Integrated support for Exchange beginning with last year’s iPhone 2.0 means Apple’s mobile platform simply doesn’t need an Outlook client. Now Snow Leopard can also get by without Entourage/Outlook, thanks to new and improved baked-in support for Exchange in Mail, Address Book and iCal.

Microsoft has responded with the announcement that it will now be delivering a real (but still scaled back) version of Outlook for the Mac again, after a decade of giving enterprise Mac users a third rate alternative in Entourage, but Microsoft’s efforts to win back Mac clients may come too late to prevent the significant erosion of one of the primary reasons companies have to pay for Office on the Mac.

With iWork and the built in Exchange client support in Snow Leopard, many users will have no need to even consider Microsoft’s Mac client offerings. It will be very difficult for Microsoft to convince Mac users that they need Office after those users discover suitable alternatives that cost significantly less.

Why the client is so important

With Snow Leopard and the iPhone each now providing their own client layer for accessing Exchange Server, Apple can now offer its users alternative access to other server products as well, from its own MobileMe and Snow Leopard Server offerings to web services from Google and Yahoo. This effectively turns Microsoft from a direct seller into a wholesaler that has to deal with Apple as a middleman retailer.

Ten years ago, Apple was in that position with its hardware sales. It tried hard to get Sears, CompUSA and other retailers to sell Macs for it, but those retailers also sold generic PCs. Because they made more money selling generic PCs, they had little incentive to aggressively market Macs. Apple’s retail stores eventually solved this issue by allowing the company to reach users directly.

In the software business, Microsoft has long known the importance of owning the client end. It worked hard to displace Netscape’s web browser in the late 90s, not because there was any money to be made in giving away browser clients, but because it knew that whoever controlled the client could set up proprietary demands for a specific web server. That’s what Netscape had worked to do as it gave away its web browser in hopes that it could make money selling Netscape web servers; Microsoft first took control of the client with Internet Explorer and then began tying its IE client to its own IIS on the server side with features that gave companies reasons to buy all of their server software from Microsoft.

As Apple takes over the client end of Exchange, it similarly gains market leverage. First and foremost, the move allows Apple to improve the Exchange experience of Mac users so that business users have no reason not to buy Macs. Secondly, it gives Apple a client audience to market its own server solutions, including MobileMe to individual users and Snow Leopard Server to organizations. In concert with providing Exchange Server support, Apple is also delivering integrated support for its own Exchange alternatives in both MobileMe and with Snow Leopard Server’s improved Dovecot email services, Address Book Server, iCal Server, the new Mobile Access secure gateway, and its included Push Notification Server.

Two Birds, One Stone

Apple’s support for Exchange and its promotion of its own Exchange alternatives are two sides of the same coin, in the sense that they use the same technologies. Apple built its support for Exchange using WebDAV, the open specification that Microsoft supports on Exchange Server as a way to deliver messages to mobile clients. Apple did not license Microsoft’s Windows-only “Exchange Active Sync” software; it merely licensed the rights to implement a compatible EAS conduit with Exchange. Apple owns the Snow Leopard software that talks to Exchange.

The client applications Apple has upgraded in Snow Leopard to connect to Exchange, including Mail, Address Book, and iCal, also use WebDAV to talk to Apple’s own Snow Leopard Server applications. Because Apple makes its money almost exclusively from selling hardware, it has opened up its own Snow Leopard Server applications, Address Book Server and iCal Server, as open source Darwin servers that can be compiled to run on Linux. That means Apple is essentially giving away both the client (to Mac users) and the servers (to the community) in order to encourage the use of open standards in messaging and collaboration. That giveaway is being done to help Apple sell Macs.

This effort to support everything from integrated client software owned by Apple makes Snow Leopard’s support for Exchange of use to everyone, even if they don’t use Exchange. The client work Apple has invested in making Macs Exchange-friendly also improves the features available via MobileMe, Snow Leopard Server, and even some other third party services such as those from Google and Yahoo.

Apple’s App Store software model

If this seems like a familiar strategy, it’s because Apple is doing something similar on the iPhone: creating a managed market for third party developers, as long as they support Apple’s business as well. Apple’s iPhone App Store goal is to support and assist small developers in producing high quality, good looking apps that are sold at low prices in high volume. This “managed market” strategy has worked much better than the “laissez faire” conventional third party Mac platform that developed on its own starting in the 80s, where developers set prices relatively high, piracy abounded, quality was unchecked, and the only force keeping software consistent and looking good was the taste of Mac software buyers.

Microsoft did a better job of supporting developers on its DOS and Windows platforms, but also required less of its developers, resulting in a mixed bag of third party PC software that is usually expensive, often buggy and hobbled with old legacy issues, and almost always inconsistent and inelegant. The Linux community, along with Google’s new Android mobile platform, offer even less in terms of minimum standards and quality control, resulting in software that is often free but usually unfinished and typically inaccessible to anyone outside of dedicated tinkerers and hobbyists. While examples of fine open source client software exists, there is no available market driving this kind of development financially.

The success of the iPhone App Store has benefited both developers and users by establishing a competitive market based on meritocracy. Snow Leopard’s support for Exchange, because it opens up equal access to alternative competition, similarly creates an iPhone-like market for desktop messaging services ranked by merit, not the vendor’s current market position. This will provide Snow Leopard users with not just the ability to talk to corporate Exchange Servers, but also the ability to access Apple’s own offerings and other third party services.

The next segment in this series looks at fifth feature of Snow Leopard that has often been misrepresented: its new malware protection and related security features.

• Snow Leopard Proves No Threat to Windows 7
• Snow Leopard Proves No Threat to Windows 7
• Snow Leopard touchscreen “evidence,” trademarked Apple chat bubbles
• Snow Leopard from Apple Incompatible with many HP Printers
• Alleged first Snow Leopard OS X 10.6.1 details revealed

Building on years of innovation, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (Hitachi
GST) today announced that is it shipping its fifth-generation, 7200 RPM mobile
hard disk drive. The Hitachi® Travelstar 7K500 is a 500GB, 2.5-inch, 3Gb/s SATA
drive designed for notebooks, gaming systems and professional external storage
solutions. Combining leadership performance, ruggedness and capacity, Travelstar
7K500 is ideal for multitasking, gaming and other graphic-intensive
applications. The new Travelstar 7K500 is the fastest hard drive in its class
and delivers up to 56 percent higher capacity and 16 percent better application
performance than its predecessor1. It also provides best-of-breed operating
shock and outstanding power management for sturdy, unplugged notebook
performance.

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“Portable PC shipment growth continues to be one of the most significant market
drivers underpinning 2.5-inch disk drive demand, and is a major reason why IDC
expects the 2.5-inch mobile HDD market will grow at a 16.8 percent 2008-2013
compound annual growth rate,” said John Rydning, research director for hard disk
drives at IDC. “Hitachi`s new 500GB mobile 2.5-inch HDD with a 7,200 rpm
spin-speed provides PC OEMs an opportunity to differentiate PCs with both
capacity and performance.”

Meeting Standards for Mobile Security

Due to their value and portability, notebooks and external storage devices are
highly susceptible to theft. If those devices fall in the wrong hands, sensitive
data stored on the drive could become compromised. To help combat this issue,
Hitachi GST has been providing hardware-based Bulk Data Encryption (BDE) as an
option on its Travelstar mobile hard drives for four generations. Travelstar
7K500 is one of the first mobile drives to be compliant with the Trusted
Computing Group`s (TCG) Opal storage security specification, a new open standard
designed to strengthen data protection and safeguard notebooks in the event of
system loss or theft.

When the Hitachi BDE option is enabled, the hard drive will encrypt all data
that comes from the system as it is written to the media. When read back, the
drive decrypts the data so that it can be understood by the system. Since the
hard drive is doing the encryption work, there is no impact on system
performance. A Hitachi hard drive with BDE is always automatically encrypting
data, so the system user never has to worry about whether or not the data is
being protected. For commercial or corporate IT managers with a large pool of
systems, BDE also speeds up and simplifies the drive re-deployment process. By
deleting the encryption key, the data is rendered unreadable, thereby
eliminating the need for time-consuming data-overwrite.

• New Hitachi High-Speed Drives Hit 450GB
• Hitachi Hard Disk Price List
• Western Digital Scorpio Blue 2.5 inch 1 Terabyte & 750GB Laptop Hard Disk Price
• Seagate’s fourth generation of Momentus notebook drives: 5400.4 250GB 2.5 HDD
• Seagate Barracuda XT Price – 2TB (Terabyte) World’s fastest Hard Disk

Everyone should know by now what a Solid State Disk can do for your laptop or desktop computer, there have been enough comparison videos showing the boot-up time of Windows with an SSD compared to a normal drive.

Tweak Town have taken a look at the industry and where it stands now, things are looking much better than they have ever looked when it comes to SSD’s.

In their final thoughts they said “Solid state drives are not going to hit one day, cause mass hysteria and have people waiting in lines outside of their local Apple Store like some products. Even at the 300 Dollar price point for a 64GB drive, enthusiasts and business users will be the first to take advantage of the new, lower prices.

Over the next few months, big box builders will start to offer solid state drives in more of their middle class notebooks, and if big memory manufacturers like Samsung are not able to meet demand, the prices will rise again. Thankfully, these manufacturers appear to be ready to meet demand or at least know they need to ramp up production quickly.

It is my belief that upgrading your platter based hard drive to an SSD will produce the most significant change to your computing experience for a modern computer. I am neither talking frames per second nor calculation from a benchmark, but your overall, real world ‘I use my computer everyday’ tasks. The difference is similar to running an eight-year-old 20GB, 512KB cache drive with Vista installed and then moving to a new SATA II drive.

Over the next 30 days, I will run my Lenovo T61 notebook with the Super Talent Master Drive MX and give a detailed report of my experiences dealing with the battery life, losing 40GB of storage space and the overall system feel. This isn’t a shelf notebook that is used on the weekend; my T61 goes with me everywhere and twelve hours on my lap a day is not uncommon”

Read the three page market review.

• SSD’s Get Cheaper: SuperTalent solid-state disks in 30GB, 60GB, and 120GB
• UMPC Choice: ASUS Eee PC vs. MSI Wind notebook
• Seagate’s fourth generation of Momentus notebook drives: 5400.4 250GB 2.5 HDD
• 3K Unveils Longitude 400 Notebook UMPC: Another Eee PC knockoff
• SSD (Solid State Disk) in laptops: prices still high, will you wait?

So just how good is the Super Talent Pico-C 8GB Flash Drive compared to the best of pre-gen leaders, this is just what Chris from Tweak Town aimed to find out in his six page review.

Chris put the Super Talent Pico-C head-to-head with other flash drives and found that the Pico-C is a thumb drive with great transfer speeds in a small package at a small price.

This is what he reported in the final thoughts “The Super Talent Pico-C is a great thumb drive that offers everything you could want in a portable storage device. With storage sizes up to 8 GB and a maximum cost of less than 30 U.S. Dollars, it is difficult to go wrong with this drive.

The size of the drive is its greatest strength. The term Pico describes the drive perfectly, coming in at about the size of your thumbnail. The included chain is perfect for attaching the drive to your keys or zipper on a jacket or backpack.

Transfer rates on the Pico-C show that it is faster than the previous generation thumb drives, even those that were considered the fastest around back in their day. In the coming weeks we will be taking several current thumb drives and testing them against each other in a massive roundup. At that time, we will see how well the Pico-C compares to other modern thumb drives”.

Read the six-page review.

• Super-Talent Pico USB: world’s smallest 8GB flash drive
• Transcend Pen Drives Prices
• HP 2133 Mini Note PC: Hands on with this UMPC
• HP Pen Drive Price – HP USB Flash Drive
• Update on Solid State Disk (SSD): Production up, prices down