This afternoon I was in Newport in South Wales. I had half an hour or so to kill before my train back to London was to depart, so I went to a nearby pub and ordered a pint of ale. Due to the general lousy state of WiFi hotspot provision in Britain, I was not able to connect my laptop to the internet. However, I also had my PDA with me. The PDA in question is branded as an O2 XDA IIi, but the device is in fact made by a company named High Tech Computer Corporation (HTC) of Taiwan, and is known generically as the HTC Alpine, as well as being rebranded by a variety of other companies under a variety of other names. It runs Windows Mobile 2003SE, which includes stripped down versions of Internet Explorer, Microsoft Word and Excel, and a variety of other applications. The device also functions as a GSM cellphone, and in what is I think is the way of the future, the device has several different wireless technologies built into it – 802.11b (WiFi), Bliuetooth, and at that moment most importantly. GPRS, the usual packet switched data overlay of the GSM cellphone system.
What did this all mean? Well, it meant that I could connect my PDA to the internet via a GPRS cellular connection and check my e-mail and browse a few blogs. The limitations of this were that I was using a rather limited browser and I had a slow connection – in practice probably only around 20kbps. This means that I didn’t want to view too many separate pages – each takes a while to load and as one is paying by the megabyte, one also doesn’t want to download too much in the was of fancy graphics. Being asked to browse through six pages to read one article is something of an imposition. Lots of popups and flash animation is also bad. Relatively straightforward HTML is best.
After a quick trip to Samizdata, I went to Instapundit to see what was up. I scrolled down, and came to the observation that Time Magazine’s choices as “People of the Year” were lame, and a link to a Michelle Malkin piece that had more to say about it. That wasn’t terribly helpful in itself, because I didn’t know who Time Magazine had chosen, but I followed the link.
Michelle didn’t say precisely who the award had gone to either, but there was a comment about philanthopists, rock stars, and Bill and Melinda Gates. Okay, so at this point my guess (which ultimately turned out to be correct) was that the award had been given jointly to Bono of U2, as well as Bill and Melinda Gates for charitable efforts in the third world.
Actually I find the (joint) award of Man of the Year to Bill Gates is kind of interesting. I have long thought that it was an absurd oversight that Time had never given the “Man of the Year” award to Gates. I am no fan of Microsoft’s products, but even I have to concede that that the man’s career is an extraordinary one, and even that the argument that he was the most significant man of the 1990s is quite a strong one. One man came from nowhere and in 20 did a considerable job of seizing control of one of the most important industries in human history. That Time missed this and failed to give him the award at any time in the 1980s or 1990s was really lame. (Time almost got off to a good start in recognising the PC revolution with “Man of the Year announcements”. They apparently intended to give it to Steve Jobs in 1982, but ultimately lamed out by giving it nebulously to “The Computer” instead after discovering that Jobs had a difficult personality. (Laming out is something they have been doing for a while).
Malkin does make some observations on this, stating that she thinks that Time’s vaguely blah leftist politics are in play here, and that they wouldn’t have given it to Gates in the 1990s when he was doing something significant because that was filthy capitalism of which they do not approve, and that they would now rather give it to him and his wife now that she has civilized him and he is doing something “worthy”. Although Time does have a bit of a history of rewarding starry eyed “one world” stuff, and that certainly explains the Bono thing here, I am not sure it does explain the Gates award.
In truth, I think that Time is almost trying to apologise for not giving the award to Gates before. It is a bit hard to give it to Gates for anything he has done for the world of technology lately. Microsoft makes all its money from two products, Windows and Office, and Microsoft has not produced significantly new version of Office since 1997 or Windows since 2000. (Yes, there have been three subsequent versions of Office and one of Windows, but the changes are superficial and cosmetic) . Microsoft has spent a lot of money trying to break into other markets, but has probably lost money in aggregate by doing so. Declaring Gates “Man of the Year” now in a sort of lame shared way is like giving Winston Churchill the Nobel Prize for literature: we want to reward the man in some way so how do we go about it?
In truth I don’t think it was so much Time actively thinking that Gates was not worthy of the award in 1995 as their being too stupid to fully appreciate the significance of what was happening at the time, and they now feel really embarassed looking back.
Now, all this went through my mind in the pub in Newport. But, I still wasn’t aware exactly who the “People of the Year” award had strictly been awarded to. More links. There was a link to Tim Blair, but all we got from him was agreement that Time’s choices were lame. These sorts of links are fine when you have a big screen and a fast connection – you can open six links rapidly and you will eventually get to the information – but on a PDA under GPRS each takes too long.
But, there was one obvious way to find out, wasn’t there. Yes, that’s right. If I went straight to www.time.com, then they would undoubtedly have something on their award on their site.
But, as it happened, the only thing I got from time.com was this message, telling me that I needed to upgrade my browser.
After that, the Time server refused to render anything else. Of course it was impossible to do because there is no updated browser for Windows Mobile 2003. So I could not read the Time website. Period.
Presumably the Time Server observed that I was using a variant of Internet Explorer that it did not recognise, concluded that it was an “old browser” and thus shut me out. Time has decided that it will provide service only for people with a “minimum browser” level, and as it seems a browser that it deems too old, it rejects it. However, it also ends up rejecting browsers that are just different and unexpected.
This is a lousy way of designing a website and a lousy way of looking at the internet. Ultimately you shouldn’t design for a particular browser. There are such things as web standards and standard forms of HTML, and you should design your website in such a way that it will render on any browser that supports a minimum version of these standards. There is no problem adding special features for advanced or late version browsers that won’t appear on more limited browsers, but these should be added over the top of a page that supports standards. If a browser that supports these standards is not available, you should render something more basic. Even if you do this, you should render something. A browser that cannot support the advanced features might not then show the whole page, but it will render something. And you should not assume that a user can download a new browser. That depends what the user is doing and where and how he is doing it.
If you have only ever used Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows, it is easy to believe that the World Wide Web is consists of nothing more than this. If you are more openminded, it is still easy to think that the World Wide Web consists of nothing more than IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari (Konquerer anyone?) running on Windows, the Macintosh and Linux. (That is, it is easy to assume that the World Wide Web exists only in a PC ecosystem). A few years ago this was fairly true. But the internet’s ecosystem is evolving rapidly. :Lots of people (such as myself) are accessing the internet on mobile devices. People are ripping pieces off websits and looking at the results through RSS readers. A few years ago the internet basically was the World Wide Web, but this is changing. Many of the most interesting things are now happening off the web, but the web as it exists remains a tremendous data repository and indexing system for those applications.
People accessing data on websites using non-standard methods and developing new ways of accessing and viewing are often the most sophisticated users and the most high-value users, and are often the people making purchasing decisions and selling equipment and services for people at other places on the chain. Shutting them out of your site is foolish. What’s worse, if you do this, they will think you are lame and will tell this to all their friends and customers.
It is not necassary to cater directly to these users, although it is nice if you do. (If I go to Google, it checks my operating system as well as my browser, and gives me a version of the search engine customised for a PDA. Unlike Time, the BBC are exemplary in this way, also). All you have to do is adhere to standards, and not make assumptions about what they are doing. And you really, really, really, shouldn’t look them out if they are not doing that. If you provide relatively dumb data and relatively dumb formatting, you allow your readers and your customers to be smart. Many people, more than you think, have perfectly good reasons for not doing what you expect them to.
Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds and Tim Blair are right. Time are really, really lame.
It took me all of 15 minutes to add a pda version to my blog and put a link near the top of the regular page. Truth is I haven’t had the means to test it; I’m sure Time’s web gurus could do an even better job.
Time’s “Man or person or whatever of the year” is a marketing gimmick. Anyone with half a brain stopped taking it serious years ago when betrayed their own rules and started picking to increase or not to decrease circulation, instead of who made the most news good or bad.
I think you had more than one ale, or I hope you did, to write something so trite about nothing.
What about people who can deliver functioning hospitals, fresh water, a working airfield, global communications, and thousands of workers almost anywhere in the world in days? The U.S. Navy and Marine Corp did that with their nuclear carriers and assault ships.
Somehow that got lost.
Of course if Terry had read the entire article he might have noted that it was also a thoughtful post about the increasingly diverse way in which people access the Internet.
Terry, I did not notice anything “trite” about Michael’s observations. Maybe you were having one too many.
I only ever read Time if it is on the coffee table of my local dentist surgery. I’d sooner read Hello! – more intellectually stimulating.
So by using windows CE custom built for a cell phone and using IE which understands xhtml and wml markup languages discover that Gates is man of the year, and then accuse him of not making any new products? Do you know how an http request works? It’s not Microsoft’s fault that time.com does not have an ISAPI filter in place to send out markup compressed enough to be sent in a timely fashion to your phone over such a slow connection. ASP.NET automatically re-renders the markup of any control used to match the useragent of a browser making the request, in effect making asp.net pages freely accessable to wml/wap browsers with no work.
The technology is there. Not everyone has learned how to use it yet.
Its very simple with the XDA/MDA/Jasjar range –
all you need to do is go to Programs > Wireless Modem and set the PDA up for Bluetooth modem use, then you can connect using your laptop. A fairly basic, but reliable, guide can be found here [link]
There is a way with the XDA2i/2s and the XDA Exec to set up the PDA as a wireless access point and thus connect to it as though you are connecting to your normal AP, but I have yet to find a reliable guide on how to do so. You might also want to look at XDA Developers network for clues on this.
Regarding the IE problems try using the ‘View’ section on the menu and change from Default to One Column – this makes pages easier to load. Or wait for the new Opera browser for PocketPC
I wonder if the reason Time refused to serve data to you was because the limited version of IE you were using prevented them from serving their most obnoxious (and presumably effective) advertising to you.
Sort of, “If you can’t see our ads, then we won’t let you see our material. Humph.”
There’s nothing “vague” about TIME’s lefty political position.
bago: I didn’t say that Microsoft has not produced any new products: I said that they have not been very innovative in the products from which they make pretty much 100% of their profits. Windows and Office. They have spent lots of money developing new products in other markets, and some of them (including Windows Mobile / CE have actually been good products) but none of them have made significant amounts of money, and none have been terribly significant for the computer industry as a whole. Microsoft is not changing the world at this point, whereas at one point it was.
And I made no criticism whatsoever of Microsoft’s product. In this instance I like Microsoft’s product. The criticism was entirely of Time for their inability to support anything but the most obvious of hardware and software.
Julian: I have tried the “Wireless Modem” application, but for some reason cannot get it to work. I can pair the laptop and the PDA, and transfer between the two, but actually downloading information from the internet. I will have another go.
I have tried minimo on the PocketPC but it is still a bit primitive. I will be very interested to see what Opera come up with.
Surely to meddle and and attempt to control the user agent (e.g. their web browser) is no surprise to all those who recognise the leftist politics of Time?
If I understand your characterisation of Time correctly (I’ve never read it) then surely its just another manifestation of an apparently well recognised disposition for centralised control? If so, then it provides a great demonstration of how patronising and ineffective that approach can be in practice.
I wonder how long it will be before we see either Firefox or indeed Internet Explorer 7 in Windows Mobile format.
Windows Mobile / CE have actually been good products
WinCE is a good product. WinMo still has a long way to go. It is getting there though.