I had the day off today, but the kids were all in school — so I jumped on my bike and went looking for some sun.

I did at least get out of the fog as soon as I started climbing out of the plain, but despite a couple of attempts, the sun never did quite make it through the overcast.

Why do I ride a gravel bike? Precisely so I can do rides like this, with a long on-road approach, and then a fun bit at the top.

To be honest around here I would have been much better off with proper fat mountain-bike tyres; the Kendas on my Bianchi are pretty good for what they are, but they weren’t quite up to literal rivers of snowmelt coming down the path I was trying to ride up — so I stopped for a quick photo op and a breather.

The long way down, back on tarmac.

This sort of thing is good for the soul — that, and the shower beer I allowed myself when I got home… Cheers!

Quick, it's happening again!

This is my third CPU architecture transition since I've been a Mac user. I started on the 68k, with the weedy 68020 in my first Mac LC. When Apple moved to PowerPC, I cajoled my parents into getting a 603e — still relatively weedy in the context of the dual 604s I got to play with at work, but a massive upgrade from the LC. By the time of the Intel transition I was out of the Apple fold — I couldn't afford one as a student, and later prioritised gaming and dual-booting with Linux.

However, when the MacBook Air launched — yes, the very first one, with the 11" screen, no ports, and no power — I spent my own money rather than use the massive corporate-issue Dell that was assigned to me. Since then I've never looked back; every work computer I've had since that tiny MacBook Air has been a MacBook. My personal computer is my iPad Pro, but I also have a 2nd-gen Mac mini¹ which runs headless to take care of various things around the house. An upgrade to SSD and maxed-out 16 GB of RAM keeps it chugging away, nearly a decade in.

When Apple announced the new M1-based Macs, I was blown away like everyone else by the performance on offer. I was particularly relieved to see the M1 Mac mini in the line-up, not because I have any urgent need to upgrade, but just to know that it remains a product in Apple's line-up, for whenever I might need to upgrade in the future. In the same way, I'm not pushing for an early upgrade of my work-issued MacBook Pro, because one of the must-haves for me is support for multiple monitors. I'm assuming that will come with the rumoured 14" Pros that are more clearly differentiated from the Air, so that's what I'm waiting for there.

Most of the commentary is trying to differentiate between the new Air and Pro, and figuring out whether to replace an iMac Pro (or even a Mac Pro!) with the M1 Mac mini. Some, though, have gone the other way, comparing the new MacBook Air to the iPad Pro. The article's conclusion is that "Apple's M1 MacBook Air kills the iPad Pro for the rest of us", but I'm not so sure.

Over-reach

My iPad is a substantially different device from my MacBook, and it gets used for different things, even when I have both within arm's reach. Let's dig into those differences, because they are key to understanding what (I think) Apple's strategy will be for the Mx MacBook and the iPad Pro in the future.

Form Factor

All of the comparisons in that ZDNet article are comparing the big 12.9" iPad Pro to the 13" MacBook Air — which is fair enough on the MacBook side, since that's what Apple has announced so far. On the iPad side, though, most people have the smaller size — currently 11" — and that is the more meaningful basis for differentiation. We'll see whether that changes when and if Apple ever releases a successor to my beloved MacBook Air 11", or SWMBO's (just) MacBook 12", aka the MacBook Adorable — but for now, if you want an ultra-portable device without sacrificing power, the smaller iPad Pro still has an edge.

External Display

Seriously, who connects an external display to an iPad? AirPlay is far more relevant for that use case. Meanwhile, I'm actually more bothered about the fact that no M1 MacBook allows for more than one monitor to be connected.

Webcam

This is a long-standing weak point of the MacBook line, and it's going to be hard to remedy simply due to physics. A better webcam requires more depth, meaning a thicker cover around and behind the screen. Again, though, the use case matters: it's more important for the iPad to have a good built-in webcam, because a MacBook is more likely to have an external one for people who really do care about image quality, resting on top of that external monitor. People who use their MacBook for work care a lot less about image quality anyway, because they may well be looking at a shared document rather than headshots most of the time.

What's Missing

A surprising omission from the list of differences between MacBook and iPad is the operating system. iOS — or rather, iPadOS — is a big differentiator here, because it affects everything about how these devices are actually used. This is the same mistake as we see in those older PC reviews that only compared the hardware specs of Macs to Wintel devices, missing out entirely on the differentiation that came from running macOS as opposed to Windows.

Uhoh, This content has sprouted legs and trotted off.

Confusion

I think the confusion arises from the Magic Keyboard, and how it makes the iPad Pro look like a laptop. This is the foundational error in this list of recommendations to improve the iPad Pro.

Adopt a landscape-first mindset. Rotate the Apple logo on the back and move the iPad’s front-facing camera on the side beneath the Apple Pencil charger to better reflect how most people actually use their iPad Pros.

No! Absolutely not! I use my iPad in portrait mode a lot more than I use it in landscape! Does it bug me that the Apple is rotated when I'm using it with the keyboard? Sure, a little bit — but by definition, I can't see it while I'm doing that.

Release a new keyboard + trackpad case accessory that allows the iPad to be used in tablet mode without removing it from the case.

Now this one I can stand behind: I still miss my origami keyboard case for my iPad Pro, which sadly broke. You could even rotate the Apple logo on the case, while leaving the one on the device in its proper orientation, if you really wanted to.

The reason I still miss that origami case is that I didn't replace it when it broke, thinking I would soon be upgrading my iPad Pro, and I would get a new keyboard case for the new-style flat-edge case. Then Apple did not refresh the iPad Pro line this year, so I still have my 10.5" model.

I do wonder whether this could be the reason why the iPad Pro didn't get updated when the new iPad and iPad Air did. That is, could there be an even better one coming, that differentiates more clearly against the M1 MacBook Air?

Then again, Apple may be getting ready to release a convergent device: a fold-over, touch- & Pencil-enabled MacBook. They would never tell us, so we'll just have to wait and see, credit cards at the ready.

In my last bike post introducing the Bianchi, I mentioned that I had turned my previous steed into a single-speed city runabout. Well, today I was out running an errand astride said hipster conveyance, so I thought I’d get a pic of it too.

I love how the conversion turned out. The gear ratio is fine for short trips around town, optimised for short bursts, not sustained speed. The thing on the back wheel is just a chain tensioner. The flat bars are raised up by flipping the stem upside-down, so it’s actually a pretty comfortable thing to ride. It’s also still a very light bike, with its carbon fork and all, so it’s nippy and manoeuvrable around town. The old Campagnolo drive train was completely shot, and these days a gravel bike frame that won’t take disk brakes is basically unsaleable, so this is a better fate for my old Rat — even if it does mean that I now own more bicycles than the rest of the family put together!

Appropriately enough for such a bike, what I was doing out and about was buying fresh-ground coffee from my coffee roaster. The shop is a couple of streets back from the square in the photo, but they have a century-old roaster, and when it’s running you can smell the coffee clear to the square!

For my sins, I have been working with CSV files in Excel again — and it's giving me an aneurysm, as usual.

If you haven't had the (dis)pleasure, here's how the Import wizard works in Excel. You do File > Import, and choose CSV — so far so good:

Now, make careful note of the explanation: "Text files that contain comma-separated values".

Here is where the insanity begins: the wizard somehow decides that my text is not actually comma-delimited, as per the description above, but fixed-width:

I have no idea how the wizard arrives at this conclusion, because it does it for every single CSV file I have ever fed it.

Having reassured the wizard that no, I really do want my text delimited by characters such as, oh for instance commas because this is a file of comma-separated values — guess what the default character is that the wizard suggests?

Sure. Tabs. Not commas, for the file of (once again) comma-separated values. Tabs.

Now this might look like yet another minor annoyance, merely the latest in a series of papercuts that we have to deal with when we work with computers — but it's also a particularly egregious example of why people hate computers so much.

Three Reasons Why This Is a UX Disaster

A computer should never ask the user a question to which it can work out the answer. It should have sane defaults, that work for most users most of the time. Finally, it should implement the user's inputs faithfully.

This wizard falls down on all three fronts:
1) It's a CSV file, you should know it's going to be comma-separated; why are you asking me?
2) Given that it's a CSV, the default should be to import the contents as comma-separated values, not tab-separated. Maybe have an Options button somewhere for weird edge cases, but the default flow if the user hits OK on every screen should make sense for the most usual case of a CSV file containing comma-separated data.
3) Gaslighting the user like this on every screen is just not acceptable. I feel like I'm trying to figure out how to avoid signing up to a junk mailing list, not using an ostensibly professional-grade, market-validated piece of software.

If you're writing even a simple program, at some point you're going to have to figure out inputs and what to do with them. Please, I implore you: do better than Microsoft.

Here’s a fun little game: the perfect three car garage, but with a twist compared to the last time I played the "dream garage" game: one car has to be from the year of your birth, one from the year you first got your driver’s license, and one from the current day.

Here’s my line-up; what’s yours?

1980: Porsche 911 SC (Super Carrera)

I’d want to do a bit of work on this one: I’m not a fan of those hooded headlights, the stance is all wrong by today’s standards, and the bumpers would have to go as well. The main ingredients are all present and correct though, with a three-litre aluminium engine block, a five-speed gearbox, and those classic Fuchs wheels.

It turns out, there is not a huge amount of choice in 1980, falling in between the hangover from the 70s oil crisis and the coming over-the-top 80s, but you can never go wrong with a 911.

1998: Lamborghini Diablo SV

There’s a bit more choice in 1998, and in fact a couple of perfectly acceptable alternatives would be the Ferrari F355 or the Lotus Elise S1 — but with the 911 to play the role of the serious car, a Diablo is the biggest and baddest toy out there. It’s having a bit of a moment too, with a Diablo being wrecked during filming for Top Gear.

1998 is actually another gap year, as I just miss the Bugatti EB110, my all-time favourite supercar, while the likes of the Ferrari 360 are yet to come, but I wouldn’t feel too left out with a Diablo. I mean, take a look:

Current day: Audi RS6

Yes, same as last time, what of it? All of the power, all of the practicality, no compromise whatsoever — as long as you can afford the quite substantial cost, that is.

Here’s another video, with another Top Gear connection:

Yes, I think I could live with those three…

Next step: Competition!

An extension to this game is to find competition cars from those same three years.

1980: Fiat Abarth 131

Gotta have that Alitalia livery! Or alternatively, I’d be tempted to build one out kaido-racer style. The silhouette is not too dissimilar from an 80s Nissan Skyline… Imagine a 131, dropped on tiny gumball wheels, with even more over-the-top aero, one of the headlights replaced with a hole to let radiator hoses through, and so on. Japanese-Italian fusion done right, to avenge the insult of the Alfa Romeo Arna!

1998: Mercedes-Benz CLK GTR

Okay, this is a Straßenversion, because by 1998 race-car decals were getting pretty ugly, but still, look at it.

Current day: ???

To be honest I’ve fallen off the bandwagon of following motorsports, so I don’t have an entry here. If forced I would probably go with whatever James Glickenhaus is building, but it’s all getting a bit too silly for me to get much emotional involvement.

My current gig involves making comparisons between different products. It’s mostly interesting, and helps me understand better what the use cases are for all of these products — not just how they are built, but why. That double layer of analysis is what takes most of the work, because those two aspects — the how and the why — are never, ever documented in the same place. I spend a lot of time trawling through product docs and cross-comparing them to blogs, press reports, and most annoying of all, recorded videos.

Fundamentally, most reviews or evaluations tend to focus either on how well a product delivers its promised capabilities, or on how well it serves its users’ purposes. Those are not at all the same thing! A mismatch here is how you get products that are known to be powerful, but not user-friendly.

One frequent dichotomy is between designing to serve power users versus novices. It is very very hard to serve both groups well! The handholding and signposting that people require when they are new to a product, and perhaps even to the entire domain, is liable to be perceived as clutter that gets in the way of what more experienced users already know how to achieve. The ultimate example is between graphical and command-line interfaces: the sorts of pithy incantations that can be condensed into a dozen keystrokes at a shell prompt might take whole minutes of clicking, dragging, and selecting from menus in the GUI. On the other hand, if you don’t know those commands already, the windows, menus, and breadcrumbs, perhaps combined with judicious use of contextual help, give a much more discoverable route to the functionality.

Ideally, what you want to do is serve both user populations equally well: surprise and delight new users at first contact, but keep on making them happy and productive once they’re on board.

Two Tribes Go To War: Dev and Ops

There are two forces that are always tugging IT in different directions: stability, maintainability, and solid foundations (historically, this has been called Ops), versus ease of building and agility (this one is Dev). Business needs both, which is why Gartner came up with the idea of "bimodal IT" to describe the difference between these two approaches.

For more on this topic, listen to Episode Ten of Roll For Enterprise, digging into how come "legacy" became a dirty word in IT.

The problem, and the reason for a lot of the pushback on the mere idea of bimodal IT, is that most measurement frameworks only evaluate against one of the two axes. This is how we get to the failure modes of bimodal: the cool kids playing with new tech, and boring, uncool legacy tech in a forgotten corner.

Technologies can be successful while concentrating only on stability or only on agility, depending on target market; think of how successful Windows was in the 95-98-ME era despite tragic levels of instability, or for a more positive example, look at something like QNX quietly running nuclear reactors. However, in most cases it’s best to deliver at least some modicum of both stability and agility.

It’s About Time

Another factor to bear in mind is the different timescales that are in play. The lifetime of services can be short, in which case it’s okay to iterate rapidly & obsolesce equally rapidly — or more pithily, "move fast and break things", without slowing down to update the docs. On the other hand, the lifecycle of users can be long, if you treat them right at first contact. This is why it’s so important to strike a balance between onboarding new users quickly and servicing existing ones. If you turn off new users to please existing power users, you’ll regret it quickly; by definition, there are more potential users out there than existing ones. The precise balance point to aim for depends on what percentage of the total addressable user base already adopted your service, but there will always be new or more casual users who can benefit from helpful features, as long as they don’t get in the way of people who already know what they’re doing.

There’s no easy way to resolve the tension between agility and stability, speed of development and ease of maintainability, or power-user features and helpful onboarding. All I can suggest is to try to keep both in mind, because I have seen entire products sunk by an excessive focus on one or the other. If you do decide to focus your efforts on one side of the balance, that may still be fine — just as long as you’re conscious of what you’re giving up.

🖼️ Photos by MILKOVÍ and Aron Visuals on Unsplash

I don’t usually do breaking news here, but this story pushes a whole lot of my buttons. Today, VMWare announced their intent to acquire SaltStack.

I have been following the automation market closely, at least since my time at BladeLogic. With BladeLogic acquired by BMC, and arch-rival Opsware by HP, much of the action moved to the open-source realm, with Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and SaltStack. Of those four, only Puppet remains as an independent player¹; Ansible was bought by Red Hat back in 2015, and of course Red Hat were themselves snapped up by IBM a few years later.

There was a gap after that, but just this month Chef was bought by Progress (who?), and now there is this Ansible news.

While merging automation functionality in the shape of Ansible into Red Hat made a lot of sense, the reaction to the Chef acquisition was more one of bemusement. We discussed the acquisition on a recent episode of the Roll for Enterprise podcast, and the only strategic rationale any of us could see for the acquisition was a possible integration with Whats Up Gold, as part of some sort of integrated detection and remediation play. I haven’t seen any further news from that direction, but it’s only been three weeks, so based on my own experience during acquisitions, I wouldn’t necessarily expect anything for a while yet.

The Action Moves Up The Stack

That theory about the role of automation in the modern infrastructure stack explains both why automation specialists no longer have the sorts of growth prospects (and valuations) that they did fifteen years ago at the time of the BladeLogic and Opsware acquisitions, and why they are being bought up now.

As the interface to software stacks moves further and further away from the bare metal, adding more and more layers of abstraction, the role of automation becomes that of plumbing: it’s important, perhaps crucial, but it’s invisible unless it breaks or fails. Arguably, this is a positive development, signifying the maturity of the automation market. Technology that is visible is cutting-edge and unreliable. There is a reason it’s called the bleeding edge; given the choice, I’d rather it be someone else’s blood getting spilled, while I hold back and learn from their mistakes.

Once that exciting technology settles down and becomes better understood, it disappears from our attention. We don’t think about what happens when we flip a switch, because we simply expect the light to come on. Intellectually we understand that there are all sorts of systems in place to make that light come on, that specialists work hard around the clock to look after those systems, and that there is a whole world of complexity around the generation and transmission of electricity, but ultimately all we care about is that it ultimately enables us to reach out and say "let there be light".

Automation is getting to that point: it’s a must-have, and because it’s a must-have, it’s no longer tenable for everyone to have to roll their own. In the dawn of personal computing, it was reasonable to expect every computer owner to bring their own soldering iron. That was obviously not a setup that could drive mass adoption, and these days, our computers are sealed shut, with no moving parts, let alone user-serviceable ones.

In the same way, back in the dog days of the last millennium, it was reasonable and even expected of me, as a junior sysadmin in training, to bang out a script that would let an Apache web server running on HP-UX authenticate users from a Windows NT domain — because there was no off-the-shelf way to do it. When I had to do add single sign-on to a project of mine last year, the SSO part took me one line of config, and I was done with that task and could move on to something more interesting and value-additive.

Automation is no longer something the CIO will care about. It’s expected and built-in, and the action has moved elsewhere. This is a victory: it’s not every software category that lasts long enough to become legacy!

🖼️ Photo by Yung Chang on Unsplash

A recurring topic when it comes to curbing the power of Facebook to influence the real world is somehow to curtail its huge advertising revenue. Campaigns such as Sleeping Giants have made it their business to call out advertisers whose brands had been associated with unsavoury themes, causing revenue to alt-right websites to drop as much as 90% (despite some shenanigans to attempt to reverse the drain).

In the wake of all this, large corporations such as Disney have made a big deal of "boycotting" Facebook:

Walt Disney has dramatically slashed its advertising spending on Facebook according to people familiar with the situation, the latest setback for the tech giant as it faces a boycott from companies upset with its handling of hate speech and divisive content.

The reasons for the supposed boycott are never stated clearly, but centre on supposed enablement of the alt-right by Facebook. I suspect that the actual recruitment is happening elsewhere, e.g. through YouTube’s recommendation algorithm, but that is a whole other issue.

Facebook seems unswayed:

Facebook executives, including Carolyn Everson, vice president of its Global Business Group, previously told advertisers that the company wouldn’t change its policies based on revenue pressure.

This actually looks like the correct response, given that otherwise pressure could presumably also be brought in the other direction. Imagine weapons manufacturers demanding that calls for gun control be censored or otherwise limited, and threatening to cancel advertising.

Facebook may also have correctly identified the real reason for the "boycott". Disney’s results for the past year show that overall revenue fell 42% to $11.78 billion, driven primarily by an operating loss of $1.96 billion in the parks and consumer products business, and a 16% fall in their studio business. The coronavirus pandemic causing cinemas and amusement parks to close is hardly Disney’s fault¹, but it’s not surprising that they might look to cut some advertising expenditures, while also making themselves look good in the process.

It’s not cost cutting (bad, reactive), it’s joining a boycott (good, proactive).

It’s also worth looking at who is cutting what. Disney is still advertising on FB, but it’s direct-action ads to drive people to sign up to Disney+, their streaming service which is one of the few bright spots on their results with 60.5 million paying customers. That’s what FB is good for. It’s terrible at brand advertising, where you’re trying to build buzz around a new film that everyone has to see, rather than customising the benefits of Disney+ to each specific audience.

If you want everyone to pack the cinemas to see the new Star Wars film, you don’t need to advertise to everyone individually; you just get a billboard in Times Square. On the other hand, you can sell Disney+ many different ways:

• Parents of young children: it’s a Pixar delivery mechanism!
• Teenage boys (and men who never grew up, don’t @ me): it’s all Marvel superheroes and Star Wars all the time!
• Older adults: National Geographic documentaries!
• Musical fans: we have Hamilton now!

And so on: micro-segmentation is what adtech in general is good for.

This is why it’s worth looking beyond the headlines, at a boycott that is both more and less than it appears. Facebook will weather this boycott, and so will Disney.

In a timely update, today brings the story of a Dutch broadcaster that killed cookies and saw advertising revenue go way up. It turns out, advertisers don’t need to know much about users, beyond what they are reading or watching, in order to make sensible decisions about whether and how to advertise to them or not.

Instead of targeting a certain type of customer, advertisers target customers reading a certain type of article or watching a certain type of show.

The article calls this approach "contextual advertising", and according to the results of NPO’s testing, they convert at least as well as, if not better than, micro-targeted ones.

In January and February of this year, NPO says, its digital ad revenue was up 62 percent and 79 percent, respectively, compared to last year. Even after the coronavirus pandemic jolted the global economy and caused brands to drastically scale back advertising—and forcing many publications to implement pay cuts and layoffs—NPO's revenue is still double-digit percentage points higher than last year.

Everyone’s happy! Well, except for adtech vendors:

The main explanation is simple: because the network is no longer relying on microtargeted programmatic ad tech, it now keeps what advertisers spend rather than giving a huge cut to a bunch of intermediaries.²

And good riddance to them. Their only value proposition (such as it is) is that they will identify the high-value users browsing, say, NPO’s web site, and enable customers to advertise to them elsewhere on the web where the cost of displaying the ad is lower. What’s in it for NPO and other high-value outlets? Nothing; their value is actively being hollowed out. The advertisers aren’t that much better off, because now their ad and their brand is getting displayed in cheap locations beside low-value content, instead of on a reliable solid broadcaster’s web site. Everybody loses, except the adtech creepiness pushers themselves.

The sooner we move away from micro-targeting, the better.

🖼️ Photos by Annie Spratt and Travis Gergen on Unsplash