I stand before you here today, addressing all my fellow members of this great Association, with profound gratitude and great humility, I accept this nomination for a place on the Association of Shareware Board of Directors.

Many of you watching may not know this junior entrepreneur from England, and I'd like to spend a few moments to introduce myself.

My journey is an improbable one. Being born in England, of American parents, I learnt programming at an early age on a ZX81. I was schooled in art, and came to New York to participate in the great experiment that only America could forge, the dot com boom, and then inevitable bust. Born out of this I formed Iconico.com and set about to produce my own shareware tools and sell them over the web.

Now our economy faces a similar collapse, and during such times it's every member's responsibility to change, to think anew about the role shareware plays, and I believe that my skills learnt through hard times and hard work will help the Association through these dark times.

A year ago I took over the running of BitsDuJour.com and worked as a community organizer with developers, ISVs, and ecommerce providers alike, helping them to promote, market, and sell their products. We rebuilt the infrastructure, eliminated waste, and forged new partnerships whilst never pandering to the special interests, all in the cause of giving developers a global audience for their products.

As we stand at this crossroads in history the ASP has a choice. To continue the same failed policies of the past which have resulted year on year in falling memberships, or to embrace change. We must look hard at the $100 membership fee and find new ways to market the Association in order for fledgling developers to come on board in these tough economic times.

We must look hard at the ASP website, and our marketing efforts. Our organization is one that still produces a printed paper newsletter, when great financial savings and even greater exposure could come from blogs, rss feeds and wikis. We must embrace this change for the future, not in the quality of what we are doing, but in how we get our message out there.

I believe that despite our best efforts the ASP has lost respect amongst the professional software community. As a member of the board of directors I will be prepared to sit down with leaders of the OISV, and Joel on Software, at a time and place of my choosing. Isolationism in the recent years have only lost us members, and by negotiating without preconditions, and starting face to face talks with our competitors I believe that we can forge new alliances and regain respect for our organization on the world stage.

As small business owners and developers we all share a hope for the future. I've seen that hope in the developers who work long nights and weekends, with the dream that one day they can give up their day jobs and devote themselves to their business full time. I've seen hope in the eyes of people in conferences from Denver to Boston, and this great Association that we have built together serves that hope, that dream for a better future.'

Fellow members, we cannot turn back. We cannot walk alone.

At this moment, in this election, we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise, that independent Shareware promise, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.

Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the Association of Shareware Professionals.

The User Interface

The Techie Stuff

A Little History Lesson

tag that Netscape hung onto? IE3 really pushed the envelope; you could write AJAX for IE3 years before the term was even invented. Yes Microsoft made up some of their own standards, but compared to what was out there it needed doing and we all benefitted from it.



I’m glad the old Netscape died. By the time the core had been totally rewritten, and it really needed to be, IE owned the browser wars and IE5 and IE6 were fine updates. Then Microsoft dropped the ball, and frustration set in that years went past without the same innovations that had happened before.

Firefox filled a vacuum, and answered a new generation of web developer’s frustration at the stagnated IE project. Firefox’s Gecko engine is arguably the best out there, but with IE7 the gap’s been narrowed so that only the nerdiest would really argue the toss. IE8 promises to finally lay that argument to rest. I’m glad we finally got there, but the page rendering engines seem to be becoming much less of an issue, so if we’re past all that then what’s left?

For me the best thing about Firefox is really it’s Plug-ins. I’ve coded Plug-ins for IE and Firefox and IE does loose out. It’s unfortunate but IE falls down precisely because of its age. If Microsoft were to code it all from scratch today we wouldn’t have the multitude of different COM interfaces that have been added in with each release of the product. Microsoft has to keep them in there, there are too many applications on the market that they don’t want to break, and they were extremely careful not to alienate anyone with the IE7 release, which was a very delicate balancing act.

So before last week I’d say that we have two great browsers heading the pack. IE7 with a finally fixed rendering engine, tabbed browsing and installed pretty much everywhere, it’s the people’s choice. Firefox with some excellent expert features, customizations and open source credentials, a power user’s dream.

Both browsers have a clear path forward and are being actively worked on. People are not crying out for a new browser, so why Google Chrome?

Aren’t you forgetting something?

Ok there are more than two browsers, so I’d be remiss not to at least mention a few more.

Opera has been around for years, and has a small but devoted following of users. Much in the same way as I never understood my older brother’s weird friends and their odd tastes in music, I never understood Opera users. It’s a fine browser, and it has allegedly the fastest page renderer out there, but I always find it a little quirky. Occasionally I use it and I don’t dislike it, it works fine, but why switch?

Safari is Apple’s browser of choice and like many things Mac related I find its overt simplicity belies a frustration which comes from actually trying to get things done. If you’ve ever tried to code HTML for Safari it’s a pain, even with the secret ‘debug’ menu revealed. With Firefox running on the Mac there seems little point to it and the recent Safari port to the PC was aimed at iPhone development and not a serious attempt to compete. It undoubtedly has its fans, but Macs always have done.

So, who would use Chrome?

Well looking through Chrome it does have one or two nice little features. It comes with Google Gears installed. Gears is great, a nice solution to running offline JavaScript and Aaron Boodman has convinced me that it’s definitely what we should have in a browser, hey who wouldn’t want a client side lightweight SQL database, neato, but it already comes as a plug-in for IE and Firefox and it hasn’t really taken off. Macromedia didn’t launch a new browser to distribute their Flash plug-in, and it’s now almost ubiquitous, so Gears alone is not a reason for Chrome.

Chrome introduces the idea of an ‘Application Shortcut’. I initially got quite excited about this idea, but all it does is open a website in a window without the navigation and tabs at the top. Microsoft did more with their .hta HTML Applications and they simply never caught on. I’m again left wondering why.

When you install Chrome you’ll notice an unchecked checkbox entitled ‘Help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google.’ Could this be one of the reasons that Google made the browser?

Back in the times of IE6 a lot of people had the Google toolbar installed. It had a great popup blocker and that too had a ‘usage statistics’ checkbox. Then when Firefox launched it came with the default search set to Google. Google paid millions in advertizing Firefox, including full page ads in the New York Times. It’s pretty obvious why; they were going to make that revenue back by ensuring that every search went through Google, and it did.



IE7 has now followed suit with a search box and the Google toolbar is a lot less useful than it was in the past. IE and Firefox now both have all the old Google toolbar functionality built in. Google has the search results but not, it would seem, the usage data.

I’m not suggesting that Google’s motives are less than pure, but I do think it’s a factor here. Again I keep asking myself who would want to use Chrome, and I actually think that it’s aimed squarely at the general public and not power users who will stick with whatever they already have, namely Firefox.

The problem is that the general public don’t go downloading new browsers. Firefox had this problem and is forever playing second fiddle as most people plain just don’t care as long as they can browse the web with IE.

So who can Chrome take market share from? Firefox users are either too techie to be interested, or too left leaning political to want to use a non open source browser. Internet Explorer users are either those that don’t care, or the very small minority like myself who use IE because they know it inside out and understand how it ‘thinks’ and don’t want to change.

It seems that the real reasons behind this new browser from Google will be revealed to us over the next few months. I’m going to watch this space carefully because right now all the reasons for Chrome don’t quite add up. I’m betting there’s some other plan by Google that we’re not aware of yet that will reveal why Google has spent so much on a great web browser that nobody really wants.

ICONICODE