Category Archives: Development

Ballmer’s On The Way Out

So the news came down today that Steve Ballmer is retiring from Microsoft within the next year. And within moments of that news getting out, Microsoft’s stock rose nearly ten percent, coming close to its highest level in a year. That must be a real ego boost for Mr. Ballmer (although from all apparent signs, his ego is quite healthy, thank you).

The departure (and its aftermath) raises some interesting questions about where Microsoft has been and where it’s going, and about the tech industry as a whole.

First, a data point: Ballmer’s departure announcement was covered as an urgent, breaking-news story by financial publications (e.g., Wall Street Journal) and by general-news publications (e.g., New York Times). Some of that is probably expected, given the size and scope of Microsoft as a company, but I suspect that if the head of Nestle decided to step down over the next year, there would be articles but not breathless and speculative reportage. Clearly there’s something about Microsoft and about Ballmer that rates more amped-up coverage.

Most notably, the departure was also covered in a similarly urgent manner by Variety, a trade publication for the entertainment industry. And this is where we start to see one of the impacts of Ballmer’s tenure as head of Microsoft, and, really, of Steve Jobs’ leadership a decade ago: the worlds of tech and entertainment are separate no more.

Through his embrace of the creative community (and his extreme leveraging of it through interrelationships between Apple, Pixar, and others), Jobs educated both camps about the value of partnering with the other. But Ballmer oversaw some significant motion there, too. MSNBC, the Xbox (and subsequent iterations), and the various music initiatives (Zune, anyone? Anyone?) all had thumbprints from Ballmer on them.

His tenure at Microsoft was rocky, to be sure, and his on-stage performances that were once likened to a “humanized baboon” remain of legend. But Ballmer’s stewardship of Microsoft has resulted in some pretty great stuff, too. So maybe the tech community could keep the gleefulness down to a dull roar?

Unix Dying? Ha!

Julie Sartain over at Network World published a piece today called “The last days of Unix.” In, largely citing Gartner analysis, she posits that Unix is slowly dying.

To that, I say, “fat chance.” Reading the article, the numbers are reasonably compelling, but I think they tell a different story than what Gartner and Sartain are saying.

The article appears to be measuring pervasiveness through expenditure, and particularly server expenditures. By that measure, Gartner’s data is showing the levels have peaked and will slowly be declining over time. And generally, that measure is probably accurate.

But that’s a little like saying carbohydrates are going out of fashion because some Panera Bread franchises are closing. Measuring Unix’s staying power through people purchasing specific servers is probably not the best way to do it.

If you are trying to get a true measure of Unix’s pervasiveness over time, it would seem to be far better to look at shipments of…Unix. And it’s variants, of course (although the article differentiates between Unix and Linux, et al, it seems a bit of a spurious distinction). So look at the dedicated server shipments, sure, but also at Mac OS X (hello, Unix kernel), and RedHat/Fedora and CentOS and Debian and Solaris and …well, you get the idea.

Looking only at the sales of big iron itself says more, I think, about the decline in purchasing of big iron. Recent articles in mass media have talked about the slowness in tech spending, driven in part by companies’ move into the cloud for computing power. Well, that’s one example (of several) where previous orders for big iron just aren’t happening anymore, unless you’re someone like Amazon or Google – and they both build their own custom boxes.

So for those denizens of bash, the wizards of tcsh and the valiant vi users, fear not. Rumors of the death of Unix appear, to me, to be greatly exaggerated.

Retro Tech: Beagle Bros

Back when I was trying to figure out this whole technology stuff, The Great Migration happened. For me, that was the migration from a mainframe you had to drive (or, in my case, take the bus) to see and use to a computer you could just go to your room to use. And my first computer (before the TI, before the CoCo, before the C64, before all the rest) was an Apple ][.

Now this is not the time to rhapsodize nostalgic for the Apple ][ per se. But the environment around that computer encouraged hobbyists, students — and it encouraged fun. And one of the leading fun-makers was a software company called Beagle Bros.

They were weird. They were fun. They were whimsical. They’d put code snippets or bits of hexadecimal in their ads that would reveal funny lines, or a previously unknown feature in the computer’s code. Their whole purpose seemed like it was to enable hobbyists to dig ever deeper into the machine and get ever more out.

Take, for instance, their Apple Mechanic software. With it, I could create my own shape tables to use in my little hobby games. I could make ‘em look like they were professionally done. And this was in 1982!

Who else (before Clarus the dogcow) could teach you how to make your computer moo? (CALL 985, by the way.) Who else released so much professional software that was unprotected with code listings available, so you could see how it was done and try it yourself? Who else ran their own comic strip in their catalogs?

And perhaps most tellingly, who else had a software company (now gone) that inspired its own online museum? There aren’t many. And few had as much an impact on an entire generation of today’s programmers.

Perhaps it’s nostalgia, but Beagle Bros was ahead of its time in creating and putting forth a culture that engaged its customers (contests, for instance), respected them (no copy-protection, just a request not to pirate), and supported them (the PEEKs & POKEs poster alone was huge support). Many a company today could take a page from their playbook.

Retro Tech: The 200-year Old Computer

It was nearly 200 years ago (okay, 191) that Charles Babbage came up with the design for his Difference Engine, a mechanical calculator that could solve polynomial-based equations. In the 1820′s, he also sketched designs for a printer to go along with it!

What’s perhaps more amazing is that when, in 2000, the printer and difference engine were built, they worked perfectly. And they still do!

As we move ever faster into quantum computing, wearable computing, holographic interfaces, and all the rest, it’s sometimes useful to take a moment and look back. This week, to look WAY back, and celebrate one of the foundational moments of the technology.

The Computer History Museum in California has a working Difference Engine No. 2, and also has a wonderful interpretive website about it all.

Worth checking out!