Six years ago, Informix Software was acquired by IBM. I remember this perfectly because at the time I was an Informix employee and, unlike many of my colleagues, I was quite excited by the news. The truth is that I wanted to join a larger company that would allow me to learn new technologies besides relational databases. That is why, after the acquisition, I spent most of my time working on WebSphere software, but I never forgot my passion for the Informix database engine.

This may seem strange to many as there are many RDBMS out there that are more popular than IDS but I have my reasons. You see, other database engines like DB2 or Oracle might be faster when tuned by experts but Informix achieves excellent performance by just tweaking a couple of parameters. In my experience, an average DBA can get much better results from Informix than from competing products. Since exceptional DBAs are scarce, I feel that IDS is a great choice for most companies unless they need the advanced XML processing capabilities provided by DB2.

Until now IDS was available for most UNIX variants as well as Windows. A Mac OS 9 client SDK was available many years ago but was discontinued when Apple moved to OS X. That is why I was so excited to learn that IBM had ported Informix Dynamic Server to Mac OS X.

However, the exciting news for Macintosh enthusiasts is that this announcement is not just an anomaly. There have been rumblings that at this week’s Lotusphere event in Orlando, IBM was poised to announce several new products for the Mac, including the Lotus Notes 8 client, Lotus Symphony and Lotus Sametime. This was made possible thanks to the efforts put by many IBMers to ensure that Eclipse runs smoothly on OS X.

Besides porting current IBM software to the Mac, IBM has also acquired some Macintosh software through acquisitions. For example, IBM recently acquired Solid, an in-memory database, that has offered for years a Mac OS X version of their flagship product.

While the Mac seems to have so far attracted the attention of the Lotus and DB2 brands within IBM Software Group, what about the remaining brands? Many software developers have long migrated to the Mac platform. It seems only logical that Rational should be interested in that audience. Since many Rational products are built on Eclipse, porting them to the Mac shouldn’t be that difficult. In fact, there already is a Mac version of Rational Application Developer. The problem is that it is for internal use only because it lacks the embedded WebSphere Application Software. This is a major issue. Despite being divided in five brands, IBM SWG products are very much integrated. Porting a single product is moot unless there is a clear strategy to port the whole portfolio.

A decade ago, IBM made a clear commitment to Linux and as a result made all SWG products available on that platform. That corporate commitment is still missing for Mac OS X, but the walls are crumbling, one at a time. For Lotus to make gains against Microsoft, IBM needs to support the Mac (and Linux) in a big way. Many Lotus products are built on WebSphere software and require Rational development tools to be customized. Convincing the WebSphere management team that they need to port some of their products to the Mac won’t be easy. After all, how many servers does Apple sell each quarter? Not enough to support a serious business case.

I do believe though, and this is pure speculation on my part, that it is just a matter of time before other critical IBM products such as WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Process Server and WebSphere Integration Developer get ported to Mac OS X. It is amazing to see how the success of the Mac on the client side is getting a middleware company such as IBM to progressively port its server software. In the case of Linux it was a well thought strategy to create some competition for Windows. It all made sense as Linux was (and still is) a strong contender on the server side. In the case of Mac OS X, it is an unorganized move, fueled by a single brand and the passion of many IBMers, including myself, who have adopted the Mac as their platform of choice.

Last week I posted my predictions for MacWorld. How did I do? Well, not too bad. I actually nailed the AppleTV announcement, I was just slightly too optimistic regarding the price cut. Although Apple did not release the final 10.5.2 they released a new developer build that seems to be a week or two away from final release, and therefore I believe that I deserve some credits for that prediction too. Unfortunately, my remaining four predictions did not materialize. Apple did not release a 16GB iphone, there was a new iTunes release but it wasn’t version 8.0 nor contained the features that I expected. Finally, my dreams for a new portable Internet device did not materialize. All in all, I was quite happy to at least have predicted Apple’s new take on the Apple TV. It shows that Steve Jobs and company are not super human and that their moves can actually be predicted.

What I did not see coming was the MacBook Air. It seems like a gorgeous device, but it is not for me. Sure, I need a light computer for presentations and enhanced mobility, but the lack of 3G connectivity is a show stopper. I am currently using a Sprint PCS express card on my MacBook Pro and I am not ready to give up the convenience of being connected everywhere. I do not believe that the MacBook Air will be a failure. In order to maintain exponential growth in the laptop market Apple needed a new model to captivate a new segment of consumers and I think that they may take significant share away from Sony.

Finally, I must say that I like the Time Capsule. I really see myself using it. I have been using .Mac’s Backup regularly to well, backup my data and I must say that it is a pain to have to connect an external drive to my laptop once a week to protect your data. The only problem is that I already have an Airport Extreme base station. That means that I would have to pay $399 for a 500GB disk. That is expensive. The decision will probably be much easier for those who are looking into upgrading their old 802.11b/g wireless routers.

Many Mac users seem to be quite excited by today’s release of Office 2008. The truth is that I couldn’t care less since. Like many Mac users, I switched to iWork long ago. However, when I started thinking about this, I quickly realized that I have abandoned not only Microsoft but also other large software companies like Adobe. On my Mac, besides iWork and iLife, all you will find are freeware and shareware products developed by small companies.

You may think that I switched to shareware simply to save some bucks. That isn’t really true, many of those products are top-notch. Take for example Coda, a great Web development tool developed by Panic (who also publish Transmit, a very compelling FTP client). This is probably one of the best tools available to design web pages for those of us who feel comfortable with HTML and CSS. Another great example is Pixelmator. I used to love Photoshop back in the version 3.0 days. After that it became a pro tool, too complex for the casual user. From my point of view, Pixelmator is basically Photoshop 3.0 with many great additional features at an unbeatable price. That is why this program has become my image editor of choice.

Today most end-users want simple programs to solve simple needs. I personally feel that the days of the large suites which pack thousands of features and are difficult to learn are long gone. That is why I no longer think that it makes any sense for Apple to buy large software company like Adobe. In the 90s such a move would have given Apple a significant competitive edge. Today the times have changed. Many things that could only be achieved with pro apps can now be done with consumer grade products, and as a result the market for pro-tools is stagnating or even shrinking. Apple knows the Adobe market pretty well as both companies share many customers. If Apple hasn’t made a move yet it is not just because Adobe is a pretty expensive company, it is primarily because it wouldn’t offer Apple the kind of rapid growth that Steve Jobs is obtaining by pursuing other strategies.

When I bought my PS3 early last year there where no compatible UPnP solutions for the Mac to stream music, pictures or video to Sony’s console. I was disappointed but since the PS3 didn’t support many popular media types at the time I quickly realized that even if such a solution had been available I probably wouldn’t have used it very frequently. That totally changed last December when Sony released version 2.10 of the PS3 firmware with support for DivX and WMV.

When I tested EyeConnect 1.0.1 in February 2007 I had little success, the console could see the files stored on my Mac but was unable to display my media files. Fortunately, version 1.5.1 which was released later in the year offered much better support for the PS3, using a familiar Mac interface. However, some glitches remained. For starters, EyeConnect does not stream album art or previews of your pictures which is quite annoying. More troubling though is the fact that the PS3 reports frequent (non-fatal) network problems. I have no doubt that ElGato will eventually fix these problems, but at US$49.95 EyeConnect will remain an expensive solution for most console owners.

Yesterday Nullriver announced a new solution called Medialink. This is the same company that produces Connect360, the software Mac owners use to stream media to their XBox 360. The good news is that Medialink works perfectly. During my initial tests yesterday I ran into absolutely no problems. Unlike EyeConnect, MediaLink supports album art and media preview. Pricing is attractive too, at US$20 nobody should hesitate to buy this product since it instantly converts your game console into a gorgeous 1080p media centre.

There has been much talk recently about an upgraded AppleTV with a built-in Blu-Ray drive (and presumably support for 1080p, up from the current 720p). I am quite skeptical that such a product would be very competitive. Even if Apple was able to maintain the price of the enhanced device at US$299, that is just US$120 less than a PS3, including Medialink for your Mac and a Blu-Ray movie. Sure, movie rentals are not available yet on any console, but that is probably not a real differentiator for most customers in the U.S., let alone for those of us who live in countries with no iTunes store.

I am sure that everyone at Apple understands the situation. That is why I am very interested to see what Apple is planning to offer next week at MacWorld. My gut feeling is that Apple will not add Blu-Ray support (maybe 1080p support) and will instead try to make the device more attractive by dropping its price and add more new features beyond the widely expected movie rentals. Welcomed additions could be a web browser that syncs bookmarks with Safari and an RSS reader. DivX support would be nice too, but we all know that with Steve Jobs at the helm of Apple that is extremely unlikely.

Will that be enough to save the Apple TV? It will all depend on price. If Apple is willing to make no money on the hardware in order to increase movie sales and rentals it may work. That would be a major change for Apple though as they have until now consistently followed the opposite strategy, making money on the hardware while working with razor thin margins on the software. However, in order to compete effectively against Sony, a company that is used to lose money on the hardware (at least on their game consoles), they have to adopt the same strategy. With hardware margins hovering around 30% at Apple, a US$199.95 40GB Apple TV seems achievable. Will Steve Jobs announce that next week? Who knows, but it is much more likely than a Blu-Ray equipped AppleTV.

I have never been a customer of Citibank-Banamex. When I landed in Mexico about 15 years ago I started working at a rival (much smaller) bank called Bital (now HSBC) and for me it was much easier to open an account there. I have never switched, not that HSBC’s service is stellar but at least their Internet banking works pretty well.

My wife, however is a Citibank-Banamex customer. She normally does her banking transactions over the phone. However, today she wanted to access her account using the Internet. She called me and asked me to help her, because she was having trouble. It turns out that Banamex only supports IE and Netscape 7. Their error page even tells Mac customers to download either product. They do not seem to know that both products have already been discontinued, which is quite amazing.

The fact is that I have been working with Citi quite closely recently as an IBM Software Architect. They are big Java users, mostly a BEA shop but they have recently started to adopt WebSphere Application Server. From what I know, there is nothing in their current software architecture that would stop them to support either Firefox or Safari. That makes the situation even harder for me to understand. As I told them in an e-mail, it is easier for us to switch banks (and more likely) than switch computers. I do not believe that their customer service department understands that it is very likely that about twenty percent of their customers do not use IE as their default browser. Otherwise, they would probably avoid to ignore/upset such a large constituency.

I am sincerely surprised that in early 2008 we still have to educate such large corporations about standards, but it is clear that we have to. That is why I urge all Citibank-Banamex customers to send a complaint using the e-form that can be found here.

P.S. Yes, I have tried to change the user-agent to IE 7/Vista on Firefox and I was able to bypass the test, but all I got a blank screen. Anyways, I am not really interested in outsmarting their system, what I want them is to fix it.

Having been raised in Switzerland, a country which was never ruled by a king, I have always seen royalty as a ridiculous idea, even though I am Dutch and therefore I am a citizen of a country “ruled” by a Queen.

Since it doesn’t look like my fellow countrymen are particularly interested in getting rid of this ridiculous and expensive remain from a distant past, I am at least glad that in The Netherlands we got the next best thing, a smart royal family.

The proof is that both crown prince Willem-Alexander and his wife Maxima have recently purchased an iPhone while shopping at an Apple Store in the U.S. Even better, it seems that he is an avid Mac user who participates regularly in Dutch Apple Forums. I wonder if he listens to the “One More Thing” podcast, one of my personal favorites.

Even though I am still convinced that my country should be a Republic, it is nice to see my future king making the headlines for his good technological taste, instead of the shameful behaviors displayed by other royal families.

Yesterday Apple finally opened a Mexican on-line store. There is still no iTunes store, but this is a great (unexpected) first step.

The good news is that on-line prices seem to be reasonable. While it still is cheaper to buy in the U.S., the difference is now much smaller. This is good news because it may encourage many customers to shop locally. Until now, Mexico has been a minor market to Apple if you look at the sales numbers. However, that is not really true because wealthy Mexicans (those more likely to buy from Apple) tend to buy their mobile products (those that can be easily smuggled through the customs) in the U.S. and that skews the numbers significantly.

For example, if you were to walk into any Starbucks in Mexico City today you would have a good chance to see Macs outnumber PCs. The same happens with iPhones and iPods which can be found everywhere. Most of these sales never go through Apple Mexico and are therefore accounted as U.S. sales.

While this new on-line store may actually have a negative impact on both local dealers (used to low unit sales and high margins) as well as the physical Apple Store sales in the U.S. it may give Apple Mexico a chance to grow significantly beyond their current small local market (desktops used by graphic designers and universities). If this turns out to be true, we may finally get better local support, which is badly needed.

Since I haven’t received my Leopard DVD from Amazon yet, I still have some time to blog.

However, having played with the Developer Preview I got at WWDC a couple of months ago i must say that I am surprised that except for a couple of honorable exceptions, all the OS reviews I have seen so far focus on the end-user features that are available right out of the box. That is just plain wrong. Reviewers should also have spent some time discussing what new features are available for developers and how applications could take advantage of these new or expanded APIs to create better applications for the Mac over the next few months.

It is too bad that the mainstream press didn’t take more time to review the developer CD because if it lis like the one handed to developers last June, it contains a lot of hints on how Mac applications will outshine their PC counterparts over the next two years. My two favorite APIs nobody has talked about yet are:

• Pub-Sub
• Core Text

Ever wondered why there aren’t that many applications that work with RSS feeds? The reason is that there are many different versions of RSS (not even counting Atom) that a developer needs to support if he/she wants to avoid any incompatibilities. RSS Readers must also be able to work with malformed XML files, which are unfortunately very frequent on the Internet. Writing such a flexible parser is boring and time consuming. Apple understood that and decided to include an API to make it easy for any programmer to either generate or parse all kind of RSS feeds. This is great news because now we will probably see many new innovative uses of RSS in Mac applications. I am planning for example to publish puzzles created with my upcoming application as an RSS feed including custom XML files. The client will use RSS to download the latest puzzles included as attachments just like podcasts today include MP3 files.

Core Text is also new in Leopard. Core Text replaces most of all previous text handling APIs. Now it is easier than ever to write applications that can easily handle gorgeous text in multiple columns wrapping around complex objects. Expect to see many specialized text editors to improve dramatically as developers start using this new technology.

Many seem to believe that Leopard is just another small evolutionary step over Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger because they haven’t seen any applications yet that take advantage of all the changes that were made under the hood. I suggest to everyone to take a look at the developer sample projects included on the developer tools DVD to understand what Leopard really is about.

The IBM PC was introduced on August 12, 1981. At the time I was 15 but I was already an avid Apple II user who enjoyed programming in assembly language. I must say that I didn’t pay much attention to the announcement. After all, it was just another boring monochrome computer. However, it soon became clear that the PC was a commercial success and a clear threat to Apple. The truth is that, like most teenagers, I couldn’t care less about the business market. As long as Apple could maintain their lead in the education and home markets, I would be happy.

In 1983, however a new threat emerged, the IBM PCjr. This product was squarely aimed at the market that Apple had dominated for years, at least in the U.S. That is when I started to hate IBM. I felt that they were forcing me to switch to a platform that wasn’t as exciting against my will. Of course, years later the same anger made me revolt against Microsoft and I progressively started to forget about IBM. That is a good thing by the way because I have just celebrated my tenth anniversary at IBM. Of course it helped a lot that I have always worked at IBM’s Software Group, a division that is operating system agnostic and allows customers to choose their preferred computing environment.

Today, almost 23 years after the introduction of the IBM PCjr, Apple is the most valuable computer maker in the world. What has changed? We now live in a world ruled by consumers, not corporate suits. Consumers want exciting new products, not boring, barely functional products. That is good. Some may complain that teenagers are driving the consumer electronics industry but I am ecstatic. I still remember why I was so excited by Apple as a teenager. The reasons I had then were not driven by style or peer pressure, they were driven by a passion for radical new products that made no compromises to achieve greatness. In general teenagers do not tolerate mediocrity as well as adults because they are not scared by change. That is why Apple is successful now with a new generation. They are fighting the establishment with superior products and this is a battle teenagers can perfectly relate to.

However, make no mistake, this is not just a marketing gimmick. Unlike Pepsi who wanted to artificially create a generational gap with their “Pepsi generation” campaign, Apple decided to focus on creating exciting new products that have since been adopted by a new generation. That is why it worked.

Today is a date I will remember. It is the day I have been waiting for since IBM announced that we would be selling our PC division to Lenovo. I just got a memo that describes a procedure to purchase a Mac as my primary computer. At this point it is not clear wether this initiative will be limited to the U.S. or be more global in scope, but it is certainly another crack in Microsoft’s armor since I understand that IBM is Microsoft’s largest Windows and Office customer. Way to go IBM!