Global Nerdy

Forrester Research’s recent Mobile Workforce Adoption Trends report (yours for the price of US$2,495) is based on a survey of nearly 10,000 information workers from 17 countries, in which they were asked about their usage of desktop, laptop, and mobile devices. We didn’t spring for the full report, but we were able to glean some numbers from online sources and we’ll share them below.

“Anytime, Anywhere Workers” Up 25%

The photo at the top of this article of my own work setup: laptop, tablet and smartphone. As someone who uses three or more devices and works from a number of locations, Forrester would classify me as an “Anytime, anywhere” worker. Forrester’s report says that 23% of the workers surveyed in 2011 fell into this category; in 2012, that number increased by a quarter to 29%, meaning that nearly a third have three or more devices and move around a lot.

Smartphones: It’s Android’s and Apple’s World; We Just Live in It

Back in January, we pointed to a ComScore MobiLens report that indicated that the smartphone world is an Android/iOS duopoly, with Android taking 54% of the market and Apple taking 35%. The duopoly also exists in the business world, but it’s a much closer race, with Android taking 37% of the market, with iOS following closely behind at 34%. BlackBerry users make up 15%; Forrester also reports that in the financial sector, this share is 26%, and across North America, their share is 20%.

The workers surveyed were also asked what smartphones they currently had and which ones they wanted. Android has a slight lead over iOS in terms of currently-used phones, but iOS is ahead by 50% when it comes to the “What I want for my next smartphone” category. It appears that the BlackBerry camp are sticking with their devices; I’m sure a good number of them are the sort who love their physical keyboards. The surprise is the number of people who want their next phone to be a Windows Phone: 10% of those surveyed.

Tablets: iPad Rules the Roost, But is There Hope for Surface?

As we expected (see this earlier article of ours), the iPad is the most-used tablet among those surveyed, with over twice the share of the runner-up, Android. Windows tablets make up for 11%; since this survey was taken in the fourth quarter of 2012, it’s likely that many of these tablets aren’t Surface RTs runnign Windows RT, but Windows 7 “slates” such as Samsung’s Series 7.

The growing demand for tablets at work isn’t surprising. What is surprising is the demand among those surveyed for a Windows tablet as their next work tablet. Surface sales have been slow, which suggests that what people want is a tablet that can run desktop Windows applications and not just Windows RT apps. The Surface Pro might appear to be that machine at first blush, but it looks as though it lives in that neither-here-nor-there netherworld between tablet and laptop.

This article also appears in Mobilize!: The CTS Mobile Tech Blog.

…and if you do this with a raincoat, you can eat cereal.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

Even though I’m no longer a Developer Evangelist with Microsoft anymore, the dead-ending of their XNA games development toolset upsets me. This development was quietly announced to XNA MVPs (Most Valued Professional – an officially recognized “civilian evangelist” for a Microsoft technology or tool, a title which comes with a fair number of perks) in their mailing list. Until MVP Promit Roy shared the following snippet of the email on his blog, it was generally unknown:

The XNA/DirectX expertise was created to recognize community leaders who focused on XNA Game Studio and/or DirectX development. Presently the XNA Game Studio is not in active development and DirectX is no longer evolving as a technology. Given the status within each technology, further value and engagement cannot be offered to the MVP community. As a result, effective April 1, 2014 XNA/DirectX will be fully retired from the MVP Award Program.

You could think of XNA as a thin wrapper around a bunch of DirectX’s components, but I preferred to think of it as a way to make game development simple and deployable to a number of Microsoft platforms: Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox 360 (and if you have a soft spot for stillborn platforms, Zune). I loved XNA because it made the hard stuff easier and the seemingly impossible possible; it also allowed an eager game developer go, as I liked to put it, “from zero to awesome in sixty minutes”. I myself ran a series of game development tutorials for university students in eight cities across Canada during TechDays 2010, where I gave them a forty-minute crash course in native mobile game development:

Me teaching XNA development for Windows Phone in Vancouver, September 2010.
If you look closely, you can see variables named bieberTexture and bieber2Texture.

Best of all, I did it from scratch: by live-coding up a simple game, from File -> New to playable demo, right in front of their eyes. In my allotted forty minutes, I walked them through the basics of sprite textures, moving them about the screen, collision detection, playing sounds and, since I was talking about XNA game development for Windows Phone, touch detection. We started with simple variable declarations and finished with an amusing game called Biebersmash (named after Scott Hanselman’s game, BabySmash), a Bieber-flavoured “punch the monkey” game.

Demonstrating how simple rect-based collision detection works with two sheets of paper.

I’ve seen some great 2D and 3D XNA-based Windows Phone apps built by local developers, and I worked hard to make sure that they got noticed by both the game-buying public as well as The Powers That Be within Microsoft. Of note was Mike Kasprzak’s incredibly addictive Smiles, pictured below:

Here’s a little Smiles gameplay:

Also of note was Sudoku 3D by Alexey Adamsky and Alex Yakobovitch, which used XNA’s 3D mode to present the gamer with a maddeningly frustrating yet addictive twist on Sudoku:

And XNA was a big part of the game design and development courses at the University of Toronto, some of which were taught by my friend Steve Engels, who’s featured in this video:

When XNA’s aggressive update schedule — five major updates in under two years — suddenly stopped with XNA 4.0 in the fall of 2011, it was cause for concern. Some people saw the writing on the wall a little earlier than others, and given Microsoft’s history of hyping certain technologies and giving them lots of love and attention in the beginning and then letting them die from neglect, their arguments were credible.

Still, many developers held onto the hope that the technology that they loved and that had enriched their lives would go on. It’s a rare thing when developers get emotionally attached to a toolkit, but developers did get emotionally attached to XNA. While it doesn’t have the fanbase of something like Rails, there was enough of a Twitter groundswell. Seriously, check out the tweets with the hashtag #BecauseOfXNA:

#becauseofxna I moved from MI to WA, got paid to write Zune HD games, worked at MS for 2.5 years, and currently contract with Turn 10.

— Nick Gravelyn (@nickgravelyn) January 31, 2013

#becauseofXNA – I am a published author and got to travel to Seattle and meet dozens of awesome developers and MS personnel

— Jim Perry (@MachXGames) January 31, 2013

#becauseofxna I released games, ran business, did blog/mag/radio interviews, spoke at conferences & worked in games for my childhood heroes.

— Deejay (@BinaryTweedDeej) January 31, 2013

#BecauseofXNAI’ve gone to Germany, became an MVP, spoke at GDC, helped sell thousands of titles through an indie promo, made a game…

— Dave Voyles (@DaveVoyles) January 31, 2013

#becauseofXNA I could afford to fly my family to visit my father before he passed away

— Bill Fowler (@dadooGames) January 31, 2013

#BecauseofXNA I was able to start a small game company and peruse being and Indie Game developer as a full time endeavor.

— DigitalDNA (@DigitalDNAGames) January 31, 2013

#becauseofxna FEZ happened, and I realized that I wanted to do games programming for a living, and am doing it right now!

— Renaud Bédard (@renaudbedard) January 31, 2013

#becauseofxna I’m not stuck working for someone else. Also, you know, a million sales is nice. :-)

— DjArcas (@Fortress_Craft) January 31, 2013

#becauseofxna my childhood dream came true. Just wish I could show the kid version of me the game I made with this technology.

— Chaosoft Games (@ChaosoftGames) February 1, 2013

#BecauseofXNA Hating C++ and being a game developer is not mutually exclusive

— Nick Landry (@ActiveNick) February 1, 2013

I met my wife #becauseofxna! I love you, @shelldragon :)

— James Silva (@Jamezila) February 1, 2013

#becauseofxna we, as a small game development studio, were able to create our first console game! #rocketriot

— Codeglue (@Codeglue) February 4, 2013

It breaks my heart to see the hopes of these developers’ hopes dashed.

Microsoft’s official stance is that XNA remains a supported technology, but speaking as a former insider, I would take that with a softball-sized grain of salt. It simply means that it works on the current platforms, and no more. If you’ve got an XNA project with a user base, you can continue for a little bit. However, if you’re thinking of starting something new, take XNA off the list of possible tools. While platforms and toolsets never quite truly die, they often become undead, and that’s no good to you.

DirectX, it would seem despite the confusing messaging from Microsoft, is an ongoing concern (but don’t believe them completely). That’s cold comfort to the developers who built their games and careers on XNA; while DirectX is the underlying technology, it’s the XNA wrapper that brought them in.

It’s yet another Microsoft technology that entered with much fanfare, followed by much fandom, then left to die like a forgotten dog in a car on a hot August day. It’s another sign of the rot deep within The Empire, and some very big problems with which their (mis)management has to contend. While I have much to say on that topic, I’ll leave the final word to Promit Roy, who sums up my opinion on whether or not you should bet on the Microsoft platform:

Just to be clear, I don’t attribute any of this fumbling to malice or bad faith. There’s a lot of evidence that this type of behavior is merely a delayed reflection of internal forces at Microsoft which are wreaking havoc on the company’s ability to compete in any space. But the simple ground truth is that we’re entering an era where Windows’ domination is openly in question, and a lot of us have the flexibility and inclination to choose between a range of platforms, whether those platforms are personal computers, game consoles, or mobile devices. Microsoft’s offer in that world is lock-in to Windows, in exchange for powerful integrated platforms like .NET which are far more capable than their competitors (eg Java, which is just pathetic). That was an excellent trade-off for many years.

Looking back now, though? The Windows tech hegemony is a graveyard. XNA. Silverlight. WPF. DirectX. Managed C++. C++/CLI. Managed DirectX. Visual Basic. So when you guys come knocking and ask us to commit to Metro — sorry, the Windows 8 User Experience — and its associated tech?

You’ll understand if I am not in a hurry to start coding for your newest framework.

There’s an interesting debate that’s beginning to brew on Twitter between:

• Evgeny Morozov, journalist, social commentator and author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, published in 2011. The book’s thesis is that while the internet is seen as a democratizing force, the Western world’s “cyber-utopian” rose-coloured glasses blinds it to its dark side, in which it “entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder — not easier — to promote democracy.
• Tim O’Reilly, probably the best-known tech book publisher, founder of O’Reilly Media and all-round champion of the Free Software and Open Source movements.

The debate began with this tweet:

Rebecca Solnit’s essay on how Slicon Valley is draining San Franscisco of its dissident spirit is so good lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecc…

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) January 31, 2013

The essay in question is a diary entry by San Francisco-based writer Rebecca Solnit, author of Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, an exploration of the city through many different points of view. The entry appears in the February 7, 2013 edition of the London Review of Books (and online here), and it looks at the detrimental effect of the culture of Silicon Valley on San Francisco. She writes that like the prospectors from the Gold Rush, who came to the area to get rich and whose wealth allowed them to take over the place, the techies who come to the Bay Area today are displacing those who have called the place home for decades:

A Latino who has been an important cultural figure for forty years is being evicted while his wife undergoes chemotherapy. One of San Francisco’s most distinguished poets, a recent candidate for the city’s poet laureate, is being evicted after 35 years in his apartment and his whole adult life here: whether he will claw his way onto a much humbler perch or be exiled to another town remains to be seen, as does the fate of a city that poets can’t afford. His building, full of renters for most or all of the past century, including a notable documentary filmmaker, will be turned into flats for sale. A few miles away, friends of friends were evicted after twenty years in their home by two Google attorneys, a gay couple who moved into two separate units in order to maximise their owner-move-in rights. Rental prices rose between 10 and 135 per cent over the past year in San Francisco’s various neighbourhoods, though thanks to rent control a lot of San Franciscans were paying far below market rates even before the boom – which makes adjusting to the new market rate even harder. Two much-loved used bookstores are also being evicted by landlords looking for more money; 16 restaurants opened last year in their vicinity. On the waterfront, Larry Ellison, the owner of Oracle and the world’s sixth richest man, has been allowed to take control of three city piers for 75 years in return for fixing them up in time for the 2013 America’s Cup; he will evict dozens of small waterfront businesses as part of the deal.

Here’s an excerpt from its final paragraph:

I think of it as frontierism, with all the frontier’s attitude and operational style, where people without a lot of attachments come and do things without a lot of concern for their impact, where money moves around pretty casually, and people are ground underfoot equally casually. Sometimes the Google Bus just seems like one face of Janus-headed capitalism; it contains the people too valuable even to use public transport or drive themselves. In the same spaces wander homeless people undeserving of private space, or the minimum comfort and security; right by the Google bus stop on Cesar Chavez Street immigrant men from Latin America stand waiting for employers in the building trade to scoop them up, or to be arrested and deported by the government. Both sides of the divide are bleak, and the middle way is hard to find.

It reminds me of Paulina Borsook’s Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, published back in 2001, as well as her 1999 essay, How the Internet Ruined San Francisco, which I read prior to moving there to contribute to the ruination.

Strangely enough, there’s no Wikipedia entry for Paulina Borsook, even though she’s notable enough to warrant her own page. Perhaps the Wikipedians (a rather huffy libertarian bunch, from the sound of them) aren’t too keen on her. I’m not the only one who’s noticed this recently.

In response to Morozov’s initial tweet, Tim O’Reilly posted this:

@evgenymorozov Yes, but is it true? It seems very selective to me, as is often the case with writing that draws power from being “against”

— Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) January 31, 2013

…and thus began the debate:

@timoreilly oh yes, I’m sure that writing about “open source” and “web 2.0” and “govt 2.0” has never been “selective” or “against”

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) January 31, 2013

@evgenymorozov …attempting to build up your own reputation by tearing someone else’s down. I like positive visions.

— Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) January 31, 2013

@timoreilly I seriously doubt that Rebecca Solnit needs to “build up her reputation” – I’m afraid she’s not in the business of meme-hustling

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) January 31, 2013

@evgenymorozov I’ve been disappointed by your willingness to attack me without ever being willing to talk. I’m a convenient straw man.

— Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) January 31, 2013

@timoreilly I know all your memes by heart – there is no need to talk. Alas, I don’t talk to PR people, even if they are worth millions.

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) January 31, 2013

@evgenymorozov Your unwillingness to engage brands you an opportunist, who builds his name by trashing others, not caring about truth

— Tim O’Reilly (@timoreilly) January 31, 2013

@timoreilly want me to engage? I will engage, fine. It is on.

— Evgeny Morozov (@evgenymorozov) January 31, 2013

If you’d like to see the full exchange, complete with sabre-rattling and cheering bystanders, it’s here.

While I understand and even sympathize with Morozov’s point of view — I’ve seen what he and Solnit are talking about first-hand — he comes off as being a bit of a dick. Perhaps it’s my bias: I know Tim O’Reilly, and the last time I saw him (at SxSW 2012), he stood up from the middle of his conversation, yelled “Joey!” and gave me a big hug.

As much as I like watching a good heated exchange, I’m with Jeff Sonstein, who tweeted this comment in the middle of the back-and-forth between Morozov and O’Reilly:

@evgenymorozov if you 2 don’t get involved in a flame-war, IMHO you could spark some excellent & useful discussions /cc @timoreilly

— Jeff Sonstein (@jeffsonstein) January 31, 2013

They would be useful discussions, and not just in terms of the relationship of Silicon Valley and San Francisco. They’d be applicable to any city undergoing a transformation due to changes in the economy, or an influx of new people, or even just plain old gentrification. Do newcomers to a city have responsibilities ensure that their disruption is minimal to those who already live there? Are the private systems like the Google Bus, which hauls Google employees to work, merely a practical way to let employees enjoy city life at home and still work in Mountain View, deep in the exurbs, or is it a snobbish way of shielding the tech aristocracy from the local hoi polloi? Does the “I’m building the future” mindset blind us to our actions, letting us carelessly destroy the past?

As techies, these are questions we have to at least consider, if not answer.

Beware the powerful stare of Captain Crunch. You know what I’m talking about…

There’s a lot going on today for me: I’m getting some much-needed plumbing repairs done, putting together a proposal for a big consulting gig, moving into a new office and trying to launch a coworking space. Understandably, I had a little trouble getting to sleep, so I decided to be productive and update the hell out of my LinkedIn profile. If you check it out now, you’ll see that it now includes a lot of media links, including an article from Der Spiegel about Peekabooty, the censor-busting proxy application that Paul Baranowski built and for which I programmed and designed the UI (also the last time I did any coding in C++). I can’t read German, so for me, the article is most notable for one of its photos (shown above) featuring Paul, me and a wild-eyed John “Captain Crunch” Draper taking a break from CodeCon 2002 in San Francisco.

Also featured in my LinkedIn profile: Developer Jr., in which my fantasy to host a Sesame Street-style show for kids came true…

…this hastily-put together clip in which I talk about HTML5 and rich internet applications (which Microsoft may have disavowed)…

…and that time when my fantasy to play the opening number for a big keynote at a developer conference came true…

It would appear that LinkedIn approves of the changes, judging by it’s “Profile Strength” gauge:

If you’re bored, go ahead and check out my LinkedIn profile. If you’re feeling inspired, go ahead and update yours!

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.