t “steal our ideas”.  Obviously, I disagree.  And last week’s revelation about Microsoft’s 2 Billion dollar patent profits from Android Phones illustrates my point.

The problem with this argument, I think, is people’s view of how new inventions come about.  I think we all have a collective image of a quirky scientist working away in a tiny lab in almost complete isolation. Another image is some small start-up company spends years of time inventing some revolutionary new gadget or process.  In both cases, you might feel that it would be unfair for a big company to swoop in and “steal” their work and make a bunch of money off it.

It is these images that, I think, drive public support for patents.  But in reality these are exceedingly rare cases.  In reality almost all inventions are either small improvements on existing products, and\or was the result of teams of people working for an already large corporation or public institute.

Instead, what happens more often is that big companies use their patents to file lawsuits or threaten to file a lawsuit to keep would-be competitors from offering better and lower cost products.  That is what is happening with Microsoft.  Just the threat of being sued by Microsoft has scared businesses to collectively pay Microsoft 2 billion dollars in tribute every year.

What effect does this have on competition?  Well, first of all, it’s going to scare companies from getting into the smartphone business.  Less competition is going to drive up cost and drives down quality.  Secondly, any company that wants to get into the smartphone business will have to make sure that they have the money to either pay the patent tribute or hire an army of lawyers to defend itself in court.  Thus raising the start-up costs and further driving away potential competition.

Now think back to that quirky scientist and start-up company with a revolutionary gadget.  Let’s say they come up with a software patch that makes the android phone’s battery last longer.  Now let’s say they try to sell it as a patch for Android.  Uh oh, here comes Microsoft claiming that the software violates a Microsoft patent.  Now the company can’t sell it, even though they may have come up with the idea completely separate from Microsoft.  So now, instead of patents protecting the inventor from big business, it is big business that is protected from the little guy.

You might think that my scenario from above is contrived.  But that is exactly what happened when General Electric sued the small medical imaging company, DR Systems.

The patent in the case, entitled “picture archiving and communication system employing improved data compression,” was issued to Fairfield, Conn.-based GE in October 2003. 

DR Systems and GE compete in the market for Radiology Information Systems (RIS) and Picture Archiving and Communications system (PACS).
RIS is used by radiology departments to store, manipulate and distribute patient radiological data and imagery. The system generally comprises patient tracking and scheduling, result reporting and image tracking capabilities. 

Of course it isn't just small companies.  Large companies waste a lot of time suing each other as well.  Patent trolls are a major problem in the computer and software industry.  There are now entire companies whose sole existence is to file or acquire software patents and then sue everyone in sight.

Of course, big companies aren't immune to all this patent absurdity.  Google and other Android makes are being sued by their smartphone competitors.

Google probably knew this was coming. When it lost out in the Nortel auction, the company's top lawyer, David Drummond, complained that the Microsoft-Apple patent alliance was part of a "hostile, organized campaign against Android." Google's failure to get patents in the Nortel auction was seen as one of the driving factors in its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola in 2011.
Rockstar, meanwhile, was pretty unapologetic about embracing the "patent troll" business model. Most trolls, of course, aren't holding thousands of patents from gigantic technology companies. When Rockstar was profiled by Wired last year, about 25 of its 32 employees were former Nortel employees.
The suits filed today are against Google and seven companies that make Android smartphones: Asustek, HTC, Huawei, LG Electronics, Pantech, Samsung, and ZTE. The case was filed in the Eastern District of Texas, long considered a district friendly to patent plaintiffs.

The problem of these patents gets even more absurd and harmful.  Monsanto has taken to suing small time farmers for "patent infringement" because they planted seeds that they cultivated themselves.

According to the report, Monsanto has alleged seed patent infringement in 144 lawsuits against 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses in at least 27 U.S. states as of January of 2013. Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta together hold 53 percent of the global commercial seed market, which the report says has led to price increases for seeds -- between 1995 and 2011, the average cost of planting one acre of soybeans rose 325 percent and corn seed prices went up 259 percent. 

[snip] 

In the case of "Bowman v. Monsanto Co.," Bowman allegedly replanted second-generation seeds that had been purchased legally from a licensed Monsanto distributor instead of buying new seeds. Monsanto claims that in doing so, Bowman was essentially stealing its product. Monsanto has won battles in several lower courts.

Can you believe that?  If you purchase corn seeds and save 10% of your crop to replant next year, you're committing a crime!  I don't know if this patent absurdity can get any worse than this.  Whether it is a tech corporation like Microsoft extracting 2 billion from potential competitors, or Monsanto controlling small time farmers, patents are more likely to benefit the powerful at the expense of the small and the greater economy.

Who is the Next Big Winner in the Console Gaming Wars?

What do the Wii U, Playstation 4, and Xbox One have in common?  Answer:  All three run AMD processors inside.  AMD managed to find it's way into each of the three gaming consoles: Either as the Graphics processor or, Graphics AND Central processor.  That seems like a huge deal to me.

AMD has been a big player in the microchip market for a long time, but it's never been the biggest.  Currently nvidia is still the biggest player in graphics.  Providing all the graphics cards for the consoles might change that.  ExtremeTech explains how:

The real worry with AMD’s push for unified gaming is that games developers might shirk Nvidia optimizations. If it’s relatively simple to get Xbox One games up and running on PCs with AMD graphics, publishers might not see the need to spend the additional cash to optimize for Nvidia cards. This could be a huge hassle for the majority of PC gamers with existing Nvidia cards, but it would be even worse for Nvidia itself. While AMD has been lagging well behind lately, this PC-console strategy could help it leapfrog its competitors in a meaningful way.
Despite being the company that created the first x86 64 bit processor, and the first dual core x86 processor

It would be exciting if console and PC hardware started moving closer to each other.  Porting of top titles costs a lot of time.  If it's moving from one type of chip and hardware set to another will mean even more time to make sure it looks and plays the same.  But if the console hardware is similar to PC hardware, then it won't take as long.  That means more and quicker game ports.

AMD could really use the boost because right now, despite the legacy of creating the first 64bit x86 processor, and the first dual core x86 processor, AMD is getting it's butt handed to them by Intel in the x86 server market.  It's also losing ground on mobile devices.  Qualcomm and Samsung overtook AMD's second place in the mobile phone market.

Overall, I think this was one hell of a strategic coup for AMD.  One that keeps them a big player in the chip market.

Sony will win

As the Wii U, PS4, and Xbox One come to tangle in the next round of the console wars, Here is my bold prediction:  The PlayStation 4 will win the next round of the console wars.

PlayStation One and PlayStation 2 were the top selling consoles worldwide of all time.  The PlayStation 3 was set to be huge, but then the Wii came along and blew everybody away in the last round.  So why do I think sony will be back on top?

Here's what I see.  The Wii won because it was revolutionary.  It's working name was even "Revolution". It expanded the video game market instead of competing for the existing one.  It was different.  Games were excited, non-gamers were interested.  Eventually PS3 and Xbox started making back some ground, but they never caught up with the Wii's original sales and are virtually tied for second.

But now, the Wii U is old news.  It's touchscreen controller is more an evolution than a revolution.  It still uses Wii controllers.  It's working name was Wii 2, and the end product reflects that.  While the Wii U will benefit some from past success, there is not as much buzz about it.

The other competition is Microsoft's xbox One.  Originally, I thought Microsoft was going to win.  They were going to concentrate on better and better online features and integration.  Instead, they are locked into a boxing match with their own customers.  They're adding and removing features and pissing of different groups.  I can't help but think that all this confusion is going to hurt them.

All of Xbox controversy wouldn't hurt Microsoft as much if they were the only game in town like Windows on PCs.  But Sony is making huge strides to catch up with Microsoft's online advantages.  Sony is also making lots of other new changes.  You can read about them here.  Nothing is revolutionary, just evolutionary... just like the other 3 consoles.

So here it is.  All the consoles made evolutionary steps, I believe Sony made more.  And in addition, Sony isn't repeatedly pissing off large groups of users.  I believe Sony will find it's way back on top their fourth round of the console wars.

Ack! Austrian Economics have Invaded my Computer Magazine

Most every single miss fire by Microsoft has been of their own doing.  Very little(if any) has to do with the largely unsuccessful anti-trust suit filed by the FTC in 1998. But Not according to Preston Gralla.  In his article for computer world called, Will Google go the Way of Microsoft?  Ask the FTC? he blames the anti-trust suit for much of Microsoft's failures and warns that the same could happen to Google.  As this is the perfect intersection of all my interests (technology, politics, and economics) I couldn't let his ridiculous premise stand.

Gralla makes this claim in his article:

These suits, no matter the eventual legal outcome, could cripple Google's ability to innovate and expand. To see why, you only need look back at what happened to Microsoft when the federal Department of Justice launched an antitrust suit against it in 1998. The core of the issue back then was similar to what Google faces now. The issue wasn't whether Windows was a monopoly (it was); it was whether Microsoft used its monopoly power to harm its competitors and dominate new markets such as browsers.
Eventually, Microsoft wasn't given much more than a slap on the wrist, but by the time that happened in 2004, the company had been embroiled in the suit for six years. During that period, it spent an immense amount of time and resources fighting the suit, and it wasn't sure which newly contemplated business actions might be deemed illegal.
It's no coincidence that during those lost years, while Microsoft was distracted, Google locked up the search market and Apple sewed up the digital music market with the iPod. During that time, Microsoft was also unable to capitalize on Windows Mobile, a smartphone platform it had developed years before Apple's iOS. Before the suit, Microsoft practically owned the tech industry. Ever since, it's been playing catch-up in every important growth area.

So the premise here is that the anti-trust lawsuit kept Microsoft from innovating between the years 1998 and 2004.  For this premise to hold up, we would have to see evidence that Microsoft was standing still during those years, and, once released from their lawsuit hell, unleashed their innovation again starting in late 2004early 2005.  So how does the premise hold up on the time line?  Not very well...

First of all, Microsoft did a LOT of things between 1998 and 2004.  Their most successful foray into a new market started.  They started and launched the xBox during this time.  That turned out to be a major success for them and is now a staple of their profits.

Microsoft also made lots of strategic planning during these so-called "lost years".  They layed out their entire .NET framework strategy in 2000 - in the middle of their anti-trust lawsuit.  They even managed to get beta release out that year.  The .NET framework is now one of the most widely used programming platforms.  Also, Microsoft dominated PC gaming with their DirectX gaming engine.  They made good, credible updates to that before, during, and after the lawsuit.

Microsoft also tried lots of things with varying degrees of success during these so-called "lost years".  Windows Media Center for instance was their attempt to turn windowsXP machines into entertainment hubs.  While it didn't catch on it also wasn't universally panned.  Microsoft also had innovation failures like, Project Mira.  Never heard of it?  There's a reason why, it was useless as designed.

If the reason Microsoft couldn't innovate was FTC strangulation, then it must have been successful both before and after those "lost years".  But as we will see that just isn't true.  Even before the lawsuit Microsoft had big, public failures like Microsoft BOB.

Even after coming out of the lawsuit Microsoft has still had failure after failure.  Project Origami was Microsoft trying to improve tablet PCs.  It was a bloody disaster in the consumer market.

Now let's look at the 3 things Mr Gralla blames the government for Microsoft not being at the top.  First up, the ipod and digital music.  Microsoft was caught empty handed.  No one foresaw Apple's giant success with digital music.  But, could Microsoft have succeeded if it hadn't been for the FTC?  Well, evidence points to no.  Microsoft got into the digital music market with the Zune, they poored millions of dollars into it.  for 4 years they struggled.  All of them long after they settled the lawsuit.  They never made any headway or found a way to innovate on top of Apple's success.

Now let's look at phones.  Was Microsoft crippled by the FTC?  Hell no!  They're inability to break ground in the smart phone market was not for a lack of trying.  They had an entire product line of Windows CE devices for things like smart phones going back to the mid nineties.   They launched in 2003(again, middle of their "lost years" Windows Mobile.  They released several version after that trying to get their O.S. onto cell phones.  It never caught on and they abandoned it in 2010 and created "Windows Phone" that was an imitator of the iPhone.

Finally, let's look at search.  No doubt Google dominates the market.  But they didn't steal the entire market from Microsoft.  When Google first came around, yahoo was the biggest search engine.  Google and Microsoft did become the big competitors for a while, but Google just won.  They did it better than Microsoft, and it was never for a lack of trying.  Microsoft is still trying.  Microsoft launched ANOTHER search engine(their third, by my count) called "Bing" in 2009.  This is well after their supposed FTC induced innovation coma.  That search engine has never taken more than 5% Marketshare.  In fact it only went over 4% for a few brief months.  If Microsoft lost the "search" wars because of their anti-trust lawsuit, they should've made a more credible attempt afterwards.  They didn't and haven't.

Another argument is that the anti-monopoly lawsuit distracted Microsoft and lawyers sucked up resources that could have gone to innovation.  If Microsoft's legal bills were a problem, it was their own doing, not the government's.  Microsoft was ridiculously over zealous with protecting their trade marks and violated other company's intellectual property.

Microsoft sued a company named "Lindows" because it sounded too much like "Windows".  (The company was trying to get Windows to run on Linux: hence - Lindows).  Microsoft eventually paid the company millions of dollars to change their name.  Microsoft also sued a 17 year old canadian named "Mike Rowe" for registering the domain name "MikeRoweSoft" for his business.

As if things like that weren't enough for their legal department, the company spent a hell of a lot more time defending itself against private lawsuits brought by other companies.  Note that that link is not an all-inclusive list of lawsuits.

So why did Microsoft lose their innovation?  I would argue that it wasn't the anti-monopoly lawsuit that slowly brought them down a few pegs, I would argue that it was the fact that they were a monopoly.  They got lazy and spent more time trying to protect their monopoly than innovating.  They let Firefox creep on on their Internet Explorer Market.  Gmail took away their Webmail market.  Linux became the cheaper alternative for netbooks and phones.  I might be wrong on why they ultimately were dethroned, but I can safely say that it had nothing to do with the FTC.