The iPhone is already a popular product in the US, but it will become much more popular, specially in the enterprise, once Apple releases version 2.0 of the iPhone OS. With the new software companies will be able to easily distribute custom build applications to their employees using a special version of the iTunes App Store.

While not much is known about this application, it is a pretty safe guess to assume that it is Mac OS X only and that it will probably included in an upcoming release of OS X Server. While such a strategy may help Apple sell a couple of hundred servers, it is hard to believe that Apple doesn’t have larger ambitions in the telephony market, specially for small and medium sized businesses.

Asterisk is a popular open-source application that is already widely used on Linux servers. It is used to create cheap telephony solutions that used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. The solution is an open source/free software implementation of a telephone private branch exchange (PBX). Like any PBX, it allows a number of attached telephones to make calls to one another, and to connect to other telephone services including the public switched telephone network (PSTN). With Asterisk it is easy to setup voice mail boxes and route calls to home numbers or cell phones.

Asterisk also supports a wide range of Voice over IP protocols, including SIP, MGCP and H.323. It can interoperate with most SIP telephones, acting both as registrar and as a gateway between IP phones and the PSTN. This makes Asterisk a perfect complement to iChat.

Apple has a long history of including open-source applications with OS X Server, making them easy to configure and manage. The OS already includes products such as the Apache Web Server or the MySQL database server. So why not include Asterisk? It would allow Apple to offer a turnkey solution for small to medium companies. Imagine a server that costs less than US$ 5,000 and offers everything that this market needs, from e-mail to instant messaging, from wikis to video conferencing, and now with a true unified communications solution. I am sure it would quickly become an instant hit.

What is required to make this happen? Asterisk already runs on OS X, so all Apple really needs to do is to integrate it better with the OS and offer the required analog phone and E1/T1 interfaces for the XServe. Additionally they will need to port iChat to Windows (this is long overdue). On the business side, they will also need to improve their VAR network as these solutions cannot be simply sold at the Apple Store, they need to be supported by IT professionals.

None of these hurdles seem too hard to overcome. I really believe that Apple will eventually offer such a solution, with an announcement coming maybe as soon at WWDC. After all, at the event there is an Information Technologies track designed for IT professionals who support Mac networks and many of those attending it would likely be very interested by such an announcement. The iPhone is Apple’s key to get the Mac into the Enterprise and Asterisk can make it happen in a really big way.

Last year over 5,000 persons attended WWDC. At the time it represented a new record for the annual Apple developer event. The result was fueled by the imminent launch Mac OS X Leopard. This year, with 25 days to go before Steve Jobs addresses developers at the keynote speech, Apple has announced that for the first time ever, the conference has sold out.

I am sure that most do not realize the significance of this announcement. In the past, Apple has used many dirty tricks to artificially increase the number of attendants to WWDC. For example, there used to be a separate conference for Quicktime content creators. I believe that Apple cancelled that event two years ago and folded it within WWDC. Last year there was a session track for web developers, presumably to pave the way for new web applications targeting iPhone users. The result was that if you engaged in conversation with people you didn’t know you were likely to find out that they had absolutely no clue about Objective-C or XCode.

This year things are likely to be quite different. Apple no longer needs tricks to fill Moscone West up. Gone are the tracks for web developers and video content creators. There still is a track for System Administrators but the rest of the sessions are designed exclusively for developers. This means that even if attendance only grows to six thousand (the Convention Center was already packed last year), this will still represent a very significant increase in the number of real programmers attending the event. It is a clear sign that many of those 200,000 persons who downloaded the iPhone SDK are actually using it and want to be prepared for the launch of the app store at the end of June. This is going to be the best WWDC ever!

Earlier today, Ryan Naraine reported for eWeek that “PayPal, one of the brands most spoofed in phishing attacks, is working on a plan to block its users from making transactions from Web browsers that don’t provide anti-phishing protection”. The reason behind this decision is that “browsers that do not have support for blocking identity theft-related Web sites or for EV SSL (Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are considered ‘unsafe’ for financial transactions”.

This announcement has generated a lot of concern among Mac users since Safari, the most widely used browser on that platform does not support EV SSL. Even though I do use Safari as my main browser on both Mac and Windows, I do agree with the decision. The reason is simple, even though it is very simple to avoid phishing attacks on any computer by just pointing your DNS information to OpenDNS, few know how to do it or even understand how phishing works. Those who complain about the decision are obviously not aware of the size of the phishing attacks and the amount of fraud they represent. If PayPal’s decision forces Apple to implement EV SSL support into Safari, I will certainly not complain. It is great to have a fast and standards compliant browser, but security for the technologically challenged users should be a major concern for Apple.

However, there are more reasons to back PayPal’s decision. Too many users are still using old browsers and this his slowing down the adoption of new technologies. I would love to see more companies to stop supporting old versions of Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. That would really give web developers an opportunity to create great innovative applications. Right now, people too often prefer to use those old versions because there are still sites that require them. If large sites start requiring newer browser versions, those old sites will face increased pressure to modernize. That cannot be bad for the industry or the end-users.

I just read an editorial on The Mac Observer in which John Martellaro writes that Microsoft Retail Stores would fail. He bases his conclusion on the poor reception Vista has had in the market so far, specially among consumers, and the fact that Microsoft seems to have lost interest in that segment of the population.

I totally disagree. For starters, Microsoft currently produces one of the most successful consumer electronics device, the XBox 360. Microsoft could easily fill up any Apple Store just with Xbox 360 games and accesories. Then there is the Zune. Sure, that MP3 player isn’t nearly as sexy as the iPod touch but I could see more people buying it if it were properly showcased. Microsoft could also sell phones based on Windows mobile made by their hardware partners. Those phones are certainly not state of the art but they (almost) work as advertised and appeal to a segment of the population. Microsoft also produces some PC hardware that includes keyboards and mice which are quite popular. And then obviously there is software, Windows and Office of course, but let’s not also forget that there is much more, like the Microsoft Expression Suite which is a decent collection of products and finally highly popular PC games like Age of Empires or Flight Simulator. So, the perception that Microsoft does not have products that are compelling for consumers is totally wrong.

People also tend to assume that Microsoft would be unable to match the Apple shopping experience. I am not sure what they mean by that. Sure, Apple’s sales force tends to be nice and knowledgeable but having run a small chain of Apple retail stores for three years about ten years ago, I know that this is relatively easy to achieve when you only handle a small number of SKUs. The secret of Apple’s success has to be found somewhere else. You want to know what it is? Easy. People go to the Apple Store because it is usually one of the only stores in the mall that appeals to men (although not exclusively), and because there is free internet access. That was the genius behind choosing malls to open stores. People usually don’t go to Best Buy or Fry’s to just hang out, instead they go to a mall where there are more entertainment and food options. And where do men go when they are tired of watching the women apparel that their wives or girlfriends want to buy? That’s right, they go to the Apple Store. WHy? Because there simply aren’t many other options (and it could get even worse if The Sharper Image goes out of business.

There is a reason that explains why Apple hasn’t yet opened stores in Germany, France or Spain. Those countries haven’t embraced the retail shopping mall model like the US, the UK or even Mexico. It has to do with expensive and scarce real estate in downtown areas where affluent people use to shop. In those countries you may find malls in the suburbs but they will usually not house luxury or premium brands. You could argue that not all Apple Stores are located in malls, and you would be right. In fact all flagship stores (San Francisco, New York, Chicago. Tokyo and London) are on busy streets, but only major markets support that model. The problem is finding great locations for smaller stores. Nothing prevents Apple to open a flagship store on the Champs Élisées in Paris or Serrano in Madrid but where does Apple grow from there if there are no (suitable) malls?

Apple has great products but analysts and Apple enthusiasts must understand that many of those who enter the company stores do it often simply because of a lack of better options. That is great for Apple because it generates a disproportionate amount of foot traffic, but most of those people would probably welcome a little competition. I love Apple but I also like to spend some time at a Sony store, specially if the alternative is spending time at Zara or Coach. I am sure that if Microsoft decides to open new retail stores and like Apple places them in malls, they will be able to get a fair share of that traffic. Wether Microsoft deserves it or not is a different matter.

Microsoft just announced that they would make Windows Vista cheaper. It is clear that Microsoft wants to spur adoption of Vista and lowering the price of a product is certainly easier and quicker than improving the product to make it more palatable.

What bothers me is that I don’t hear any existing Vista customers complaining. Compare that to the clamor that resonated through the blogosphere when Apple decided to lower the price of the iPhone. So, what is happening? It seems that despite Microsoft’s claims that Vista has seen a strong adoption, few customers have actually purchased the new OS, most Vista users are really new PC buyers who get it pre-installed. That probably explains why so few feel cheated.

However, that is not the only reason. It is clear that the expectations customers have from both companies are quite different. Microsoft customers have a business relationship with them. They understand that Steve Ballmer is running a business and wants to make a profit. Apple customers, on the other hand seem to think that they have a more personal relationship with the Cupertino based company. Many seem to believe that in exchange for buying from the underdog and heavily promoting their products among their friends they deserve to be treated almost as partners. That will have to change at some point, but right now Steve Jobs really needs the legions of Apple fans to continue growing, even if it means having to put up with the somewhat silly protests of some loud fanboys when they don’t agree with some corporate decisions.

At MacWorld 2008, Steve Jobs made some important announcements. One of the new products he introduced was Time Capsule. Today that product finally became available, just in time to match the announced product availability date (end of February).

What is really weird for us old timer Apple followers is that in timeframe between MacWorld and the launch of Time Capsule, many new Apple products that were not announced at the expo have also be released. In fact the list is quite long and includes many major launches such as Aperture 2.0 new Mac Books and Mac Book Pros, and a new 16GB iPhone to name a few.

It is clear that Apple has decided to launch new products as they become available and not wait for events such as WWDC or MacWorld expo to announce them. This makes a lot of business sense, as conventions have become a thing of the past and increased competition does not allow for product launch delays that may give competitors an edge.

I am not really sure how this will impact WWDC though. This is a very special event that is crucial to Apple success. It is imperative for them to demonstrate year over year increased attendance and without the buzz of new product releases and no new OS version in sight, this is probably a difficult task for the organizers. That is why I am quite certain that this year crowd drawer will be the iPhone SDK. We may see some preview of the SDK next week along with some nifty demo applications at Apple’s roadmap event but it is clear that both the full SDK and the enterprise features mentioned on the invitation will not be available immediately. This meeting will probably be an opportunity for Apple to apologize for the delay while demonstrating solid progress. It will also be a great occasion to announce the dates of WWDC and generate hype for the event.

I am currently in Vegas, resting a couple of days after a very hard end of year and an even more complex year start. I had the opportunity to play a couple of minutes with the new Mac Book Air at the Fashion Mall Apple Store. It definitively is a sexy machine. I would love to have one at work to replace my IBM laptop. This is a great machine for e-mail, Internet browsing and customer presentations. It will not replace my MacBook Pro any time soon, but it is a great addition to the portable Mac line of products. Judging from the crowds the new laptop was drawing and the number of inquiries , I don’t expect it to be the failure many have predicted.

I met Jens Alfke during the 2006 WWDC. Apple had organized a party on their campus and during the event attendants had the opportunity to talk to Apple engineers. I had heard about the Pub-Sub API and wanted to learn more. The API allows developers to easily add RSS support to any application. RSS is used today to push web content and podcasts to users but it can be used to publish any kind of content. For example, an RSS feed could contain crosswords or sudokus. This would allow end-users to get a new set of games delivered every day automatically to their computer or mobile device, provided that their RSS reader understands the format these puzzles are distributed in. The Pub-Sub API makes developing such applications much easier as it allows programmers to avoid all the problems related to parsing RSS feeds.

I looked for the Cocoa team and asked one of the Apple engineers about Pub-Sub. It turned out that he had written the API. Jens was very enthusiastic about it and eager to share his knowledge, it was obvious that he was proud about the job he had done. I discussed with him a couple of ideas on how to use his API. I thought that it would be nice to expand the Address Book to support RSS feeds. After all, many of us have now friends who own web sites and keeping in touch with them through the Address Book makes more sense to me than doing it through Mail App. We had a nice conversation and I moved on.

I recently remembered this encounter because of a post that Jens published on his blog. In it Jens announced that he had decided to leave Apple and explained his reasons. I will not judge his reasons, but as a tech manager, what I see is a recognition problem, which is very common in the technical community. Engineers love to solve problems, but after they do, they usually want to be recognized. The problem is that others usually do not care. When I say others, I mean all those who do not realize the complexity of the work that has been done. This applies obviously to salespersons and managers but sadly also to family. I learned that very young, my parents did not understand the complexity behind writing 3D games in assembly language, they thought I was wasting my time. Today nothing much has changed, my wife and daughters don’t get it either, but that is ok. Do you imagine a world in which family love would be measured by the complexity of our work? I don’t think so. Recognition is something that you have to get from your peers in order to be really valuable. I imagine that the idea of being popular among a larger public can seem attractive but developers are not rock stars and never will because in order to be successful we much spend our time out of the public light.

Is it possible to get better recognition as an indie developer? I guess so. Wil Shipley is the closest thing to a rock-star among Mac developers. His multiple successes (first at Omigroup and now at Delicious Monster) are well documented, but this comes at a price, there is only so much you can do nowadays alone or with a very small team. And then, there is only one Wil.

In large companies like IBM, recognition usually comes in the form of an award and sometimes with cash. The technical community accepts the cash but they usually long for something else. At a recent meeting where we discussed the issue, some technical specialists suggested giving interviews as a reward. Others wanted to have their certification credentials printed on their business cards. It is obvious that we face the same problem, proper employee recognition. Some companies like Google allow their employees to spend up to 20% of their time to work on personal projects. This could be a way to allow them to get the recognition they are looking for, outside of the company (and help them understand how hard that actually is), but it is a very expensive proposition that most high-tech company shareholders are not likely to approve.

The truth is that we developers must learn to take pride in our work and live with the recognition of a group of persons we respect. That is the way it works in most professions anyways. I have no idea if there is such thing as an Accountant of the year, but even if there was I couldn’t care less, much in the same way accountants do not care about programmers. Should the picture of chemists be on soap boxes? I don’t think so. Engineers think they deserve recognition because they solve complex problems and have lots of ideas. It may be true, but if others do not see the value of our work we must learn to accept it. We should be grateful to have an interesting job we enjoy. That obviously doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t switch jobs when we no longer have fun, on the contrary, it just means that we shouldn’t do it in search of glory, because we will not find it. Music appeals to everyone, that is why there are rock-stars. Software development only appeals to a few.

As for Jens, I wish him the best in his new endeavor. I am looking forward to try the new applications he his working on, I am sure they will be terrific. I already know he is a great developer, he won that recognition two years ago at WWDC.

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During the week-end I updated my internal 17” Powerbook hard drive with a new Samsung HM320JI. The operation is actually quite easy if you have the right tools and some patience. You just need to follow the illustrated manuals published by the nice people at ExtremeTech or iFixIt. Replacing the drive was actually quite fast, it can easily be done in half an hour. The problem is re-installing the OS and migrating the contents of your old startup disk to the new one. Even though Leopard features a nice migration assistant that takes care of everything for you, the operation can take over two hours for a relatively small 120GB disk.

Anyways, I am really happy with my new drive and I encourage everyone to perform such an upgrade. However, be aware that finding a large capacity laptop drive was much harder than expected. It turns out that the largest 2.5” internal drive I could find at Fry’s or Best Buy were relatively small and old 160GB models. Knowing that 500GB models are already available on the web, I was quite disappointed. The store clerk told me that there wasn’t much demand for such drives. I find it hard to believe. I finally bought an external 320GB 2.5” drive. The enclosure now holds my old disk and this made it easy to transfer the data to my new disk. If you do the same, just make sure the disk is a SATA drive. Good luck!

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.