Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

As part of my visit to San Francisco yesterday we went down to MountainView to spend some time with Google. I was in the Googleplex several years ago and first thing you notice it how many new buildings are in the campus and how complicated is to find your way around. After reaching building 44 where our meeting was being held (no, there aren´t 44 buildings but apparently the numbering is not consecutive and does not start with one), you could see all the stereotypes that you have heard so many times about Googleplex. The lava lamps, the motor boards for employees to move around campus, the massage chairs, the free drinks, the casual and cool atmosphere, etc. The meeting was very good and insightful, I am excited about what they are doing in mobility, specially Android and their view of how the mobile Web will converge with the Web and there will be only one in the near future. We were told about the recently published statistics of huge iPhone traffic in Google properties which reinforces the notion that people with a good phone that provide a good navigation experience with a reasonable flat rate will use the Internet on the go. I am a living proof of that in spite of having a really poor EDGE connection with my iPhone. Another cool thing that I saw was a display with the earth rotating that was displaying in near real time all the mobile searches that Google was receiving in each part of the word, each color representing a different language and the density and high of dots representing the amount of queries being received. It was weird as the part from Spain had most of the dot columns in Madrid and somewhere in the North near Galicia…(see picture below).

Then we headed to MacWorld, it was a short visit but I had to see the MacBook Air and the booth of my former company Extensis (their new booth is really cool and they were finally showcasing the new version of their server product, codename Mystique, and I got a demo, good work!!). MacWorld looks bigger than before, the registration is now in a separate building at the Moscone Center but the booths of the companies traditionally targeting the creative professional space and exhibiting there like Adobe or Quark are getting a lot smaller than they used to, lots of consumer oriented companies there, a trend that has been happening since the iPod took off and that now has gone further with products like the iPhone or Apple TV. Talking of which, I saw the upgrade announced at MacWorld has a gorgeous interface and if they continue improving that product is going to be a killer. At $229 (150€) I am actually thinking about taking one back to home if I have some time for shopping before leaving. The Macbook Air is also very cool, extremely thin, with a large mouse pad that does some of the multitouch tricks that the iPhone does and is very, very light. I uploaded more pictures here. Btw, is anyone having problems uploading pictures to Flickr? I am trying with both the Flickr uploader and Windows Live Picture Gallery (I am starting to really like that product) but with both products my pictures get rotated when uploaded and then I have to manually fix them in Flickr, a very painful procedure. Need some help here.

CD

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Since Apple WWDC last June where Jobs announced that they are moving to Intel processors (I had a VIP invitation to the keynote but I could not attend so my VP of Engineering went instead, I hope that I get one for the keynote speech in Mac World in January and I finally see Jobs from the first row) I have had this theory that, eventually, we will see Mac OS X being licensed and running on Dell or other hardware. The reason I have this theory is the following:

• Apple has been improving their OS so much recently that is now worth switching (in spite of their initial failure with the "switch" campaign, apparently now they got more than one million Windows users switching to Mac OS) to it (I was about to actually buy my first Mac but I want a notebook and I decided to wait till the Intel ones ship since the speed improvement will be more noticeable there as they still run G4s).
• Apple has been adding more and more Mac OS application of their own in spite of similar applications already being available, their own browser, their own Power Point and Word knockoff, iLife, an email client, now Aperture, they are only really missing a good spread sheet of their own. Why will they invest so much on software of their own when software accomplishing similar tasks was already available unless they are planning to gain market share by licensing the OS?
• The move to Intel is more than just speed. The fact that now runs on Intel will allow an emulator using virtualization technology on a Intel box running Windows or Linux do a very good job running Mac OS as well. And actually the opposite is also true, you will be able to run Windows on top of Mac OS much more efficiently so they might actually go the opposite patch and allow Windows to run in Apple machines as speculated here
• An OS with a higher market share will also protect their iPod and iTunes franchise by increasing the number of Mac users that are less likely to switch other music platforms

So today I came across this article that claims that Apple has got a patent that will prevent people from installing Mac OS in other hardware that is not Apple. The link to the patent is broken so I cannot read it but this might not actually disproved my theory, as the article already points out, the fact that Apple says one thing it does not mean that they will do the exact opposite (think video iPod).

CD

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