There’s one thing that’s been on my mind recently. I’m sure you’re familiar with the news that Apple has been delivering Safari by default to Windows users with iTunes installed. I think just about everyone agrees that this is committing a fairly heinous crime against your users, but let’s analyze a different take on this.

Back in June of 2007, Steve Jobs declared his intention to get “the best browser in the world” on as many Windows PC’s as he could. This declaration was reinforced at Macworld 2008 in January of this year. Mr. Jobs was hell bent on gaining market share with his browser on both major platforms. He wants that market share like, uhh, well, now.

One has to wonder if perhaps that market share just isn’t happening like he wanted. Perhaps that’s what led up to Apple making the nuclear decision to install it by default on the next iTunes update. I know that subsequently, I’ve seen many Windows PCs with Safari installed and yeah, I’ve even heard Windows users trying it out. Some like it, some don’t. That’s beside the point. It was a Bad Idea ™ for Apple to force it down their throats, hypocrisy and all… but that’s not why I’m here.

I’m here in this article because you see, I don’t get it.

I absolutely, positively do not understand the browser wars. In the day and age where Internet Explorer was not standards compliant a-tall, sure that made a difference because webmasters bent the standards to their whim to the browser with the largest market. Now that Microsoft has “seen the light” and intend to go as fully standards-compliant as possible in IE8, why do the browser wars matter?

Firefox is pretty standards compliant. Safari is very standards compliant. IE is going to be.

So why does it matter anymore?

Market share for browsers is not the real battle - it’s the desktop and the ecosystem, which of course, starts in the home. But the browser wars just do not have a point that I can gather at all.

Therefore, I’d like you, dear reader, to explain it to me.

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Browser, Mac, Microsoft, Web, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox

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EXCHANGE IS A DICK.

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Some of the #morphixers may find this hard to believe, but I’m not going to defend Apple on this latest round of controversy.

Trying to sell your browser by suddenly including it in the newest autoupdate procedure for Windows users was a bad move. It reeks of that “unfriendly neighbor” feel like Microsoft forcing IE4 down your throat (remember those days?) I understand the idea and the approach. It would have been one thing to make it available - checking the box by default is another thing altogether.

I will tell you this, though; if my stepfather is any measure of success, the ploy worked on him. He blindly clicked through the dialogue and ended up with Safari on his system. Curious, he decided to give it a go. He wasn’t too impressed, though.

I was never sure that using Safari as the ambassador to Mac technology was a good idea. Safari takes a very minimalist approach to web browsing, which I (and many others) like quite a bit. However, Windows users are not known to minimalist and I doubt will see the merits of that approach. Instead, I would suspect they would see it as a featureless, bland piece of software that has now squirmed its way onto the system. The deal sealer for Mac technology has always been the OS itself, not the squeaky-clean apps that run on it. Let them put OS X in a box and I’d bet you’d start to see different results.

I agree with all of the statements that the pundits are making… it’s unfair to expect a user to keep up with a piece of software they were not necessarily aware had gotten onto their system… gives it another attack vector, etc. etc. Safari isn’t the most insecure thing on the planet, but still, installing software in a sneaky, snarky way like this is just not the right thing to do.

One day, I’ll write an article about how I just don’t understand the browser wars anyway.

Pull it back, Apple, before your black eye gets larger.

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Do your users try to get through the day with Entourage 2004 or Entourage 2008? (Believe me when I say “get through the day.”) Do you have your domain controllers locked away behind a VPN? Are your users depressed that they cannot access GAL information from outside your iron curtain?

E’rage users should feel less enraged with this interesting Applescript. This little guy makes a shortcut key available that will use Outlook Web Access to query your GAL and return information. It was pointed out to us by a Microsoft engineer. They did not verify that it worked with Exchange 2007, but I can tell you that it does function with Entourage 2008 with Exchange 2007.

The only downside to the script that I can find thus far is PKI. If you use your Active Directory to publish PKI certificates for users, this script will not see/use them. If you need PKI functionality with directory lookup, you still need to be able to talk to that global catalog/domain controller.

Still, it’s nice to have a backup when the global catalog is taking its sweet American time to process your lookup…

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Entourage 2004, Mac, Microsoft, Office, Entourage 2008

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Once again, the iPhone rules the press with a heavy dollop of enticing news.

There’s a lot here on the surface and a lot below the surface. Let’s scratch the surface first.

The announcements about Apple licensing ActiveSync are interesting. There was lots of speculation in this regard and greetz to those who called it. I myself lost a bet. I was thinking that Apple might actually thumb their nose at ActiveSync and employ webdav for Exchange 2003 (much like Entourage) or web services for Exchange 2007. Of course, that would not be a quick route to policy controls on the device itself (i.e. remote kill), so ActiveSync makes the most business sense both in time and money. It’s a good investment. I was just hoping they wouldn’t just… well, because.

But they did. Let’s analyze what this brings:

- Sync with email (effectively push email, but it’s not TRULY push email… ActiveSync, even on Windows Mobile, IS NOT PUSH EMAIL. It just appears that way).

- Sync with contacts

- Sync with calendars

- NOTICEABLY ABSENT: sync with tasks

- Policy control over device. The You Had Me At EHLO blog states that this is about at the Exchange 2003 SP2 level of device control, which means it’s not as feature rich as the Blackberry, but a good starting point.

Other items of note for enterprises:

- Cisco IPSEC and VPN clients

- Two-factor authentication

What’s missing? Well, you saw me point out that task syncing is missing… Merlin Mann is likely pissing himself right about now over that. But I noticed today that there were no federal government folks present and… here’s the bad news for those federal workers… Jobs never mentioned encryption of data at rest. Thanks to an OMB directive, encryption of data at rest is a requirement for a mobile device on a federal government network. Guess what device is the only one to meet that requirement?

If you’re thinking of a berry in the color of night, you’d be right.

You’d also be right if you’re thinking of the next version of Windows Mobile… 6.1, I believe they call it. Last I remember, that also had encryption of data at rest.

So unfortunately, this may leave the iPhone out of the federal government networks for a little while longer. Perhaps it’s an oversight that it wasn’t mentioned - but I’m betting that it was left out deliberately.

All in all, I wasn’t crazy about the iPhone before but I certainly am now. The fact that they’ve really turned it into a platform with an ecosystem makes this very, very exciting. One of the challenges of the OS X platform was the lack of an ecosystem. Now with OS X advances, the freely-available Xcode and now the freely-available iPhone SDK, Apple stands to really rock the world with an ecosystem that could quickly rival Microsoft.

To make sure they’re shaking things up, there’s that iFund thing. What a fantastic idea. Folks, when was the last time Microsoft paid you to develop applications for their platform? If you want to get into the Microsoft developmental mafia, you’re likely looking at an MSDN subscription ($2500 or so the first year, $1500 each year afterwards… PER SEAT!)… you’re looking at heavy software licensing costs and hell, they don’t even distribute the application or updates for you.

Apple is not only making the price of entry into their ecosystem dirt cheap ($99), the development software is free and they will distribute your applications/updates. Folks, this is a hell of a deal and I’m betting there are small businesses and garage developers everywhere getting excited about this.

I really, really think Microsoft is in trouble on many fronts. It’s going to be hard to stop this kind of excitement. I don’t even intend to develop apps for the iPhone or the Mac and I’m excited.

Truly, there was an earthquake today in California. It may have been a subtle earthquake for some, but I felt it quite strong here on the other side of the states. I’m excited about computing again - and that’s something to cheer about.

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Apple, Mac, OS X, iPhone

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Full text of MSFT e-Mail: Microsoft execs on Vista problems: “Full text: Microsoft execs on Vista problems
A federal judge today unsealed internal Microsoft e-mails that have been used to support the plaintiffs’ case in the lawsuit over the ‘Windows Vista Capable’ program. Snippets were previously read aloud in court, but the full messages go further to reveal extensive hand-wringing, at the highest levels of the [...]“

(Via Dvorak Uncensored.)

It just occurred to me, while reading Mr. Dvorak’s post, that there’s a possibility that Intel specifically torpedoed Microsoft and Vista over the past few years to turn the tide in favor of Apple.

I’m not one to actually apply paranoid-style conspiracy theories, but this just came to mind. You could quite easily take these emails, examine Intel’s past actions, combine them with Vista and Apple timelines and it certainly seems quite suspicious.

While discussing this with a co-worker, he had a brilliant observation. “Microsoft and Intel are like the two parents who should have divorced long ago, but stayed together for the kids.”

Indeed.

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Apple, Mac, Microsoft, Intel

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Here’s a late night pondering for you as I traipse off to bed.

Ask yourself: does the subject matter of a blog control what browser share you’re likely to experience on your site?

Given the stats that I’m getting, I can say (without much of a doubt) that yes, that’s true…

#	#reqs	#pages	browser
1	5132	2910	Firefox
 	4002	1992	  Firefox/2
 	986	837	  Firefox/3
 	144	81	  Firefox/1
2	2535	2189	Safari
 	2534	2188	  Safari/523
 	1	1	  Safari/417
3	1750	973	MSIE
 	705	478	  MSIE/6
 	978	428	  MSIE/7
 	67	67	  MSIE/5

Eh. Just interesting is all.

Once again, I’ve stayed up far, far too late. Someone shoot me so I can get some sleep, please?

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Web, Browser

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I meant to post about this over the weekend, but… well, I forgot. I didn’t see much chatter about this over the leap day, but here it is.

On a system that uses Postfix 2.2.9 on SLES 10, Postfix started acting quite wonky on February 29th, 2008. In a standard Postfix+Amavis+ClamAv setup, you actually have two Postfix daemons - one listening on port 25 (duh), the other listening on port 10025 waiting to get mail handed off from amavis+clamav.

Well, it appears that the second daemon gets quite confused about the date on Leap Day and logs everything with March 1st plus four hours. While this seems benign enough, if you use some statistics generator like pflogsumm.pl to generate some numbers for management, your hourly totals quit working.

We had not one byte of statistic data for February 29th as a result. That’s a shame, but it was one of many odd tech-related things that happened that day that I won’t soon forget.

Our power even went out that day.

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e-mail, Postfix

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It’s pretty amazing how far behind I’ve gotten in web creation technology.  I’ve been spending some time with Adobe CS3 and I’m finding out just how much of this thing has passed me by.  I’d say… quite a bit has passed me by.  I guess I’ve had my head down working on server stuff for so long now that I’ve not had a chance to really step back and work on web pages like I used to.

Of course, I do have much less time than I used to have.  Having two kids and a wife with a job and responsibilities tends to make you focus (or defocus, as the case may be) a little bit more. I’ve got to get refocused back on these items though, because this is what I’d rather be doing.

Can anyone out there in lalaland recommend some good approaches to learning CS3?  I’m not just talking about the apps themselves, but the workflows from site inception to finish, etc.

I’m especially interested in picking up Flash, too.

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iTWire - From Windows to Linux - and back again

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again… the battle for the corporate desktop is fought at home. Microsoft has known this for a long time - Apple knows it too. That’s why Apple is sneaking up on Microsoft and they’re just not paying attention. They’re too busy mucking around in other businesses that they don’t belong in instead of focusing on the real business (operating systems, servers and Office).

The be-everything-to-everyone will kill you, Microsoft.

While we’re there, let’s raise a glass to them over the Yahoo purchase. When did Yahoo start making a competing operating system? Oh, that’s right, they don’t. This plays into Microsoft’s search and advertising obsession. Or, as one might call it, the slay Google obsession. Yeah, silly me. The more they diversify, the weaker the products get. When it affects your core business (like it has with Vista), you’re really sliding down the slippery slope.

Oh yeah… and hello, how are ya? Thought you might like a helping of opinion to start your Wednesday.

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