Category Archives: Uncategorized

What is an operating system for? A friend’s Windows 11 rant shows disconnect between vendors and users

What is an operating system? The traditional definition is something like, the system software that manages computer hardware and provides services for applications.

This definition does not describe what you get though when you install an “operating system” such as macOS, Windows, Android or ChromeOS – or more likely, receive hardware with it pre-installed. What you get is an operating system (OS) plus a ton of stuff that can only be described as applications. In practice, the reach of what we call an operating system has extended over the years. Even in the early days, an OS would come with utilities, including a command line, a command line editor, perhaps a C compiler, file management tools and so on. Then there was a change when pre-installed graphical user interfaces arrived. Windows came with Notepad, Calculator, Write and Paint.

What is a commercial operating system today? We can add to the traditional definition at least the following:

  • A vehicle for advertising
  • A means of lock-in
  • A vehicle for data collection

On Windows, advertising is everything from the pre-installed trials, to the nagging to upgrade OneDrive, to the mysterious appearance of Candy Crush on the Start menu.

The lock-in comes via the ecosystem. Apple is worse than Windows for this in that more of its applications work only on Apple operating systems. On Windows though Microsoft hardly has to bother since a huge legacy of Windows-only applications keeps users from changing, especially in business.

Data collection is via near-enforced login and telemetry. An Apple ID is not required for macOS but it is strongly encouraged and necessary for the App Store. A Microsoft or Entra ID account is not required to use Windows, but the setup points you strongly in that direction.

Is any of this good for the user? A friend is disappointed with Windows 11 – mainly because it is less familiar than Windows 10. His central points are that Microsoft makes irritating changes that disrespect the learning users have invested in Windows, and has left behind the notion of the operating system as a blank canvas waiting for applications to make it useful.

Personally I put up with Windows 11; it is not that different, though there are a few things that I particularly dislike:

  • The taskbar icons in the centre. I routinely move them to the left. Settings – Personalisation – Taskbar – Taskbar behaviors – Taskbar alignment, no registry editing required. This single change makes Windows 11 feel much more familiar, and it is better since left-aligned icons are easier to target.
  • The Start menu. This was great in Windows 95 and improved up until Windows 7. Windows 8 replaced it for … reasons. Windows 10 reinvented it but badly. I have trained myself always to click All apps as a second step after clicking Start. Click on a letter for the letter menu, select a letter, start the app. It works reliably, unlike Search which is a usability disaster when what you want is to start an application.
  • The File Explorer. You right click a file, and instead of a single menu of options, there are three sets of options, one in a row of icons, one in a mysterious subset of options, and one under Show more options. A poor user interface for a common task.

There are other things, of course. I always turn off the distracting Widgets on the taskbar. I always show as many of the “additional System tray icons” as I can, with the exception of consumer Teams. I always open Edge, reflect on the cheap ugly mess that is the default home page, and set about disabling it.

These annoyances are mainly design errors by Microsoft rather than an a direct consequence of the changing role of the operating system; yet they would be impossible without that change.

Imagine for a moment if Windows were optimised for installing and running applications. Oddly, Windows 8 (which most hated for more or less the same reasons my friend cites for disliking Windows 11) did have that vision. Install from the Store, with clean setup and easy removal. Run full-screen with no distractions. Before you say it, yes there were issues, the UI was not good enough, the apps were not there, we missed multiple overlapping windows, and more. There was a good concept in there though.

A mild case of Azure bill shock: is this the most over-priced service on Microsoft’s cloud?

I have been experimenting with accessing Azure storage from remote PCs and tried out the option to use SFTP which was introduced last year. It works though there are limitations, like no support for SSH commands after connecting, no resume support for uploads, and no support for Azure AD authentication – this last is a bit of an issue since fine-grained permissions can only be done with local users, specific to the blob storage.

I actually thought I had turned this off after my experiment but I did not. So I had SFTP enabled on a test storage account, doing nothing. I spotted it of course when I got a large (for my usage) bill. Simply having SFTP enabled on a storage account costs around $220 per month.

To be fair to Microsoft, the cost is documented and there is a notice in the portal, in the details for the storage account, that enabling SFTP incurs a charge, though it does not say how much.

The cost for enabling SFTP

The price is remarkable though, especially given that it seems that the SFTP support is a bit of a hack. Perhaps Microsoft actually runs up a dedicated VM for this in the background, who knows?

“The cost is astronomical considering the service, it’s like $7.20 a day to use and roughly $220 a Month. It’s WAY cheaper to use a VM. This service is like 3x too much,” said a comment from another sufferer.

My advice is not to do this. My further advice is to track closely the actual spend on any new services you run up since is it the only reliable way to avoid this kind of problem.

Reimagining Collaboration by Phil Simon

This is a book about collaboration in the new era of Zoom, Teams, Slack and other such tools – not that they are completely new, but the pandemic and enforced remote working caused a huge boom in usage and some permanent changes in the way people work together. Author Phil Simon is a US specialist in business communications, and associated with the Agile methodology of software development – quite appropriate for this book, since collaboration is at the heart of Agile.

There are a few themes here. Simon believes that organisations need strong collaboration in order to thrive, and personally I think that is spot on. He spends some time distinguishing between collaboration and other related but different things like communication (a pre-requisite but insufficient on its own), or co-operation which can be a passive relationship; people can co-operate without actually collaborating.

Despite all the this, the main topic of the part 1 of this book, I am not sure that Simon ever nails what collaboration really is, at least not in this book. He has a go at it and there are many examples given of what it is not, but it remains, in my mind, a bit elusive. I did like his metric of organizational health: “The ability to rally around a common vision, execute effectively, and create a culture of innovation.”

Simon does show a good understanding of the human factor in productivity. He talks about managers versus makers, and how managers feel the need to communicate often with many people, while makers need to reduce distraction and focus on a task; I am not sure if he had software development in mind but this is a good description of what developers need.

Part 2 then gets to the heart of the book: better collaboration through technology. The key concept Simon uses is what he calls a “collaboration hub,” meaning any of a number of tools which form a central internet-connected space where users can interact with one another. This includes what the author calls the big three, Slack, Teams and Zoom, as well as other applications such as Expensify or Canva.  

The author is a user of Slack and of Google Docs and while he shows a commendable neutrality in the sense that he considers other tools such as Teams equally effective, adding that “It’s fair to call the similarities around today’s internal collaboration hubs remarkable,” his greater depth of knowledge of the tools he mainly uses does show. There is really much more about Slack than about Teams, and that is something to be aware of. Teams users can still benefit from the book but less so than Slack users.

There is a big theme here though which is that the author considers email, especially internal email, a blocker to collaboration. He gives reasons, including that inboxes tend to die when an individual leaves the company; that email is gaffe-prone since a careless email, or a careless reply-all, cannot be unsent; and that emailing attachments like spreadsheets leads to multiple forks of the same data. In fact, toward the end of the book Simon remarks that “Effective, long-term collaboration cannot take place via email. Period.” He also recommends ditching internal email completely.

While I have some sympathy with this view, I think it is overdone. I reminded myself that one of the most successful collaborative projects of all time, the Linux kernel, is based on email lists. 

Still, Simon is quite correct, a collaboration tool with channels for team members has lots of advantages over email, gathering all the communications in one spam-free place and making search much easier.

Part three of the book is called “moving from theory to practice” and contains lots of discussion about how organizations can move towards using collaboration hubs and what can go wrong. Then part four peeks into the future and envisages smarter collaboration hubs which use AI to book meetings for us, automatically transcribes meetings and sends automatic alerts to Slack channels.

There is plenty of wisdom though I could have done with more on practical questions about how to get the most from Slack or Teams. How many channels or Teams should you have? When should you have a video conference versus a message chat? Should we have our collaboration hubs always open or sign out sometimes? Who should be able to create a channel, or should anyone? And what more advanced or intricate features of the products are worthwhile?

I enjoyed Simon’s willingness to be blunt at times, as well as some amusing reflections like “In my consulting days, I often saw project managers call meetings essentially because they were bored.”

Towards the end of the book we also get this: “Just because the discussion or task takes place in a hub doesn’t mean that it’s truly collaborative.” I agree. What then is the magic that enables an organization to be collaborative? In the end it is corporate culture rather than tools that matter most. I think the author recognizes that, but after reading the book, I am still not clear about the best way to get to the collaborative culture to which we should aspire.

Thanks to Netgalley for an electronic review copy of this title

Using an M1 Mac after a lifetime of mainly Windows

So I got an M1 MacBook Pro back in April and it is time for a quick brain dump on my experience. I am not travelling as much as I did pre-lockdown, so although I got the Mac as a replacement for an ancient Windows laptop it gets used at home too. My usual desktop PC is a few years old but a decent spec gaming PC withCore i7-7700 3.6 GHz, 16GB RAM and Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU. I have been happy with it; but I do find myself thinking “why not just use the MacBook” when needing to fire up a computer, a subconscious preference that bears examination. Most of my work is writing, web browsing and coding.

I do not particularly prefer the macOS UI to that of Windows. It is more consistent because Apple managed iOS vs macOS sensibly whereas Microsoft made a hash of Windows desktop vs Windows CE vs Windows Phone vs Windows 8 and has now settled on a thing called WinUI but scratch the surface of Windows and you still find UI that has not changed for decades.

I digress though. I do not mind the Windows UI, I am used to it. What I do mind though is annoyances like the always-broken Windows search, and the way certain actions cause lengthy pauses that make me wonder what my PC is doing. In my case, sorting a large directory in Windows Explorer takes an age. Another little issue is that creating a new folder works fine, but renaming it causes a long pause. There also seem to be some focus issues. I create a new folder, I rename it and press Enter. Eventually it renames, but half the time the focus mysteriously switches to a different folder.

I realise that these problems do not occur with a new install of Windows and that I could pop out and buy a Surface laptop and it would be fine. For a bit. Windows, it seems to me, still suffers from the cruft problem beautifully described by Verity Stob 20 years ago. I do not think Macs are completely immune (I had a Mac Mini where I upgraded the OS once too often and it crawled) but does seem to me more resistant.

There is another thing that I like about the MacBook. You close the lid and it sleeps. You open the lid minutes, hours or days later, and it wakes. This has never worked well for me on Windows, though it is meant to do the same. I can believe that it is hard to implement, but when it works it is a huge benefit.

There is also the unwanted advertising that has crept into the Windows UI especially since Windows 11. Working on the MacBook I do notice its absence; I can better focus on what I want to do.

From a developer perspective, the performance of the M1 Pro is a delight. I work mostly in Visual Studio Code on both platforms; even on Windows I have come to prefer VS Code for most types of work. There is also the fact that Unix-like operating systems have won in server and web applications, so there is less friction there.

Launchpad: reminiscent of the Windows 8 Start screen?

Microsoft came up with a great application launcher in the Windows 95 Start menu – and improved it until it reached its peak in Windows 7. I also like the Windows 8 full-screen version. Windows 10 and 11 are not so good though. You get inadvertent web searches, as well as the problem of apps that you search for not appearing for strange reasons. The Mac Launchpad, which reminds me of the Windows 8 full-screen Start menu, seems to work well. You type what you want and all the matches appear.

What do I miss when not using Windows? It is mainly a matter of working out new ways to do certain tasks. I do miss Hyper-V and WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) though I have had success with UTM for running both Windows and Ubuntu on the Mac. The integration of WSL with the desktop OS is great though. Microsoft Office still works best on Windows though not to the extent of a few years back. There is no Paint or Notepad, and favourites like Notepad++ do not run natively, but Preview works for cropping images and alternatives to Windows utilities exist.

Sometimes you are pushed towards the command line which is not a bad thing. No WinSCP for example, so use scp instead, and do some helper scripts for common tasks. You end up saving time. (I realise you can script WinSCP as well). And no need for Putty; just type ssh or script the command line you need.

I do expect though to use Windows less in future, and for me that is a big change.

Fixing an Xbox controller broken by Elden Ring

I have been enjoying Elden Ring on the Xbox but not so much when my controller broke. I recall the same thing happening with Dark Souls. Maybe it’s the way I play, but the problem is that the right bumper is used for a quick attack, which I use constantly. The bumpers seem to be less robust than the triggers, so after a while it breaks.

Fortunately the current Xbox controllers (I have a Carbon Black) are easy to fix. The hardest part is getting the textured panels off the controller handles; like so many modern electronics cases, these are a press fit and have to be levered off while trying not to break or scratch them. Then you undo two screws each side using a Torx T8 security screwdriver and another screw under the label in the battery compartment. Then you can carefully remove first a central rear panel and next the rear bumpers.

This revealed the problem: a small plastic tab had broken.

Gluing the tab back probably would not last long; but fortunately compatible bumper parts are available for a few pounds on eBay. I bought two (one for next time) and everything is fine.

Google’s Digital Garage, hosted by UK City Councils

I have recently moved into a new area and noticed that my (now) local city council was running a Google Digital Garage:

Winchester City Council is very excited to be partnering up with The Digital Garage from Google – a digital skills training platform to assist you in growing your business, career and confidence, online. Furthermore, a Google digital expert is coming to teach you what is needed to gain a competitive advantage in the ever changing digital landscape, so come prepared to learn and ask questions, too.

I went along as a networking opportunity and learn more about Google’s strategy. The speaker was from Google partner Uplift Digital, “founded by Gori Yahaya, a digital and experiential marketer who had spent years working on behalf of Google, training and empowering thousands of SMEs, entrepreneurs, and young people up and down the country to use digital to grow their businesses and further their careers.”

I am not sure “digital garage” was the right name in this instance, as it was essentially a couple of presentations which not much interaction and no hands-on. The first session had three themes:

  • Understanding search
  • Manage your presence on Google
  • Get started with paid advertising

What we got was pretty much the official Google line on search: make sure your site performs well on mobile as well as desktop, use keywords sensibly, and leave the rest to Google’s algorithms. The second topic was mainly about Google’s local business directory called My Business. Part three introduced paid advertising, mainly covering Google AdWords. No mention of click fraud. Be wary of Facebook advertising, we were told, since advertising on Facebook may actually decrease your organic reach, it is rumoured. Don’t bother advertising on Twitter, said the speaker.

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Session two was about other ways to maintain a digital presence, mainly looking at social media, along with a (rather unsatisfactory) introduction to Google Analytics. The idea is to become an online authority in what you do, we were told. Good advice. YouTube is the second most popular search engine, we were told, and we should consider posting videos there. The speaker recommended the iOS app YouTube Director for Business, a free tool which I later discovered is discontinued from 1st December 2017; it is being replaced by Director Onsite which requires you to spend $150 on YouTube advertising in order to post a video.

Overall I thought the speaker did a good job on behalf of Google and there was plenty of common sense in what was presented. It was a Google-centric view of the world which considering that it is, as far as I can tell, entirely funded by Google is not surprising.

As you would also expect, the presentation was weak concerning Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms. Facebook in particular seems to be critically important for many small businesses. One lady in the audience said she did not bother with a web site at all since her Facebook presence was already providing as many orders for her cake-making business as she could cope with.

We got a sanitised view of the online world which in reality is a pretty mucky place in many respects.

IT vendors have always been smart about presenting their marketing as training and it is an effective strategy.

The aspect that I find troubling is that this comes hosted and promoted by a publicly funded city council. Of course an independent presentation or a session with involvement from multiple companies with different perspectives would be much preferable; but I imagine the offer of free training and ticking the box for “doing something about digital” is too sweet to resist for hard-pressed councils, and turn a blind eye to Google’s ability to make big profits in the UK while paying little tax.

Google may have learned from Microsoft and its partners who once had great success in providing basic computer training which in reality was all about how to use Microsoft Office, cementing its near-monopoly.

Last thoughts on Windows Phone

Microsoft’s Windows Phone disaster lurched further towards oblivion last week, when Windows boss Terry Myerson emailed employees with the news that “Today I want to share that we are taking the additional step of streamlining our smartphone hardware business, and we anticipate this will impact up to 1,850 jobs worldwide, up to 1,350 of which are in Finland.”

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“Streamlining” is exec-speak for further withdrawal from the mobile phone business.

Microsoft is at times a dysfunctional company and nowhere is this better illustrated than in its mobile devices adventures. The failure of Windows Phone is a self-inflicted wound. Mis-steps include:

  • Aiming the first release of Windows Phone 7, in 2010, at the consumer market despite Windows core strength being in business computers
  • Launching Windows Phone while failing to do the spadework with operators and retailers to ensure that it was actually widely available
  • Using Silverlight as the development platform for Windows Phone and then abandoning Silverlight on Windows and releasing Windows 8 with a different and incompatible development platform
  • Promising that Windows Phone would be updated by Microsoft so users could stay up to date, while in fact leaving this to operators who did not care – this applied until April 2014 when the Developer Preview program kicked off, allowing users to update by signing up as developers, subject to hardware constraints
  • Long dormant periods while Microsoft went through one of its, “let’s pause while we make huge changes that will be great eventually” phases, such as before Windows Phone 8.0 which introduced the NT kernel and before Windows Mobile 10 which introduced the Universal Windows Platform

Despite all the above, the arrival of a former Microsoft executive at Nokia meant that Windows Phone was adopted by a company that actually understood how to develop and market smartphones. Visibility of Windows Phone at retail greatly improved and technology such as Nokia’s PureView photography gave it an edge in some areas. Windows Phone was also strong for turn by turn driving directions with Here maps.

It was an uphill battle against iPhone and Android, and with Microsoft’s too-slow platform development, but Nokia made some impact and built significant market share in certain territories, though in Europe rather than the USA.

Microsoft acquired Nokia’s devices business in 2014, along with CEO Stephen Elop, and it was here that everything went wrong. Specifically:

The transition period along with the coming Windows 10 resulted in not much happening in terms of new phones or announcements

Steve Ballmer was replaced as Microsoft CEO by Satya Nadella, before the acquisition completed. Ballmer had a strong belief in “Windows everywhere” and the importance of Microsoft not conceding the mobile space to competitors. Nadella came from a server background and believes everything will be fine as long as Microsoft’s server and cloud products are strong.

There was no consensus at Microsoft about whether Windows Phone was a key strategic asset or a waste of time and after running around in circles for a bit the inevitable happened: in June 2015 Nadella cut back the Windows Phone staff, cancelled some forthcoming devices, and parted company with Elop, who presumably had no appetite for presiding over the death of the business he had nurtured.

Myerson’s memo still presents the illusion that Windows Phone has some kind of future. “We’re scaling back, but we’re not out!” he writes. However you cannot be a little bit in the mobile phone business any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. The reason, as Elop announced when Nokia chose Windows Phone, is that you need an ecosystem. No, Continuum (the ability to use a phone like a desktop with an external display) is not an ecosystem. Maybe there will be some specialist business cases where a mobile device running Windows meets the need, but it will be a tiny niche.

This is also the reason why June 2015 was really the date that Windows Phone died, at least in public. Once it became obvious that Microsoft no longer believed in its own mobile platform, there was no hope, and sales suffered accordingly.

Could it have been different? Of course. The Nokia acquisition was not necessarily a bad idea: in theory it gave the hardware the backing of Microsoft’s deep pockets and brought to the company the skills that it lacked in how to make and market phones.

The saga has not been pretty to watch. In particular, the destruction of value in acquiring and then disposing of Nokia is distressing, as is the destruction of value in the Windows Phone operating system itself.

I have used a Windows Phone as my main mobile device for several years, and yes, it has a lot going for it. Navigation is easier than on Android or iOS, performance is good, and the integration with social media was for a while excellent. The camera on a Lumia 1020 remains superb. The development platform is strong, with Visual Studio and C#.

The subject of operating system design is another story; but there is another take on this narrative which looks like this:

Old world: Windows 7, Windows Mobile 6

Lurch towards mobile: Windows 8, Windows Phone 7

Lurch back towards desktop: Windows 10, Windows Mobile 10 with Continuum

Windows 10 is not as good as Windows 8.x on tablets, and Windows Mobile 10 is perhaps not as good as Windows Phone 8.x on mobile. I say perhaps because I don’t hate it; but there is a trade-off with performance and touch-friendliness worse while the capability of the operating system and its apps has improved.

In this way of reading Microsoft’s strategy, the death of Windows Phone is a consequence of the unravelling of former Windows boss Steven Sinofsky’s strategy to make Windows a secure and mobile-friendly platform.

The new Microsoft

That is it then; Microsoft is exiting mobile and trusting in server and cloud, plus a large but declining desktop Windows business, plus applications for other people’s mobile platforms. It is a software company after all.

It is too early though to say whether or not Ballmer was wrong and Nadella right in steering away from Windows everywhere. For sure Google will continue to do all it can to push Android users towards its own cloud services. Apple’s is a more open platform in this sense, because the company has no real equivalent to Office 365 or Azure, but Microsoft is vulnerable here as well. There is also Amazon Web Services to think about, the dominant cloud player, with its own offerings for email, cloud database and so on.

Still, this is the new Microsoft; and from a customer perspective there is good news in that both iOS and Android should be well supported for Microsoft’s services, and that Office 365 and Azure have to compete on technical merit, not just on the basis of integrating nicely with Windows.

Microsoft Financials: steady, but a turning point as on-premises server business declines

Microsoft has announced its latest financials, and I have made a quick table summarising the year-on-year comparison for the quarter. See the end of this post for what the confusing segment categories represent.

Quarter ending  March 31st 2016 vs quarter ending March 31st 2015, $millions

Segment Revenue Change Operating income Change
Productivity and Business Processes 6522 +65 2994 -210
Intelligent Cloud 6096 +193 2188 -345
More Personal Computing 9458 +89 1645 +596
Corporate and Other -1545 -1545 -1544 -1352

A few observations.

Overall the figures are flat. That is not a bad result if you think of Microsoft as a PC company, considering that the PC is in decline; disappointing if you think of Microsoft as a cloud company. The answer is that one is offsetting the other, which is not too bad.

Microsoft says that revenue and income would be up, were it not for currency fluctuations. Of course there is that big hit in “Corporate and other” which is “net revenue deferral related to Windows 10 of $1.6 billion,” according to the earnings statement.

On-premises server business is in retreat. It is not possible to migrate customers to the cloud while at the same time growing on-premises business. That truth finally showed up in Microsoft’s figures. CFO Amy Hood referred to a “larger than expected decline in our transactional on premise server business” in the earnings call.

Margins are not so good in cloud. Selling software license is almost all profit, once you have developed it. Not so with cloud, which requires data centres, networking, and ongoing maintenance. “Our company gross margin percentage declined this quarter driven by our accelerating mix of cloud services in our Intelligent Cloud and Productivity and Business Processes segment offset by higher gross margin percentage performance from products within More Personal Computing,” said Hood.

Office 365 continues to grow. CEO Satya Nadella said that “Commercial Office 365 customers surpassed 70 million monthly active users and we grew seats by 57 percent” year on year. This is key to the company’s health. Customers in Office 365 are hooked to the platform and more likely to buy other services such as Dynamics CRM, Enterprise Mobility Services MDM (Mobile Device Management), or applications hosted on Azure. “Dynamics CRM Online seats more than doubled this quarter with over 80 percent of our new CRM customers deploying in the cloud,” said Nadella.

Windows 10 is being taken up. The nagware is working according to Nadella, who said that “The number of Windows 10 devices is twice that of Windows 7 over the same time period since launch.” Nevertheless I still hear a lot of caution out there, with people advising one another to stick with Windows 7. Windows 10 pushes users more strongly to Microsoft services than 7, with Cortana driven by Bing. “Over 35 percent of our search revenue last month came from Windows 10 devices,” said Nadella.

Windows Phone is dying fast. “For phone we expect year over year revenue declines to deepen in Q4 as we work through our Lumia channel position,” said Hood.

Linux is growing. Nadella made a few comments about SQL Server on Linux and Linux on Azure. Why SQL Server on Linux? “We look at that as an expansion opportunity,” he said. Over 20% of VMs on Azure are Linux, he added. Microsoft made Linux “first class” on Azure in order to be able to host an enterprise’s “entire data estate across Windows and Linux.” People don’t move between operating systems, he said, but “now they have a choice around database.”

I’d add that we are now seeing scenarios where Linux is ahead of Windows on Azure. The new Azure Container service is currently Linux only, for example, though a Windows option is planned.

What Microsoft does with Linux in the coming years will be interesting to see. Office on Linux? Microsoft Android?

A reminder of Microsoft’s segments:

Productivity and Business Processes: Office, both commercial and consumer, including retail sales, volume licenses, Office 365, Exchange, SharePoint, Skype for Business, Skype consumer, OneDrive, Outlook.com. Microsoft Dynamics including Dynamics CRM, Dynamics ERP, both online and on-premises sales.

Intelligent Cloud: Server products not mentioned above, including Windows server, SQL Server, Visual Studio, System Center, as well as Microsoft Azure.

More Personal Computing: What a daft name, more than what? Still, this includes Windows in all its non-server forms, Windows Phone both hardware and licenses, Surface hardware, gaming including Xbox, Xbox Live, and search advertising.

Mobile World Congress 2015 round-up: MediaTek Helio, Samsung Galaxy S6, Boyd smell sensor, Jolla Sailfish 2.0, Alcatel OneTouch devices, ZTE eye scanning, and Ford’s electric bike

Finding time to write everything up is a struggle, so rather than risk not doing so at all, here is a quick-fire reflection on the event.

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Microsoft’s Windows 10 was part of it of course; I’ve covered this in a separate post.

I attended MediaTek’s press event. This Taiwan SoC company announced the Helio X10 64-bit 8-core chip and had some neat imaging demos. Helio is its new brand name. I was impressed with the company’s presentation; it seems to be moving quickly and delivering high-performance chips.

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Alcatel OneTouch showed me its latest range. The IDOL 3 smartphone includes a music mixing app which is good fun.

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There is also a watch of course:

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Despite using Android for its smartphones, Alcatel OneTouch says Android Wear is too heavyweight for its watches.

The Alcatel OneTouch range looks good value but availability in the UK is patchy. I was told in Barcelona that the company will address this with direct sales through its own ecommerce site, though currently this only sells accessories, and trying to get more retail presence as opposed to relying on carrier deals.

I attended Samsung’s launch of the Galaxy S6. Samsung is a special case at MWC. It has the largest exhibits and the biggest press launch (many partners attend too). It is not just about mobile devices but has a significant enterprise pitch with its Knox security piece.

So to the launch, which took place in the huge Centre de Convencions Internacional, unfortunately the other side of Barcelona from most of the other events.

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The S5 was launched at the same venue last year, and while it was not exactly a flop, sales disappointed. Will the S6 fare better?

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It’s a lovely phone, though there are a few things missing compared to the S5: no microSD slot, battery not replaceable, not water resistance. However the S6 is more powerful with its 8-core processor and 1440×2560 screen, vs quad-core and 1920×1080 in the S5. Samsung has also gone for a metal case with tough Gorilla Glass front and back, versus the plastic and glass construction of the S5, and most observers feel this gives a more premium feel to the newer smartphone.

I suspect that these details are unimportant relative to other factors. Samsung wants to compete with the iPhone, but it is hardly possible to do so, given the lock which the Apple brand and ecosystem holds on its customers. Samsung’s problem is that the cost of an excellent smartphone has come down and the perceived added value of a device at over £500 or $650 versus one for half the price is less than it was a couple of years ago. Although these prices get hidden to some extent in carrier deals, they still have an impact.

Of particular note at MWC were the signs that Samsung is falling out with Google. Evidence includes the fact that Samsung Knox, which Google and Samsung announced last year would be rolled into Android, is not in fact part of Android at Work, to the puzzlement of Samsung folk I talked to on the stand. More evidence is that Samsung is bundling Microsoft’s Office 365 with Knox, not what Google wants to see when it is promoting Google Apps.

Google owns Android and intends it to pull users towards its own services; the tension between the company and its largest OEM partner will be interesting to watch.

At MWC I also met with Imagination, which I’ve covered here.

Jolla showed its crowd-sourced tablet running Sailfish OS 2.0, which is based on the abandoned Nokia/Intel project called MeeGo. Most of its 128 employees are ex-Nokia.

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Jolla’s purpose is not so much to sell a tablet and phone, as to kick-start Sailfish which the company hopes will become a “leading digital content and m-commerce platform”. It is targeting government officials, businesses and “privacy-aware consumers”  with what it calls a “security strengthened mobile solution”. Its business model is not based on data collection, says the Jolla presentation, taking a swipe at Google, and it is both independent and European. Sailfish can run many Android apps thanks to Myriad’s Alien Dalvik runtime.

The tablet looks great and the project has merit, but what chance of success? The evidence, as far as I can tell, is that most users do not much object to their data being collected; or put another way, if they do care, it does not much affect their buying or app-using decisions. That means Sailfish will have a hard task winning customers.

China based ZTE is differentiating its smartphones with eye-scanning technology. The Grand S3 smartphone lets you unlock the device with Eyeprint ID, based on a biometric solution from EyeVerify.

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Senior Director Waiman Lam showed me the device. “It uses the retina characteristic of your eyes for authentication,” he said. “We believe eye-scanning technology is one of the most secure biometric ways. There are ways to get around fingerprint. It’s very very secure.”

Talking of sensors, I must also mention San Francisco based Boyd Sense, a startup, which has a smell sensor. I met with CEO Bruno Thuillier. “The idea we have is to bring gas technology to the mobile phone,” he said. Boyd Sense is using technology developed by partner Alpha MOS.

The image below shows a demo in which a prototype sensor is placed into a jar smelling of orange, which is detected and shown on the connected smartphone.

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What is the use of a smell sensor? What we think of as smell is actually the ability to detect tiny quantities of chemicals, so a smell sensor is a gas analyser. “You can measure your environment,” says Thuillier. “Think about air quality. You can measure food safety. You can measure beverage safety. You can also measure your breath and some types of medical condition. There are a lot of applications.”

Not all of these ideas will be implemented immediately. Measuring gas accurately is difficult, and vulnerable to the general environment. “The result depends on humidity, temperature, speed of diffusion, and many other things,” Thuillier told me.

Of course the first thing that comes to mind is testing your breath the morning after a heavy night out, to see if you are safe to drive. “This is not complicated, it is one gas which is ethanol,” says Thuillier. “This I can do easily”.

Analysing multiple gasses is more complex, but necessary for advanced features like detecting medical conditions. Thuillier says more work needs to be done to make this work in a cheap mobile device, rather than the equipment available in a laboratory.

I had always assumed that sampling blood is the best way to get insight into what is happening in your body, but apparently some believe breathe is as good or better, as well as being easier to get at.

For this to succeed, Boyd Sense needs to get the cost of the sensor low enough to appeal to smartphone vendors, and small enough not to spoil the design, as well as working on the analysis software.

It is an interesting idea though, and more innovative than most of what I saw on the MWC floor. Thuillier is hoping to bring something to the consumer market next year.

Finally, one of my favourite items at MWC this year was Ford’s electric bikes.

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Ford showed two powered bicycles at the show, both prototypes and the outcome of an internal competition. The idea, I was told, is that bikes are ideal for the last part of a journey, especially in today’s urban environments where parking is difficult. You can put your destination into an app, get directions to the car park nearest your destination, and then dock your phone to the bike for the handlebar by handlebar directions.

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I also saw a prototype delivery van with three bikes in the back. Aimed at delivery companies, this would let the driver park at a convenient spot for the next three deliveries, and have bikers zip off to drop the parcels.