Office for the iPad -- too late? The browser is the next battleground.

Microsoft finally released Office for the iPad, but the iPad is four years old -- this announcement is long overdue. Preliminary reviews say they have done a good job on the touch user interface, but isn't that the last war?

The next war is not over the tablet or phone, but over the browser.

Don't take my word for it. In a 1997 Time interview (by Walter Isaacson) Bill Gates said:

Any operating system without a browser is going to be f****** out of business. Should we improve our product, or go out of business?

In 1998 he sent a memo to Microsoft executives saying:

One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company...This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.

I have been using a Chromebook for a week and I use Google Docs quite a bit, and, while I like both, am not ready to give up Windows. But, I bet there are a lot of folks who would abandon Windows if they could run Office in a browser.

What would have happened if Microsoft had released Office for the iPad, say, two years ago? It would have helped iPad sales and hurt Windows tablets for sure, but Windows tablets are not doing well regardless, and Microsoft and Office would have strengthened their dominant position with professional and enterprise users. Maybe they should have rebranded themselves the "software and services company" instead of "devices and services."

Now let's look forward, say, five years. I will have a gigabit Internet connection (well, not if Time Warner has their way) and my Chromebook will be very fast and compatible with HTML6. Will I want to use Office 365 and One Drive or Google Docs 2019 and Google Drive? Which one will my university or an enterprise settle on?

Today, Microsoft has the advantage of having many years of experience with Office and full-featured productivity applications. (Charles Simonyi, who worked on object-oriented programming on computers with bit-mapped displays at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, led the development of Word and Excel at Microsoft). They also have a solid grip on the enterprise.

Microsoft "got" bit mapped displays before Google existed, but Google "got" the Internet before Microsoft did and they have more experience with network infrastructure and applications with their data centers, Google Fiber and Google Docs/Drive. They've also got the chromebook and Chrome. (That being said, both may end up running on Mainframe 2 if that technology prevails).

I don't know which will "win" the browser battle (it may end a tie) and neither do the folks at Google and Microsoft -- and that is good news for us as consumers and citizens.

The Apple simplicity myth -- iTunes/iOS upgrade is a kludge

The Macintosh was the first affordable personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI). Doug Engelbart invented the GUI and Xerox refined it at their Palo Alto Research Center, but they could not make an affordable machine with a GUI -- the Xerox Star failed. The first time Apple tried (the Lisa), they also failed, but the Macintosh succeeded. The Mac embodied creative hardware and software design and was a significant innovation. The early Macs were underpowered, but they were much simpler to use than DOS PCs and could run unique applications.

That innovation earned Apple their ease of use reputation, but the world has caught up. Today, Apple's ease of use advantage is a myth. Computers are complex devices and Apple is fully capable of building kludges. Let me give you an example.

Yesterday I installed the NBC Olympic Games app on my wife's iPad -- the tablet that is so simple your Mom could use it.

Maybe, if she had a degree in computer science.

I will give you the step by frustrating step account of the process below, but the bottom line is that it took about two hours, several nervous moments and several trips to Google because I had to upgrade iOS and install a new version of iTunes before installing the app.

I think my wife is a typical iPad user. She likes it, but has not upgraded anything since the day she got it. I can imagine thousands of folks just like her trying to install that Olympic app and either giving up or zapping their iPads.

As you see below, it is a daunting task and far from self-explanatory.

Perhaps the saddest part is that the process is obscure. Two computers are involved -- why? What is the data flow between them? What happens when I click a button? Dealing with technology you do not understand is alienating. It makes you nervous and forces you to rely on others.

Intented or not, the "simple" iPad/iTunes design seems to be a good way to keep customers paying for extended support contracts and making visits to the "geniuses" who work in Apple stores.

Well, enough of that. Here is the step by step account of my installation of the NBC Olympic games app:

• I found the app in the App Store, but when I tried to install it, an alert box told me that it required iOS 5. I suspect that my wife is typical of iPad users -- she was using the verison of iOS that came with the machine.
• No big deal, it just said to plug the iPad into a PC or Mac and follow the upgrade instructions. <snarky aside> I can upgrade my Windows PC without plugging into an iPad </snarky aside>.
• I plugged it in and tried to upgrade, but then it told me I needed iTunes version 10.4 or better on my laptop to upgrade iOS on the iPad.
• After a bit of hunting around, I found the iTunes upgrade button and clicked on it, but nothing happened. No user interface feedback.
• So, I fired up a Web browser and downloaded iTunes from Apple.com. The file was huge and it took what seemed like about half an hour to download and install it.
• Once that was done, I started the install, only to be told that my wife had purchases that would be lost if I did not move them to the library. Not being an iTunes user, I did not understand that, so had to go to Google to see what "library" they were talking about and how to move things to it.
• I moved her purchases to the library, then started the update. Things went well for a while, but when I came back half an hour later to see what was up, I found this error message:
  

  An error occurred while backing up this iPad (-54). Would you like to continue to update this iPad? Continuing will result in the loss of all contents on this ipad.

That error message made me nostalgic -- it reminded me of the blue screen of death.
• Another trip to Google ensued, and I learned from various threaded discussions that others had seen good old error 54 and there was no consensus on what it meant or what to do about it.
• At that point, I did what any 17th century witch doctor would have done, I rebooted things and started the install again.
• It worked!
• But, wait, the iPad "bookshelf" was empty and the issues of the New Yorker and Economist my wife had downloaded for a trip were gone.
• I plugged the iPad back into the PC and it tried to synch. Nothing much seemed to be happening, then it told me it could not find some file, so it could not synch photos. That was fine with me because I did not want her photos on my laptop.
• But, when I went back to the iPad, the bookshelf was stocked once again. The New Yorker app asked me if I wanted to re-download the back issues, and the Economist app had developed amnesia and asked me if I would like to subscribe.
• When I went back to my laptop, I discovered a lot of new cruft had been left there by iTunes -- tons of directories each containing a single file.

iPad WiFi is poor

My wife just got an iPad – the first tablet in our house.  It was not easy to get it away from her, but last night I managed to take the iPad to bed.  I was expecting an insanely great experience, but my first impression was that network access was slow and flaky.

To test my impression, I compared it to a Dell Precision laptop.  First, I pinged UCLA, a nearby university, 100 times using both the laptop and the iPad.  The average ping time for iPad was 63.7 milliseconds, over twice that of the Dell, and the standard deviation four times as great.  No wonder it seemed flaky.

	Dell	iPad
Minimum	18	22.7
Maximum	120	231.9
Mean	30.2	63.7
Standard deviation	14.9	64.8

Next I tested file transfer times (Mb/s), and the laptop was faster:

	Dell	iPad
Upload	6.29	1.77
Download	1.83	.17

That was no surprise given the variability in ping times. It doesn't look like I'll be making a lot of Skype calls or watching movies in bed.

My bedroom is at the back of the house, so I checked the signal strength. As shown below, it dropped to around -65 db as I walked from the office, where the WiFi access point is located, to the bedroom.



The laptop is not perfect in the bedroom -- it does better when it is near the access point, but its radio is clearly more sensitive than that of the iPad. iPad Wifi is more like that of a netbook than a laptop.

Notes:
I measured iPad ping time using Typhuun System Scope Lite, the transfer rate using Speedtest.net and the signal strength with Metageek Inssider.

A reader pointed out that the results were affected by my pinging UCLA, which introduced Internet and server variability into the test. I repeated the test, pinging a machine within my house and found the following:

Dell: minimum 1, maximum 90, mean 5.96, standard deviation 12.6 with zero dropped packets (1 sec timeout)
iPad: minimum 5.04, maximum 202.02, mean 18.56, standard deviation 32.49 with 8 dropped packets (1 sec timeout)

Not surprisingly, the iPad remains relatively poor.

Three reasons the iPad will succeed. Whoops, make that two.

The Apple iPad was announced January 27. After years of hype, people were generally disappointed. The trade press carried many articles like this one listing ten missing features. It can not play Flash movies, the aspect ratio is not 16:9, AT&T is the only carrier, the battery can not be changed, the operating system cannot multi-task, there is no camera or HDMI interface to a TV set, etc.

For me, the most important missing feature is a microphone with accompanying speech recognition software. I want to be able to input marginal notes, email addresses, etc. without typing on a glass keyboard.

In spite of all of this criticism, I expected the iPad to succeed for three reasons.

The original Macintosh had 128 KB of memory, only a floppy disk for storage, and a tiny, monochrome screen. Still, its operating system and simple applications for image and word processing had graphical user interfaces (GUIs). The earlier Apple Lisa and Xerox Star also had GUIs, but failed because they were too expensive. By the time the Mac was delivered, technology had improved, and they had engineered a minimal system that was just good enough to get people excited and succed in the market. The timing was right.

As technology advanced, Apple upgraded the Mac, adding memory and a hard drive, followed by a larger screen, color, etc.

The same will happen with the iPad. Features will be added as technology improves. I am confident that Apple has a multi-year plan for iPad improvements, and it has the potential to become a significant device for consuming content -- games, books, periodicals and video of all sorts.

I was optimistic for a second reason. Apple understands that the device is only one part of a system that includes the application store, content deals, and synchronization with the desktop and Internet. Apple learned this lesson with their ill-fated Newton, the first pocket computer. The Newton failed because the hardware was not powerful enough, and, more important, because it did not synchronize with desktop machines.

I am confident that Steve Jobs and his colleagues are negotiating with TV, movie, book, newspaper, and magazine publishers for content deals as I type this.

The third reason I was confident was that Apple had legions of software developers who, because they had developed iPhone applications, were ready to go on the iPad. Their iPhone applications would run with little or no modification on the iPad, and their programmers were up to speed on Apple's software development tools, their software development kit (SDK).

Apple might have learned the importance of the developer community by watching Microsoft. Microsoft wooed independent software vendors (ISVs) from day 1. Since the early days of MSDOS, they invited ISVs to conferences, provided them with excellent tools, set up a developer's organization, etc. Apple has taken this a step further with their application store -- they also provide a distribution channel at a reasonable cost. They removed the "V" from ISV. Independent developers were just developers, not vendors.

That is the good news (for the iPad). The bad news is that Apple seems to be blowing off the developer community. To use Apple's SDK, a developer has to agree to draconian terms. For example, they can only sell through Apple.

At some point, Microsoft could have afforded to ignore the ISV community -- Windows had a monopoly -- it was the only game in town.

Unfortunately for Apple, their developers have alternatives -- Google's Android, Microsoft's mobile version of Windows 7, and Palm's webOS. Google seems to be the biggest threat. They just released a new version of their SDK, which is provided to developers without restriction, and they offer prizes for outstanding applications.

I am still betting on the success of the iPad, but the odds have dropped. Apple's high handed attitude toward developers could be the chink in their armor.