I don’t think I’ve seen a better long introduction to a company and a product. The talk is about 45 minutes, and Justin maintains his mellow. He is articulate, cheerful, and on point throughout.

“It turns out that Mobile Safari doesn’t support as many embeddable font formats as the desktop version, so Google sends an SVG font version to iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches, or anything pretending to be them. And it looks like Google’s SVG fonts contain only ASCII characters, while the other formats have full character sets.”
Derek Miller, “A weird Safari-Google bug”, June 21, 2010

I haven’t encountered anything like this, but I found it to be an interesting interplay of emerging technologies.

It reminds me of the headaches of different database encoding and WordPress.

Obviously, I think this is a good move. To recap switching to Yahoo for search would have alienated users because it’s a worse search engine, but more important would have overwritten people’s existing experience on upgrade.

In an email to the ubuntu-devel mailing list titled “Follow up to Default Search Provider Changes for 10.04” Rick Spencer writes:

Each release we determine the best default web browser and the best default search engine for Ubuntu. When choosing the best default search provider, we consider factors such as user experience, user preferences, and costs and benefits for Ubuntu and the browsers and other projects that make up Ubuntu. Up until Ubuntu 9.10 these defaults have always been Firefox and Google. Earlier in the 10.04 cycle I announced that we would be changing the default search provider to Yahoo!, and we implemented that change for several milestones.

However, for the final release, we will use Google as the default provider. I have asked the Ubuntu Desktop team to change the default back to Google as soon as reasonably possible, but certainly by final freeze on April 15th.

It was not our intention to “flap” between providers, but the underlying circumstances can change unpredictably. In this case, choosing Google will be familiar to everybody upgrading from 9.10 to 10.04 and the change will only be visible to those who have been part of the development cycle for 10.04.

All thanks the Ubuntu Masters!

Don’t Downgrade the Experience

He quotes Rick Spencer, Canonical:

No, this will effect [sic] upgrades if the computer is currently set to Google. This is not because of anything special for this particular change. This is because Ubuntu always changes to new defaults for users who are on old defaults.

Once I’ve installed software, it’s no longer “defaults”, it’s my experience. Any change to the experience better be to improve the experience, otherwise you jeopardize alienating me and your other customers.

It Can’t be About Money

The search engine in Firefox is Google because it’s the best (of the infants).

In my co-worker Noël Jackon’s post today “Art First”

I respect Jay-Z for his music, but love the man for his words.

via YouTube - “NY-Z” – An ABSOLUT Collaboration with Jay-Z.

At the Jay-Z saysat the 11:30 mark “it can’t be about money. There has to be something in there that is true to both sides. … when the align … At the end of the day no one loses when it’s like that.”

Stay true to yourself, and true to your customers.

I’m Staying Hopeful

Ubuntu has hugely help make Linux and open source flavors many more people can enjoy.

I’m staying hopeful that Ubuntu will stay focus on their customers’ experience!

In the meantime, I’m also staying pragmatic and swallowing bitter proprietary medicine everyday.

Having Fun

My co-worker Alex “Viper” today shared this parody of Jay-Z “Empire State of Mind” titled “Galactic Empire State of Mind” by College Humor:

Customers’ care about one thing, a good experience.

April 8th Update: Yahoo will not be the default search engine in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx. Related article “Ubuntu Linux Still Searching Google“

‘… Most of the successful versions of HTML have been “retro-specs,” catching up to the world while simultaneously trying to nudge it in the right direction. …

…

That’s not to say that all shipping code wins; after all, … Code is necessary but not sufficient for success. …

…

The ones that win are the ones that ship.’

Mark Pilgrim, “Why do we have an IMG element?“, Nov 2nd, 2009

The article includes fascinating excerpts from some of the leaders in this almost-17-year-old work in progress, HTML.

This could go on for days:

SEO Guy: I do x, y, and z, how is that bad?
Derek Powazek: X, y, and z isn’t SEO, it’s making good websites.

SEO Guys, please change your titles to Good Website Makers. I don’t care why, just do it. Derek Powazek insists.

Posted by Jason Kirk on 12 October 2009 @ 3pm

SEO Blocks by Vishraval. Wikipedia Hosted. PD Licensed.

Derek’s intense, absolute position and lack of a shared language with SEO Experts leads to little opportunity for real discussion between the parties, but at the heart of Derek’s article is a sentiment shared by many web developers: we are extremely frustration that there continues to be a market for search engine manipulation.

This reminds me of Cory Doctorow’s “All Complex Ecosystems Have Parasites“, published 16 March 2005. It makes me think that I’ll happily pay the price of having to put up with SEO Experts, if the alternative is a less flexible and diverse Web.