I don’t know, let’s find out together. This post is one in a series that examines this question from different angles.  Today we look at one aspect in particular, the poor availability of commercial office space and the impact it may have on the city down the road.

I was recently talking with Boris Mann of Bootup Labs and he postulated (and I agree) that due to their cost effectiveness and proximity to great cafes, pubs and restaurants, that Gastown and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside have become hot spots for software startups. No offense to Yaletown, for years it’s been the trendiest and most upwardly mobile neighbourhood in the city, but because of this it’s also become quite expensive. And while he was excited that parts of Vancouver’s inner city (the Flack Block in particular) had become magnets for fledgling technology companies, when talking about the city as a whole he seemed a little less sure that Vancouver could be included right now in that top tier of globally competitive cities like Boston or San Francisco. “Vancouver itself must grow up and be recognized as a whole. We *need* to point to universities westwards (UBC) and eastwards (SFU Burnaby Mountain), the Microsoft Dev Center in Richmond, the EA buildings in Burnaby, and so on.”

As authors like Richard Florida have stressed, cities need to attract and retain top talent in order stay economically healthy and competitive. It’s a constant process of keeping up with Boston, with Tel Aviv, with the Bay Area, in amenities, quality of life, culture, safety, aesthetics and other supports, and making sure that companies have access to the best possible research facilities and a highly educated work force. That work force is both created through the quality of nearby colleges and universities and through the gravity that is naturally induced by an accumulation of the above mentioned things. When an innovative or large company appears on the scene it creates gravity, it creates spin-off companies, and it challenges everyone to raise their game. So it’s important to both see those companies develop here , or move here.

Vancouver wins hands down in aesthetics, quality of life, safety (minus the earthquake we’re all waiting for) and other supports (dining, leisure, soft laws concerning marijuana?) but there are some things that we’re lacking. It might be cohesion. Is there a disjointedness caused by the geography and inter-competitiveness of the partner cities in the region? As Boris points out, some collaborative effort between competing clusters or competing cities might just make one big cluster and put us in that upper echelon. But while Richmond, Burnaby and Surrey have either seen some large software companies locate offices there or have announced major plans to create office and mixed use developments, Vancouver has been running out of space fast.  Well actually that’s not true, we’ve been running out of space for companies. A slow and steady exodus of tech and software companies out of the downtown core would be a devastatingly bad thing (for Vancouver) if Richmond and/or Surrey started to displace Vancouver as the main cluster of high tech and software companies in the Lower Mainland.

Because of the profitability of luxury residential condos, developers haven’t produced enough commercial office space in the downtown core to accommodate any large companies that may want to have offices there. Microsoft had to locate in Richmond, and some would say so what?That’s still Vancouver right? But that’s millions of dollars a year that local businesses in the downtown business district aren’t getting from coffee breaks, catering, office supplies, etc. And not only that, but if any technology and software companies or other service providers want to do business with a large company like Microsoft, they could have had the convenience of a quick taxi or brisk walk between offices, grab a drink with associates after work and bounce casual ideas around, but now they’ve got to head down to Richmond (boring). SFU, BCIT and UBC campuses downtown or relatively close, Microsoft in Richmond. Thirdi office in Yaletown, Microsoft in Richmond. See the pattern here? It could be argued that Microsoft is not always the friendliest company especially to startups, but I use them only as an example. If a large company with a reputation of working with startups or smaller firms wanted to find a space in Vancouver proper it would be extremely difficult, as Microsoft proved. And perhaps most importantly, if a local company started to experience strong growth and needed to take on more staff and more space where would they expand to? The fact that there is simply no commercial space left in Vancouver and none really being built, means problems down the road if you ask me. And city council isn’t terribly excited to add more commercial high rise space downtown because of the risk of blocking resident’s views by obstructing our “view corridors“. So it’s a bit of a catch 22 in my opinion, companies want to come here for the beautiful views but we can’t offer them office space because it will block the beautiful views. While cheap office space for startups in Gastown and the DTES is great, this large scale component of Vancouver’s ability to attract and retain larger companies may have a very negative impact on our ability to become a true global leader moving forward.

I was also flirting with the idea of naming this post Piracy still a major concern as thousands of customers come clean to Microsoft, but that just summed it up too well.

A recent Microsoft announcement states that it has engaged with over 150,000 Windows and other MS program users who have recently flooded their Redmond office with confessions of using pirated software. Can you picture over 150,000 bottom lips quivering a little from a mix of fear and shame as they guiltily recount their sins in front of the the priests of programming and cardinals of coding at Microsoft headquarters? It’s a bit of a 180 degree turn for the company as the pontiff of proprietary software himself Bill Gates recently spoke at the University of Washington where he nonchalantly stated that:

“…about 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don’t pay for the software, someday they will though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. [software] They’ll get sort of addicted, and then we’ll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.”

So like an inner city dealer Gates has willingly let the product get into the user’s system (literally) and will be looking to rope them in no matter how many car stereos they have to steal or purses they have to snatch to pay him.

So why all the coming clean if Gates himself has said he won’t release the knee-breakers? Turns out that the pirated software usually comes with free malware and spyware features that completely expose the user’s computer to crooks and scumbags who then steal their stuff with ease. The users have now come crying to the dealer that the product they’ve been using has been cut with comet, rigged with Robitussin, sauced up with sugar and ephedra and now they’ve got to get the good stuff, the pure s**t, cause it works so goooood. And Gates can offer them that software fix for the going price on the street, and he can offer them protection too.

He wants you to confess. (to confess go here)

Confess…confess and all will be forgiven. He will welcome you back into his flock of Microsoft junkies, always waiting for that next fix.

Can you hear it? A strange maniacal and giddy laughter faintly travels on the wind. I can hear it loud and clear from my office here in Vancouver…it sounds really close. Shhhh. It sounds like it’s coming from Washington State…yes, close to Seattle. Wait, I know that twisted giddy laugh…it’s Microsoft!

A few weeks earlier here in Senses Land we mentioned how Rupert Murdoch had basically lost his mind and was considering banning Google from accessing his many newspaper’s websites- like the blood sucking freeloading leeches they are. I mean really, don’t these guys at Google have any mid 20th century business-sense? Offering a free service that directs millions of people to Rupert Murdoch’s various newspapers and websites without asking anything in return. I mean come on! Where do they get off? It should be a crime to offer such a convenient service that millions of people use. To think that people would do that rather than walk outside in the freezing cold snow or pouring rain to the nearest newspaper stand and buy a physical copy of The Wall Street Journal or sit at home waiting for something interesting and newsworthy to be “reported” on by Fox News is just shocking. And Rupert Murdoch has been shocked long enough! Here’s the plan:

Murdoch blocks Google so that millions of people can no longer see his newspaper articles through that engine, meanwhile he convinces everyone to start using Microsoft’s search engine Bing; clearly it will be the superior search engine now based on the fact that it is the only one where you can get the twisted right-winged drivel produced by Fox News and other Murdoch owned companies. So if you want what the rest of the world considers news you can still use Google and if you want what Rupert Murdoch considers to be news you can use Bing- oh and you can gall dang paying for it too (Or Microsoft can). The details of how that all works will be worked out between Microsoft and News Corp, who I predict will soon become known as News Corpse, as this kind of backwards logic will surely kill this company. Microsoft paying huge sums of money for exclusive access to what many believe is the most slanted and biased news in the world is also, in my opinion, not good for their brand or their pocket book.

I’m not the only one who thinks News Corpse is doomed. The founder of Twitter, Biz Stone, recently spoke about Murdoch’s plans at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) in London England. To use the main sound bytes, Stone said it was a “vain attempt to put the genie back in the bottle” and that it would “fail fast“. When considering how rapidly the technology and software that powers the internet changes, one can clearly see that putting a “paywall” around your content and burying it inside a search engine with a 10% market share is akin to going cyber-Amish. (Yes I am coining that term, you heard it here first. Rupert Murdoch has officially gone cyber-Amish)

That hasn’t stopped the giddy laughter from Redmond Washington though, as Microsoft has been looking for any way possible to chip away at Google’s market share of the online search industry. I’m not sure if making your search engine the only one where users can pay to get right-winged conservative news from an old man who hates the internet is the best way to go about it though.

And so begins Murdoch’s exodus into the online wilderness, welcomed and aided by another global opportunist; it will likely end poorly for the both. They have officially begun to work against the forces of internet-nature and because of this will surely be covered over by the jungle or swept away by the tide. This story is beginning to read like a Greek tragedy, where two heroes are destroyed by their own greed, ego and ambition. Blinded by their own arrogance and sense of invincibility they feel beyond censure of the gods and nature. (in this case Google and internet users)

What a swan song this will be for Rupert Murdoch.

Windows 7 has been on the market for a couple weeks now, and early indications point to this being a pretty good software launch for Microsoft. Sales of Windows 7 are up 234% in the first week, compared to their last OS launch, Microsoft Vista.

Industry pundits point to a couple factors that may have led to the good sales figures: a relatively low price point, lots and lots of advertising, and the pushing of lower-cost pre-sales. You have to think that 7 patty Whopper promotion in Japan helped too.

And while many media types are happy to trot out that 234% number as an indication that Windows 7 is selling well, there are cynics out there that have a different take. After all, that 234% number isn’t in comparison to a competitor…it’s compared to Microsoft’s own product, Vista. The same Vista that was fraught with problems and bad-press from day one. That same Vista that sent new PC purchasers scrambling to uninstall it so they could run on XP. That same Vista that seems to require 95% of my computer’s memory just checking for software updates to keep itself up to date.

That being said, the general consensus out there seems to be that Windows 7 is pretty good (especially compared to you-know-what). Yes, it has some issues, and yes it’s still vulnerable to most of the viruses out there. But hey, it does a lot of stuff well, and by the way, have you seen that 7 patty whopper?

You’d think that a major company with lots of money would have the best and brightest minds available on their marketing team, wouldn’t you? And I have to assume that this is exactly what Microsoft believes they have, but the recent launch of Windows 7 has left me and countless other bloggers scratching our heads.  Like a new line of Tupperware or lingerie, Microsoft has launched the new Windows 7 OS through a series of house parties being promoted through House Party Inc., a marketing company that specializes in promoting such house parties on behalf of clients. So if you think that you have:

a) an interest in throwing a party for a multi-billion dollar corporation that has fended off several antitrust lawsuits and has a reputation for developing bug ridden and frustrating operating systems

or
 
b) a lot of friends, relatives, co-workers and neighbors who would be extremely excited to stand around your desktop computer watching you use an operating system

or

c) nothing better to do with your time

Then you too can be a part of Microsoft’s marketing strategy! For more information just watch this excruciatingly disingenuous video on how you can get started.

 We live in the information age. We use information age technology and mediums to build excitement and to reach consumers. What Mircosoft has done is broken two basic rules of modern marketing. Your marketing strategy cannot be incongruous with the product itself. iPods are fun- therefore iPod commercials are fun. They use fun music and are colorful and “cool” because that’s what the product is. Cool and fun. Popsicles can’t be marketed as savory and hearty, and canned chunky beef soup can’t be marketed as refreshing.

An operating system is not fun, it is functional. I can’t imagine even the geekiest of PC nerds thinking that clean installing an OS or showing off its features to friends is fun. And if there is one, I doubt he has enough friends to host a party in the first place. This Microsoft marketing strategy has no legs, no legs at all. The only way that this marketing campaign goes viral is if everyone gets swine flu at one of these parties. Couple this with the fact that the new OS requires a clean install of your entire PC -or the purchasing of a new PC if that sounds like a bad way to spend your weekend- and you have the makings of a confounding marketing strategy. The marketing strategy and the product are competely incongruous. Apple is confident that all of this is going to turn more users to Mac. 

The second rule is bang for your buck. The brilliant advantage of the digital medium is that you can maximize your marketing by drawing people into your company and into the sale with new and flashy tricks. And you can reach millions very quickly and very cost-effectively. By encouraging a string of house parties Microsoft has bypassed the most effective and modern medium for marketing and opted for a format used extensively before the invention of the computer. Maybe they minimized the buck but I certainly doubt a bang will be following. Maybe they expected everyone at these parties to send out telegrams, faxes and carrier pigeons to their friends and family letting them know how great the house party for the new platform they went to was. I would’ve recommended contacting everyone through a more modern medium, something computer-based and maybe using internet technology, so we could get all excited about it in the new digital Agora- like we prefer to do now.

I’ll add a third rule. You have to understand as best as possible the trends in social behavior of the public when trying to engage them. We are social, and we use things like social media platforms. We use iPhones and Blackberries and we are constantly in touch with one another. How Microsoft can overlook the realities of basic human behavior and communication technology is baffling. Opting instead to focus on antiquated social medium for their product launch. This mode works when everyone is completely riveted to see something live, like a UFC fight or a Presidential election. It works for events, things that bring people together because of our natural desire to share big moments together and feed off eachother’s excitement. Maybe the execs at Microsoft are so cloistered from the general public that they felt this launch was an event of that magnitude.  

You think I’m being hard on Microsoft, Paul Wallis at Digital Journal rips Microsoft a new one- focusing more on the economic realities of consumer behavior in relation to Windows 7. Expecting consumers to buy new computers en masse in a recession is a tall order. There are plenty more things I could pick apart beyond the style and concept of their plan. Paul addresses some of those nicely though.

All this being said, many PC users will still of course rush out to get windows 7 because despite the dumbfounding marketing concept, the platform is supposedly much better than Vista and the other Windows operating systems. Microsoft has worked hard to fix the problems with these past systems, now they should work hard to overhaul their marketing strategy. 

Perhaps through the power of clairvoyancy Apple further weakened Microsoft’s marketing strategy by launching its new line of iMacs just before Windows 7 hit the shelves (today) stealing Microsoft’s thunder…or whimper. It’s just another example of how Apple is staying one step ahead (if not several) of Microsoft in product and especially in marketing.

Once again Microsoft is on the hot seat, this time for willfully infringing on patented technology developed by i4i of Toronto, Ontario. (no relation to Thirdi of Vancouver, BC) The court in which the two were engaged in a legal battle ruled a permanent injunction that now prohibits Microsoft from selling one of its staple products, MS Word- at least the versions that can open up any .XML, .DOXC or any files containing XML.

XML is used extensively in several software programs for website design and web development (Dreamweaver for example) as well as content management systems and for the creation of integrated databases. The most profoundly useful feature of XML language (Extensible Markup Langauge) is that it can transform non web ready documents (Say something you wrote in Microsoft Word) into a format that a website can use, Hyper Text Markup Language for example. XML clearly tells what the data is or does <name>Wes</name> This has been a major step in transforming the unstructured information we have into structured digital data that can be stored efficiently and systematically and be  more easily and quickly accessed from a database. And that has been the main concern of i4i according to Loudon Owen, the president of the company, as he stated in an interview with cnet.  Not bilking Microsoft.

It’s believed that even though the court gave Microsoft 60 days to stop selling Word, that the software giant will settle out of court with i4i to be allowed to continue selling the ubiquitous word processing program.

Some believe that this once again sheds light on the patenting vs copywriting debate in the software industry. The argument being that the culture of patenting every little step or stipend and stub of software code is potentially leading to a mucky quagmire or paralyzing web of conflict that will stifle creativity and innovation as developers second guess every step of their  progress- expecting a legal battle over a simple and common sense procedure they’ve used. That battle usually involving Microsoft, who went on a patent spree over the past decades. SO this is a victory for many small software companies in a sense, because it’s Microsoft getting a taste of its own medicine in one respect and a reminder that we need to legally address issues in the industry to help it remain competitive- not to stifle innovation. We need to open the debate on some issues like patents vs copyrights.

Oh Microsoft, if only you spent more time creating innovative new products with fewer bugs and less time in court with governments and small businesses.

Funny isn’t it. It took nearly the same amount of time for Google to become the dominant force that it is today both as a search engine and more, as it took Microsoft and Yahoo to finally hammer out a partnership aimed at dominating the search engine and more market. Microsoft is confident that the release of their new Bing search engine will re-assert their presence online and have partnered with Yahoo, the second largest engine after google, to leverage their product and brand. Interesting that just as Google begins to produce software for personal computers, a market traditionally dominated by Microsoft, then MS turns around and sticks it to Google where they’ve been most dominant.

Oh to be a fly on the wall in these people’s boardrooms. I wonder if they have a Risk board or Axis and Aliies out on the table? My advice to Microsoft/Yahoo as a humble technology and software blogger would be to try something new. Make something new. It’s what’s made Google so dominant. They kept on introducing new products, new features, new apps, and lots of them. Some of them didn’t stick, but some really did. Google Maps is a great example. Even the products that Google is releasing to move into Microsoft territories are more innovative than Microsoft’s. New features, new uses etc.

Microsoft suffers from a lack of imagination, something that Google has embraced as a key pillar in their strategy. There are plenty of search engines, a few of them are popular, one of them is utterly dominant. If I were a business, I wouldn’t try and catch up with Google when I could spend money to innovate and release a product that people instantly gravitated to, people will need to be pulled away from Google. Another search engine, just a search engine, won’t do that. With all that money and all that power one would think that Microsoft wouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel, but here they go. Maybe they have to? These guys aren’t stupid. I can’t be smarter than Microsoft Corporation? Can I?

With the release of Chrome, Google is aggressively moving into Microsoft’s territory. If Google is able to muscle into that market, they put themselves in a strong position for whatever comes down the pipe. What do most people use their computers for? The internet. Google has the internet part down- their brand is the internet. If they can get the platforms for PC down too then their options open up even more to produce more products similar to Wave and Chrome.  Seamlessly integrating the things that people use their computers for both offline and online is where Google appears to be looking ahead to.

Once again if I were Microsoft I’d be digging in a trench around PC platforms and I would’ve been working hard to make an OS that didn’t crash or jam up for the past five years instead of releasing a search engine to challenge Google once they owned 70-80% of global traffic. Focus on your strengths, admit your weaknesses, innovate, innovate, innovate. And above all else, admit that things change fast in this world. A 5 to 10 year head start is all Google needed to put them so far ahead in this category that no one is catching up anytime soon.

I’m curious to see how this plays out. I can’t imagine it being too successful for MS/Yahoo. Maybe in the short run the stocks will go up, but in the long run I think they’ve picked the wrong battle.

It’s true.  As their rate of internet growth and usage in the now independent country shows, it’s a whopping 192% growth and 90% penetration between 2000 to 2008. Greenland is more tech savvy than us, racing to embrace the future and make us look bad. Or at least that ’s what an ignorant buffoon who believes that statistics tell the whole story would think. Canada is actually one of the most online countries on the planet, right up there with Japan and the USA. And the fact that our frozen wedge of a neighbour to the north east, with a 100% literate population of 50,000 people, has a higher percentage of its country online is no surprise being that it’s basically an iceberg. What else is there to do but be on the internet? I predict now that Greenland will become a worldwide leader in blog offshoring- or “blogshoring” as I will also now officially coin it. Just look at this recent photo of Greenland’s most infamous blogger, Fridtjov Qeqertarsuaq, working on a post about Vancouver company Thirdi Software. Now on to Google.

The Canadian government is all up in Google’s face as a recent Financial Post article explains. Google has been seen as an incredible tool for small business to utilize with its range of analytical tools, recently it’s been viewed as a troubadour of open source software development and management IT solutions for its focus on cloud based technology and open source systems like Wave; and all that and more in under a decade. So it’s no wonder that governments in both the USA and Canada are stopping to take a look at Google, as it wields the internet sorcery that has become such a vital part of our economy and lives. According to the FP article Christine Varney, the American Department of Justice head of antitrust cases, raised her concern that the internet was “…increasingly coming under the sway of the online search giant” It brings up nostalgic memories of Microsoft VS the USA antitrust suits of the late 90s.

In Canada the government is concerned that Google is becoming a monopoly much as Microsoft was viewed in those days, and it may try to overwhelmingly steer users towards its own services and affiliates- stifling competition. Google, conversely, is concerned that the Canadian government will become too stringent and regulatory concerning the internet in Canada and stifle the internet in general. Oh, and this is what a troubadour historically was. Now how does this all tie in to my post’s title? Maybe we should all think long and hard about that.

With all this talk of retiring the NASA space shuttle fleet and Canadian astronauts being propelled into space using this 1960’s to 1980’s technology I thought I’d write about the software that makes the space jalopy work. The coding when compared to commercial software is far superior, being that when your OS encounters a bug at home or you office, chances are good that you’re not flying thousands of Km/h high above the continents with millions of pounds of extremely explosive fuel strapped to you. Therefore, the software used by NASA for these shuttles is as close to perfect as we’ve been able to get…on this planet. But what about these guys?

Software inevitably has errors. Thousands upon thousands, millions upon millions of lines of source code, at times co-authored by several different people is just not likely at this point to be perfect; especially with deadlines and competitive pressure from other firms. And where there may not be bugs there may be logic errors, that slip through the debugging process even if your syntax is correct. See this NY Times article on the development process for Microsoft Windows Vista and you start to get the picture of how screwed up software platforms can become in a clunky and inefficient design environment. To err is human, but these particular kinds of software errors cost the US economy alone up to 60 billion dollars every year

Open-source software has been hailed by some as offering a new programming method that actually decreases the amount of bugs because of the multiple scrutinizing eyes combing over the code as it matures. Google may have had this philosophy in mind when they pre-released Google Wave to scores of developers earlier this year, hoping to avoid MS Windows-like problems. See previous post. But to get back to the soon to be retired space shuttle fleet. In the newest Microsoft operating systems there are tens of millions (about 40 to 50) of lines of code and scores of bugs, perhaps thousands. The software coding for the shuttles has about 420,000 lines, smaller yes, but in the past three versions have only had ONE bug apparently. And the past 11 versions collectively have had only 17 errors total.  So for 4.5 million lines of code we have 17 bugs total. As an Astronaut I like those odds. That means I only have a 1 in 265 thousand chance of being blown to pieces on the job. Still probably a lot lower odds than your average safe desk job.