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I have posted a summary of Apple's response to the Norwegian Consumer Ombudsman's complaint filing on Apple's terms and conditions in iTunes, where they also are asked to defend their position on DRM protected content. The response is a 20 page letter of which parts have been blocked for view by the public on request from Apple. I have also provided a link to the response letter which is in Norwegian.

ooops, some information fell out of the posting above:

The most interesting part of the Norwegian legislation is the definition of the term "relevant equipment" where the lawmakers have allowed consumers to break copy protection mechanisms to enable playback of content on relevant equipment. More information here

Apple has been picked to test the waters of the Norwegian legislation due to iTMS's popularity, but the original filing also includes Microsoft and its DRM which will be challenged against the 2005 Marketing Control Act.

The most interesting part of this legislation is the definition of the term "relevant equipment". See above link for more.

The open source Nokia browser could mean trouble admits Opera's marketing manager in a comment in this article.

Does anyone remember the Vista Perspective or Vista View that Microsoft presented some time ago where you have some folks looking out over a blue-ish kinda misty landscape. I mean, there is some strange feeling over that image. What are the people in the Vista Perspective actually looking for?

I kinda filled in the blanks and updated the image to display a more realistic Vista Perspective. (Sorry for the link back to my blog, but Slashdot does not do images...)

It was an interesting read, the comments on Mini Microsoft the other day when it was made public that Vista was delayed once more. What is the difference between Mac OS X and Vista? Microsoft employees are excited about Mac OS X! was one of the comments.

What is even more interesting is that there might be a connection between Apple pushing their World Wide Developer Conference back to September and the new delivery date of Vista. Too close in time for Microsoft to be comfortable in the chance of having Vista look like a silly copy of Mac OS X 10.4 after Mac OS X 10.5 was introduced. More on the story in my blog entry written a couple of days ago.

One of the major shortcommings of the MacBook Pro is the removal of the PCMCIA slot in exchange of the Expresscard/34 slot. At least they could have made PCMCIA a built-to-order option.

The problem is that a number of 3G/UMTS services in Europe depend on PCMCIA 3G/UMTS add-in cards for what is basically relatively cheap, unlimited UMTS/GPRS network access without having to use a 3G bluetooth connected phone.

For people who more or less depend on these services for connection and doing their work, the MacBook Pro is basically no alternative at the moment.

Unfortunately, Apple has, at the expense of moving the plattform forward, removed the very options that people use for communication, and is in many ways recreating the same situation we had some years ago when they shed the serial ports from their machines; marketing systems lobotimized of important communications options. One should think that for a portable system, enabling the system for any type of communication would be one of its most important features.

Yes, from a technical perspective, I am inclined to say that Apple's switch from the PowerPC was not necessarily a brilliant move. However, the real reason for the switch was in my opinion this:

Apple could no longer live with a processor manufacturer that reserved its best performing processors for their own use

IBM has a huge business of their own to protect, making servers and workstations using the same technology that Apple does. IBM's issue is that these systems are priced at 2 to 4 times higher than the same performance from Apple. This became very evident when Apple shipped the G5 Xserve and completely undercut IBM in large cluster configurations (which is clearly IBM core markets.) Why has the Xserve not yet shipped with the dual-core IBM 970MP? Why has Apple never shipped anyhthing but dual processor machines even if it was possible all they way back to the PPC 604 days to build 8 way systems. IBM had them. No coincidence if you ask me.

Intel does not have any such hangups og dependencies. Intel is all about delivering its best performing processors to those who can build systems from them.

Intel will even throw marketing efforts into the equation -- something IBM never, ever did to help Apple promote the PowerPC plattform. I think IBM's - and IBM Software's complete lack of support for Mac OS X is a telltale sign why Apple had no choice but to switch even if the PowerPC/POWER processors at the technical level perhaps would be better.

IBM's continued more or less total lack of software support for Mac OS X can be seen as a telltale sign of why Apple is in the middle of making the switch from IBM's PowerPC processors to rival Intel's new generation of processors. I have blogged before on the background of why Apple is choosing Intel processors over the, in my opinion, in many ways still superior PowerPC/POWER IBM processors.

My take on this is that when Apple's XServe with the G5 started popping up in supercomputer configurations around the world at a fraction of the cost of similar configurations from IBM, IBM could only see this as a serious threat to their midrange and Unix product lines and could not allow Apple to undercut their business. It is no coincidence that the XServe has not been upgraded with the dual-core PowerPC 970MP like the Power Macintosh workstations has been.

Likewise, IBM Software has not ever lifted a finger to port their software to Mac OS X Server and help Apple promote IBM's own processor architecture. No support for DB2, Tivoli, Tivoli Storage Manager (with the exception of a half-baked client) or any of the WebSphere modules to mention a few.

Who of the parties actually cut the cord last year is still unclear to me, but I don't think Apple any longer could live with IBM reserving their best processor performance for their own hardware and thereby limiting which markets Apple could enter. Intel, fortunately, does not have such split priorities, which is good for Apple.

It will be interesting to see if IBM Software will be more eager to support Mac OS X once the switch is over. Presently they can hardly blame it on software difficulties given they market the excellent IBM XL-C and XL-Fortran compilers for Apples G5 hardware. A recompile of the Linux version of DB2 Express-C for OS X should be a no-brainer for IBM as a technical exercise.

I think the most interesting aspect of this announcement is that the presense of OSS and open standards in this case seem to have been a much more efficient anti-trust measure than any of the legal processes both the EU and the US DoJ has run against Microsoft -- the combination of OSS and the buying power of Government.

(It was really interesting to watch the activity when I translated the Norwegian government's hearing documents on the use of open source and open standards and placed them in the agenda section of my blog. For a period of almost two months, a certain company did one RSS lookup per minute on that section. It slowed down only after the deadline for submitting comments to the hearing.)

The highly reliable sources ThinkSecret often cites, most of the time produces so, so predictions.

Statments like "The dual-core Yonah chip could very likely deliver performance greater than Apple's current G4-based PowerBooks." does not sound too reliable. Why on earth would Apple intro systems with less performance than current models -- and I am not just thinking in terms of real processsor performance, but perceived system performance? They'd be the laughing stock of the industry. Unless they can put a system into the market that gives a noticeable better performance than what is possible with the G4, they will wait. Apple does not want the Intel experience to be mediocre. They want it to be top notch.

I find the predictions AppleInsider made last Friday to be more sensible, but I am still not sure if Apple would put the 32-bit Yonah into the iMac, as it may be seen as a step back from the 64-bit G5. I've commented on Apple's 64-bit roadmap and how to get there, mentioning av 64-bit Yonah, which is really the Merom. Perhaps Intel may have been able to bring this chip forward in time from fall 2006 to this spring, enabling Apple to go straight to 64-bit from day one.

Apple is well in a position to combine the techniques in this patent with locking Mac OS X to run on a 64-bit Intel CPU only. Already the Pro desktop and Xserve product lines are 64-bit and ship in configs up to 16 Gig memory. They will of course not revert to a 32-bit processor. There is nothing stopping them from waiting a launch of Intel bases systems until they can use Intel's new 64-bit chips in the Mini and portable product lines too.

Actually it would make more sense to go with the low voltage IBM 970MP for the Mini and even for a portable design for still some months because the application developers in the consumer market needs more time to prepare their apps. Running PowerPC apps in emulation with Rosetta on the Monad chip could prove to give a pretty mediocre user-experience, and I don't think that is the impression Apple would want give their new customers when they make the switch.

One of the things one should consider when evaluation Microsoft's true openness is the company's willingness to support their own technologies on competing plattforms. More than often - virtuall allways in the public debate, Microsoft seem to forget that they actually do supply products for another operating system: Mac OS X, and one metric for testing their willingness to share their own technologies outside of Windows is to take a closer look at their Mac products. For instance both Microsoft Messenger and Microsoft Windows Media Player significantly lacks in functionality and features compared to their Window versions.

Microsoft states in their response letter to MA:

...Microsoft has been deeply committed to supporting XML within Microsoft Office for a number of years and continues to work hard with many governments around the world toward these goals.

In the case of XML support in Microsoft Office:mac 2004, only Excel supports the MS XML format, where support for XML formatted Word 2003 documents produced on Windows are completely lacking. It is also not possible to write XML documents from Word on the Mac. I blogged an article earlier this fall that explains in more detail how Microsoft's XML support is only Windows deep and what they have stated on this in relation to Office 12 for Mac OS X. Repeated questions to Microsoft on the fact that this "openness" is only Windows deep remains unanswered.

I have also posted a question to Microsoft's latest blog on the ability to save as XPS format in the upcoming Office 12 for Mac -- a question that remains unanswered.

Microsoft has been very active on Norwegian discussion boards lately where Microsoft employees have been operating under nicks posing to be normal discussion partipants rallying against the OpenDocument formats and promoting the openness of the MS XML formats well knowing that the country in Europe closest to follow follow Massachussetts is Norway. This following a public hearing where the government wants to standardize on open document formats in all communication with, and within the public sector, in addition to promote the use of open source code. Microsoft's response to this has been surprisingly vague compared to the response to the Commonwealth of Massachussetts.

One of the things one should consider when evaluation Microsoft's true openness is the company's willingness to support their own technologies on competing plattforms. More than often - virtuall allways in the public debate, Microsoft seem to forget that they actually do supply products for another operating system: Mac OS X, and one metric for testing their willingness to share their own technologies outside of Windows is to take a closer look at their Mac products. For instance both Microsoft Messenger and Microsoft Windows Media Player significantly lacks in functionality and features compared to their Window versions.

Microsoft states in their response letter to MA:

...Microsoft has been deeply committed to supporting XML within Microsoft Office for a number of years and continues to work hard with many governments around the world toward these goals.

In the case of XML support in Microsoft Office:mac 2004, only Excel supports the MS XML format, where support for XML formatted Word 2003 documents produced on Windows are completely lacking. It is also not possible to write XML documents from Word on the Mac. I blogged an article earlier this fall that explains in more detail how Microsoft's XML support is only Windows deep and what they have stated on this in relation to Office 12 for Mac OS X. Repeated questions to Microsoft on the fact that this "openness" is only Windows deep remains unanswered.

I have also posted a question to Microsoft's latest blog on the ability to save as XPS format in the upcoming Office 12 for Mac -- a question that remains unanswered.

Microsoft has been very active on Norwegian discussion boards lately where Microsoft employees have been operating under nicks posing to be normal discussion partipants rallying against the OpenDocument formats and promoting the openness of the MS XML formats well knowing that the country in Europe closest to follow follow Massachussetts is Norway. This following a public hearing where the government wants to standardize on open document formats in all communication with, and within the public sector, in addition to promote the use of open source code. Microsoft's response to this has been surprisingly vague compared to the response to the Commonwealth of Massachussetts.

I think the issues around open document formats used by governments and in the public sector is too important that lawmakers should be discouraged because of accessibility issues. Such issues can and will be fixed - there is no technical reason why for instance OpenOffice can't provide the same functionality for these users as do MS office. The same goes for support of the OASIS OpenDocument format in applications spesifically crafted for these users. It should not be more difficult to parse these documents than .DOC files.

There are also a number or countries this side of the pond following Massachussetts very closesly, and IBM last week invited the new Norwegian government to follow Massachussetts in standardizing on OpenDocument in the public sector.

Microsoft has also been very active on Norwegian discussion boards lately where Microsoft employees have been operating under nicks posing to be normal discussion partipants rallying against the OpenDocument formats and promoting the openness of the MS XML formats. Repeated questions to Microsoft on the fact that this "openness" is only Windows deep remains unanswered. Microsoft's own Office:mac 2004 is unable to read the Word XML document formats produced by Word 2003 on Windows.

I think the issues around open document formats used by governments and in the public sector is too important that lawmakers should be discouraged because of accessibility issues. Such issues can and will be fixed - there is no technical reason why for instance OpenOffice can't provide the same functionality for these users as do MS office. The same goes for support of the OASIS OpenDocument format in applications spesifically crafted for these users. It should not be more difficult to parse these documents than .DOC files.

There are also a number or countries this side of the pond following Massachussetts very closesly, and IBM last week invited the new Norwegian government to follow Massachussetts in standardizing on OpenDocument in the public sector.

Microsoft has also been very active on Norwegian discussion boards lately where Microsoft employees have been operating under nicks posing to be normal discussion partipants rallying against the OpenDocument formats and promoting the openness of the MS XML formats. Repeated questions to Microsoft on the fact that this "openness" is only Windows deep remains unanswered. Microsoft's own Office:mac 2004 is unable to read the Word XML document formats produced by Word 2003 on Windows.

I wrote yesterday that processor upgrades are also very likely for this event for two reasons:

• IBM will launch new hardware on October 14 with the multi-core Power5+ processor. Such announcements tend to have a connection - particularly since it would be "new" processors for both IBM and Apple in their products
• The PowerMac, iMac, Xserve and Powerbooks are long overdue for a processor upgrade, and needs more performace to live through to the Intel 64-bit products in 2nd half of 2006.

Sure, and I think this is one of the few exceptions. But then I can equally point you to my article Microsoft XML Support is only Win-Deep which shows how bad Microsoft's support for MS XML is in their own product Office:mac 2004. And no-one seriously use TextEdit for business word-processing.

It is not like Microsoft don't have the source-code to support OpenDocument formats, yeah?

I am not sure that going straight for OpenDocument is such a good idea. For any government.

The reason being that, and here I give Microsoft some credit to their critizism, the format is still immature in supporting spreadsheets and media-rich documents. Further, the software ecosystem around OpenDocument is very limited, and is likely to be so for quite a while.

OpenOffice for instance does little for Mac users and StarOffice does nothing, and you are in essence making it even more difficult for the second largest desktop to compete in a business environment. There is no way Apple can openly support OpenDocument right now -- Microsoft would kill Office:mac spot on.

This debate is going on in Norway too right now, but the effects will be even more profound than the Massachusetts case, because the government wants to mandate a format that will be used in any communication between the public sector, businesses and citizens.

What I think is needed, and what I have proposed to the Norwegian Government, is that the government, together with the EU, hold a public competition where anyone can submit their contributions to an open document format. This also gives Microsoft an option to contribute. However, the stakes are also very high for Microsoft, because the winning format will be made mandatory for use throughout the public sector of the EU.

I have written many articles on this in my blog under the Agenda subsection. Here one can also find the public hearing documents for the Norwegian government case.

In the response letter from Microsoft written by General Manager Alan Yates to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decision to standardize on the OASIS OpenDocument format in addition to PDF, Microsoft are making claims both to the openness of the company's own Office XML formats, and that they are becoming widely adopted in Microsoft's products, and therefore argues that Microsoft Office qualifies as a product supporting open standards.

This "openness" goes only Win-deep in that Microsoft is not even willing to extend its XML support to the company's own Mac product line, where Office:mac 2004 only has fragments of the XML support found in Office 2003. The company also cites lacking XML support in OS X Panther (10.3) as the reason why Office 12 on the Mac will be released significantly later than Office 12 on Windows.

This information is missing entirely in the response from Microsoft to the state of Massachusetts, and is another in a series of misinformation and not representing the full extent of Microsoft's support, or rather lack thereof, for standards and openness. The full story goes here

In the response letter from Microsoft written by General Manager Alan Yates to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts decision to standardize on the OASIS OpenDocument format in addition to PDF, Microsoft are making claims both to the openness of the company's own Office XML formats, and that they are becoming widely adopted in Microsoft's products, and therefore argues that Microsoft Office qualifies as a product supporting open standards.

This "openness" goes only Win-deep in that Microsoft is not even willing to extend its XML support to the company's own Mac product line, where Office:mac 2004 only has fragments of the XML support found in Office 2003. The company also cites lacking XML support in OS X Panther (10.3) as the reason why Office 12 on the Mac will be released significantly later than Office 12 on Windows.

This information is missing entirely in the response from Microsoft to the state of Massachusetts, and is another in a series of misinformation like about KOffice and not representing the full extent of Microsoft's support, or rather lack thereof, for standards and openness. The full story goes here

Microsoft stand to loose less business even if some of its customers migrate to Mac OS X, because the vast majority of Mac users have bought and use Microsoft Office:mac or even Microsoft Virtual PC. Targeting Mac OS X may therefore be a smart move on Microsoft.

As a matter of fact, the Microsoft Mac Business Unit is highly profitable and will bring in even more revenue as the Macintosh again is gaining market share. Because MBU has done a good job with Office on the Mac often introducing new functionality in this version, Mac users are less likely to jump ship and pick up the free OpenOffice which has a user-interface that would alienate many Mac users. Microsoft therefore has a vested interest in making sure that if a user migrates, the migration is to a platform where it is more likely the user retains a customer relationship with Microsoft.

This in stark contrast to rival open source alternative Linux, where Microsoft would loose both the operating system and potentially an Office license if a customer were to switch. It is therefore less likely that Microsoft will target Linux with their development tools.

Another thing is of course that by supporting OS X, Microsoft can claim multi-OS support, something that makes it easier to keep the US DoJ or European authorities at bay.

I blogged a longer comment on this yesterday for those interested in reading it here.

I am in the process of writing my response to the Norwegian Government's hearing on use of open source and open standards in public sector with deadline September 15. (Hearing documents in English here.) I have two suggestions that could be implemented, that potentially would significantly reduce the market dominance of Microsoft:

1. Make it mandatory for all public sector websites to follow Internet and CSS standards (perferably in complicance with the Acid2 browser test), and do not add code to spesifically make such sites work with IE 6 or 7 using nonstandard Microsoft implementations or extensions. If the site does not render in IE, one will have to install a standards compliant browser of which there are several out there to be downloaded for free.
   This will speed up the spread of standards compliant browsers significantly, as every business or individual will have a need to communicate with the public sector and Goverment over the web.
   Full background for suggestion here.
   _
2. Make a call in the EU for a competition on open document formats, and the winning format will be adapted across the EU for exchange of documents between Government, businesses and citizens.
   This will force Microsoft to participate in the competition and/or adapt support for the chosen open format, or basically loose a significant chunk of business in the EU. Again, everyone will have to communicate with the Government and exchange documents with the public sector.

I am in the process of writing my response to the Norwegian Government's hearing on use of open source and open standards in public sector with deadline September 15. (Hearing documents in English here.) I have two suggestions that could be implemented, that potentially would significantly reduce the market dominance of Microsoft:

1. Make it mandatory for all public sector websites to follow Internet and CSS standards (perferably in complicance with the Acid2 browser test), and do not add code to spesifically make such sites work with IE 6 or 7 using nonstandard Microsoft implementations or extensions. If the site does not render in IE, one will have to install a standards compliant browser of which there are several out there to be downloaded for free.
   This will speed up the spread of standards compliant browsers significantly, as every business or individual will have a need to communicate with the public sector and Goverment over the web.
   Full background for suggestion here.
   _
2. Make a call in the EU for a competition on open document formats, and the winning format will be adapted across the EU for exchange of documents between Government, businesses and citizens.
   This will force Microsoft to participate in the competition and/or adapt support for the chosen open format, or basically loose a significant chunk of business in the EU. Again, everyone will have to communicate with the Government and exchange documents with the public sector.

Well, this is not so much about Apple hedging its bets, as it is about timing. A lot of folks anticipate an announcment of new hardware at MWSF in January. It ain't gonna happen!

Having now seen last weeks Intel announcement, it makes me believe it is unlikely they will launch Intel based Macs with 32-bit processors. Both iMac, Pro Mac and XServe are already 64-bit and they will stay that way. Anything else would be seen as a complete failure by the market.

For the mini and portables, the picture is a bit more tricky. From what I can gather from the latest announcements from IBM and Freescale, what I think will happen is that Apple will introduce a mini with a dual core processor from IBM perhaps even in September at MacWorld Paris, and follow up with similar announcements for the rest of the product line. Exception is of course the portables where they for thermal reasons have to stay at G4 until the switch to Intel, hence the agreement with Freescale.

>You have never actually met a customer or an end user, have you? Excluding 90-odd % of the market just isn't an option.

Which is exactly what you can do if you are Government and want to break down the dominance of a company like Microsoft. - This is exactly the intention of the Norwegian government; rid the population and businesses of having to become customer of a particular company in order to communicate with offices and services in the public sector. As long as you have alternatives, such action is appropriate behavior from government.

>You have never actually met a customer or an end user, have you? Excluding 90-odd % of the market just isn't an option.

Which is exactly what you can do if you are Government and want to break down the dominance of a company like Microsoft. - This is exactly the intention of the Norwegian government; rid the population and businesses of having to become customer of a particular company in order to communicate with offices and services in the public sector. As long as you have alternatives, such action is appropriate behavior from government.

My recommendation to the US government, as it is to the Norwegian government, would be to make it mandatory for Government and public sector to design their web-sites and applications to work with standards based browsers, and don't add functionality to sites to make Microsoft quirks work. This will force everyone who deals with Government to install a standards based web-browser on their system if not Internet Explorer is able to render the site properly.

This should not create a problem, because such standards compliant browsers are available for just about any operating system out there, and most of them are free to download and install. Such a measure would contribute to speed up the adaption of standards browsers much faster.

I have translated parts of the Norwegian Government's hearing documents on how to use open source and standards documents in public sector, and you can see from the documents how the working commitee wants to politically reduce the market dominance of Microsoft, rather than continue to let the population of the country depend on that company.

More on the whole issue, including the translated documents in my blog at http://www.andwest.com/blojsom/blog/tatle/agenda/

Don't know how to put images inline here, but here is a good view of the Microsoft Vista

There are basically two things going on here with Apple and the switch:

1. IBM treated Apple as just another, not particularly strategic, chip customer, whereas for Apple this was crucial. See my full comment in my blog: http://www.andwest.com/blojsom/blog/tatle/comments /2005/06/12/IBM_not_geared_for_charismatic_custome rs.html)
2. Apple, cannot afford to rely on a chip manufacturer which reserves it highest performing processors for it's own use (POWER5).

Just check out the announcement; for workstation and low end servers.

What if Apple has ambitions to build mid-range server - even high end servers, and very high-end workstations? Are they content with a chip manufacturer which perhaps does not allow them to make more than 4-way systems or cripple their performance in terms of floating point or memory access (bandwidth) ? I don't think so - not now or in the future.

As far as I know Intel does not reserve any of their chips for certain customers or their own use like IBM does with the POWER5.

For eager /. readers you have probably read the news about the Norwegian Minister of modernisation and this: http://www.andwest.com/blojsom/blog/tatle/agenda/2 005/06/27/Norwegian_Minister_Proprietary_Standards _No_Longer_Acceptable_in_Communication_with_Govern ment.html

Ofcource any public system should be open standards based.

Well, the key to understanding the switch lies internally in IBM rather than with Apple and you said it "IBM devoting more and more effort to game boxes and embedded and its own POWER servers"

Having worked both in Apple product managment and in IBM with marketing of POWER and PowerPC based servers, I believe this is all about IBM protecting its server business and that Apple and IBM simply disagreed on which markets to run the G5 and more powerful systems in (dual core and multiprocessor configurations). Remember it made quite a stir inside IBM when the Xserve suddenly started popping up in supercomputer configurations at a fraction of the cost of the same performance from IBM?

IBM's Enterprise Division simply cannot afford Apple establishing a much lower pricepoint for low and midrange POWER performance thereby shaking the foundation of an ecosystem inside IBM that probably accounts for 40% or more of their total turnover. High performance systems from Apple with IBM's processors are much more threathening from IBM's point of view because customers can make a direct comparison of price and performance.

They can always talk customers out of premium pricing compared to Intel based server systems with all kinds of RISC superiority rara, but not when the competition comes from THEIR processors.

There is no way IBM could not fix the performance issue just as good as Intel can. If that was the case IBM is in deep, deep trouble.

I made a comment on this on May 23 (after the first story in Washington Post) in my blog that I think helps shed light on what is really going on here. Please ignore the first paragraph in Norwegian; the rest is in plain English: http://www.andwest.com/blojsom/blog/tatle/2005/05/ 23/Apple_og_Intel_Chips.html

Now, for the timing of the announcement it seems like the decision on Apple's part is quite hasted. It does not make sense from a business, product managment nor development standpoint that they make this announcement such a long time before having new hardware available. It kinda seems like someone got really upset with someone.