My Digital Life

Since T-Mobile launched the first Google Android based phone a few weeks ago I’ve read a few good pieces about the both the phone itself and the overall platform.  I find it interesting that pretty much all the articles and blogs compare Android directly with the iPhone.  From what I’ve seen it’s more an alternative to Microsoft’s Windows Mobile. 

I’m sure some of this is due to the current iPhone and Apple buzz, but I don’t think the WM comparison is something we can ignore.  For one thing Android is a platform rather than a ‘product’.  Where as the iPhone is a complete product - hardware, OS, applications and services, Android is very similar to Windows Mobile in that its a platform you can adopt for your hardware or apps. 

It strikes me that Android is a lot like Chome in that I imagine its seen as a vehicle for the delivery of Googles cloud services.  Although I don’t think Google have really chased the Enterprise market in the past they seem to be building up this side of their business, putting in place the building blocks they will need to move in and squash MS.  There’s a lot of money to be made in the enterprise email and office apps market and Google seem to be chasing that cash with a bit more vigor these days.

Googles enterprise email offerings are very competitive.  On price alone they are hard to ignore.  You loose some of the functionality you get with something like Exchange and Outlook, but especially in todays market, it does put you in a place where you start wondering about whether the functionality is worth the extra cost. 

One gap in the email offering seems to be mobile services.  Services like Blackberry and WM push mail are ubiquitous in business today and will be important for business adoption.  Sure there’s a mobile GoogleMail site, and a client for Blackberry but having their own platform out there that can do push mail, run the core Google apps and provide a platform for third party apps is a very attractive piece of the overall solution.

The fact that few articles are comparing Andoid to WM really surprises me.  And if I was a WM product manager I’d be both happy and worried about that.  Happy because the market seems to be pitching Android against Apple.  Worried because no one is talking about my product.

Edit:  I just spotted a great review of the T-Mobile G1 and Android over on Engadget that gives a good description of Androids integration with the Google cloud.

Today MS have released Silverlight 2.0 out of beta.  Great news for me as I can now get it rolled out at work and get people trying out things like PhotoSynth and DeepZoom (we can’t really deploy betas!).  I’m really looking forward to seeing how people might use them. 

The installation is here and is available for PC and Mac and supports IE, Firefox and Google Chrome. 

An interesting note from the release material is that it seems like Apple are blocking a release for iPhone… I guess it gets in the way of their own plans?  What with Silverlight on its way to Windows Mobile and Nokia, and WM Mesh clients on their way too, I’m going to feel a little left out with my iPhone.

Given MS’s current marketing campaign if I were them I’d be tempted to build iPhone compatible clients anyway.  Then I’d show them working as much as possible and let Apple publicly deny them to users…

In a my post earlier today I noted that Google Chrome wasn’t passing credentials through to our SharePoint intranet.  Having played with Chrome a bit more this afternoon unfortunately it seems it’s not just SharePoint that suffers.  

With Chrome seemingly not supporting Windows Integrated Authentication, if you’re using an Internet proxy server with authentication enabled you’ll be prompted for credentials each time you want to browse an external web site.  Not a great user experience…

The good news is that the problem is logged with Google here so will hopefully be fixed in the future.

Mutt Cutts who heads up Google webspam team has posted up some useful info on Chrome:

• Answers to common Google Chrome objections
• Preventing paranoia- when does Google Chrome talk to Google.com

That’s now two posts about something I wasn’t going to look at today! :)

I didn’t really think I’d be posting anything about Chrome… there’s just so much out there already.  Having downloaded and installed it though there are some interesting things in there that I thought I’d comment on.

1. Proxy Settings - it would seem that Chrome uses/obeys the Windows Internet Properties, so if you’re configuring proxy settings etc via GPO Chrome will obey these settings.  From an enterprise perspective this is good - it was the first thing people asked here for example.  It’s nice to see Google following this route, though end users wanting to bypass said proxy servers might not like it..!It’s worth noting that I imported settings etc from IE during the installation, so Chrome might have picked up this behaviour from there.  I’ll have to test it later.
2. Integrated Authentication - Having just visited our SharePoint based intranet I noticed that Chrome isn’t passing through my Windows credentials to the site resulting in a logon prompt that I don’t get with IE.  Once you’ve logged in though, the credentials are cached for the remainder of the session.
3. Sharepoint - From an initial look, Chrome doesn’t seem to offer a great experience in SharePoint, I’m not sure it’s even providing the ‘Level 2 Browser‘ experience you get with Firefox et al.
4. Default Search Engine - This is something I’ve never configured on my computer, though I do always use Google.  It was nice to see that Chrome picked up what must have been the standing default and is defaulting to Live Search.  Not that I use that, but I like that they haven’t just defaulted Google.

Laughing Squid pointed me at ReadAir, an Adobe Air based client for Google Reader.  Seems like quite a nice little app, certainly seems faster than the webpage (at least on my work laptop).

Still can’t wait to try Fav.or.it though!

MS makes a bid for Yahoo - $45 billion. 

Sounds like good news to me as a consumer… It’s sad to see one of the original web pioneers absorbed (I still remember when the IMDB was still hosted at Cardiff University), but Yahoo has kinda lost it’s way and MS and Yahoo combined would pose pretty strong opposition for Google.  

Putting aside the advertising side of things, Yahoo could be a great addition to the ‘Live’ side of MS, for example the prospect of Flickr and Photosynth coming together would be incredibly exciting.

This is my problem for the next few weeks…

S+S and the other software and services initiatives from Google et al may well take away a fair chunk of the work needed to manage an effective IS service.  If we can do that we can devote our efforts away from the day-to-day ops and into making a difference elsewhere.  Sure there will still be challenges, but hopefully most of the operational overhead will be focused on service management and commercials than day-to-day technical design and admin.  So…  If I’m an enterprise customer planning my IS architecture for my business over the next few years what should I be thinking about?

The first thing that comes to mind is the cloud where all these services will live…  Where is it, and how do I get to it?  How do my users authenticate to it?  How is my information secured between the cloud and desktop?  How do my customers feel about having their data in a cloud somewhere in Redmond or Mountain View?  Might I be part of the cloud for my customers? 

The software side shouldn’t too much of a problem (famous last words!)… getting software to people we can do, but the more I can move that into the cloud the happier I’ll be!