In our last issue of the weekly newsletter, I complained about the latest update to Office 2001 for the Mac, particularly the Outlook email client. Although meant to provide a business-oriented replacement to Entourage, Microsoft’s previous email app, Outlook started life in a very shaky condition. Several updates, culminating with the recent Service Pack 2 release, have fixed some stability and setup quirks, but performance problems remain.

Others have encountered even worse problems. One of our readers talked of losing local email folders after the upgrade. A client called me this past weekend wondering why he was suddenly being asked to reenter his Office product key, even though he’d been using the suite for months. So he was sent scurrying for that information among his software documentation. What a waste!

Worse, however, is the fact that you can’t just reinstall an Office for Mac update. If something goes wrong, the updater won’t redo the update. Instead, you have to reinstall Office from scratch, and run each update in succession to stay current. It doesn’t seem there is a “combo” installer to be found, because Microsoft doesn’t understand the concept of simple.

But that’s Microsoft for you. Took a look at their efforts to make a go of Windows Phone, and the Metro tiled-based interface that will also grace Windows 8 later this year. There’s already a big advertising campaign designed to entice you to buy the latest and greatest Windows Phone smartphone, the Nokia Lumia 900, which available from AT&T. A lot of money has been bet on that one, because if Nokia’s latest and greatest goes down in flames, it will signal huge problems from Microsoft’s attempts to get a decent share of the mobile marketplace.

Right now, it’s not certain how the Lumia 900 will fare. It went on sale over the Easter weekend, which meant that many retailers were closed that Sunday, thus inhibiting potential sales. Somebody wasn’t thinking of the consequences. Worse, a software bug of some sort impacted online connections, forcing AT&T to agree to give early adopters a $100 rebate. Since the product sold for $100 with the usual two-year service contract, that meant that AT&T was actually giving them away. I suppose if you wanted something real cheap, and were willing to put up with a smartphone with an OS that has so far failed to gain traction in the marketplace, you’d have a winner. Time will tell just how the Lumia 900 will fare, although AT&T’s pathetic advertising campaign isn’t going to lure customers to snake around their stores to get one.

If anything, if there’s no immediate indication of success for the Lumia 900, and it doesn’t seem as if that’s happened so far, will there be a Lumia 1000 to replace it in a few months? How many times will Nokia and Microsoft continue to tout new Windows Phone handsets before they admit failure? Probably not in the foreseeable future. But I suppose there’s always Windows 8, although the skepticism about the potential of that OS upgrade is fierce.

But Microsoft isn’t the only tech company doing foolish things. I ran into a curious issue with Samsung a couple of weeks back, all with the goal of helping a long-time client replace a defective printer, an HP LaserJet 5MP black and white laser dating back to the 1990s. In order to be compatible with some very old software, the client was still using a Power Mac G4 running Mac OS 9.2. He also had an iMac running 10.5, so he hoped for a laser printer that would work with both systems.

A quick search produced a link to the Samsung ML-3312ND laser printer, a promising black and white machine touting 33 pages per minute, a resolution of 1200 dpi, duplex printing, with the first page appearing in a mere 6.5 pages. Output ports are USB and Ethernet. The “OS Compatibility” spec at Samsung’s site specified “OS (8.6-9.2, 10.1-10.4),” which their support people assured me meant the Mac OS. Teach me to trust support people.

With a street price of roughly $150, how could he miss? Well, the Samsung arrived a few days later. Setup was quick enough. The software CD worked fine on his iMac, and the printer acquitted itself well with fast response in outputting simple text pages. But when I tried to set up the ML-3312ND on the G4, I ran into an immediate roadblock. The ancient Mac OS Chooser didn’t see it on an AppleTalk or Ethernet network. The software didn’t include Classic drivers, so I searched on Samsung’s site, only to find that the driver download was limited to “MAC OS 10.3-10.6,” basically the same installation package that came on the CD.

Over the next few days, I telephoned Samsung support and interacted with their live chat service in search of a solution. In both cases, I ran into roadblocks from support people who were simply clueless. One maintained over and over again that the existing installer would run on both the Classic Mac OS and OS X, not understanding that these were different OS platforms with different printing architectures. Each time I told him he was wrong, he said to run it on the OS 9.2 Mac, which, of course, I had already tried to do without success. The installer is for OS X only.

Finally, I found a support person who finally admitted the obvious. The spec was wrong. The printer was incapable of running on Mac OS 9.2 with any drivers I could find (and I wasn’t going to waste time trying to force something that’s not compatible to function). Curiously, I found yet another spec sheet for the ML-3312ND, available in PDF format, which correctly lists Mac compatibility as 10.3-10.6. So someone probably made an error, but there will be no apologies from Samsung. At least the dealer agreed to accept a return if it didn’t work. On the other hand, if I needed a cheap laser printer — and I don’t — the Samsung appears to be a promising candidate, assuming you can accept the fact that the manufacturer will be unable to provide competent support.

As to the client, he will probably end up with a refurbished HP laser printer from the 1990s that, in the end, will cost roughly the same as the Samsung. It won’t be as fast, nor will the output quality be quite as good, but at least it’ll work.

Apple’s marketing people might have put themselves on a shaky footing when they downplayed the susceptibility of OS X to malware in those Mac versus PC ads. While pointing to over 120,000 viruses on the Windows platform, the ads used the phrase (to quote approximately), “but not on Macs.” But that statement was strategically weasel-worded. It didn’t necessarily mean there were no malware problems on a Mac, only that there were far fewer.

Over the years you heard about proofs of concept, meaning that antivirus software companies were able to build or recreate them in a laboratory, but it’s not as if such infections actually occurred in the wild. Even though antivirus apps were regularly updated to protect you from theoretical infections, the malware outbreaks rarely impacted Mac users in the real world. But that doesn’t mean Mac users were necessarily safe. Remember that there were occasional malware eruptions in the days of the “Classic” Mac OS. Sure, OS X’s Unix core might be more resilient to malware, in theory, some of the earliest computer viruses were created years ago on the Unix platform.

One reason for the relative lack of Mac viruses was the theory of “security through obscurity,” meaning that since the Mac user base wasn’t terribly high to begin with, the virus writers who were responsible for malware preferred to pay attention to the Windows platform, where it was always possible to find hundreds of millions of potential victims. At the same time, it’s not as if Microsoft didn’t do things to shore up the platform, although it happened rather late in the game. Security experts say that virus writers now have a harder time finding susceptible Windows PCs. The victims are usually consumers who have let their subscriptions to antivirus software expire. If the apps aren’t regularly updated, they won’t detect the latest malware threats.

But most Mac users don’t use antivirus software. That creates a significant potential market for virus writers to spread their misery. It hadn’t amounted to much until 2011, with the arrival of the MAC Defender Trojan Horse. That was a brilliant effort at social engineering, because many thousands of Mac users were lulled into believing that their computers, having received an online scan at one of the criminal Web sites, were infected by a computer virus. They were asked to pay for a faux malware protection app to rid themselves of the virus. MAC Defender acted like a typical Mac app too, asking you to enter your password to install the malicious software, and going through the standard setup process.

More recently, the infamous Flashback infection appeared. It was first presented as a Trojan Horse, masquerading as a Flash player, but the virus writers responsible for that outbreak moved the delivery mechanism into sites that, when accessed in your browser, would launch a Java applet and do their stuff, amounting to a what is referred to as a “drive-by” infection. Some 600,000 Macs were allegedly infected, which represents roughly one percent of the number of recent Macs in use around the world.

Upon infecting a Mac, Flashback was able to harvest personal information and Web logs, and I would assume that would include usernames and passwords. So if your Mac was invaded by Flashback, maybe it’s a good idea to change all the passwords you use for online transactions. Or perhaps look to one of those Mac apps that can manage your passwords with a single secured entry point, using a master password.

Now Mac antivirus companies have regularly updated their products to protect you against the newly-discovred infections. They often defended against Windows viruses too, the theory being that a Mac user may inadvertently infect a Windows user via email. As for Apple, they rarely said much publicly about malware. The possible need of antivirus software can be found in various support documents, of course. Beginning with Snow Leopard, Apple included software that provided a limited degree of malware protection, with detection strings updated behind the scenes, so long as you had an active Internet connection of course. But the updates were infrequent until MAC Defender came along.

After the onset of Flashback, Apple released three Java security updates, first to detect Flashback’s presence, and, with the final Java release, automatic removal. The third Java update also turns off the ability to run Java applets, which can be enabled again in the Java Preferences app in the Utilities folder. While Java is often needed for online meeting services and interactive chat rooms, most Mac users won’t have to worry about it. There’s also a separate removal tool for those who were infected by the Trojan Horse version of Flashback.

Now even though Flashback represents but one of a very few severe Mac OS X malware outbreaks (such things have been common on the Windows platform for years), that hasn’t stopped the fear mongering. One online commentator, writing about IT people who deploy Macs on their networks, insists that, “Being able to handle Mac security effectively requires a real depth of knowledge and understanding about Mac OS X.” No, it basically requires installing antivirus software on those Macs, making sure the autoupdate features are activated, the subscriptions are current, and that their Mac users are required to follow the same safe computing practices they use on Windows PCs.

To add to the potential misery, there is a report of yet another malware attack, a Trojan Horse called “SabPub” that exploits a Java vulnerability and can spread through Microsoft Word documents. The information I’ve read about this Trojan Horse doesn’t say anything about whether Apple’s recent Java fixes have closed that vulnerability. However, there’s nothing to indicate that the threat is serious — at least not yet.

Until recently, the Night Owl suggested that installing antivirus software wasn’t essential. The recent evidence has forced me, reluctantly, to change that point of view. You can find free or low-cost antivirus software in the Mac App Store, or go directly to the sites run by the major antivirus companies to find something suitable. Unlike the Mac OS of old, today’s security apps shouldn’t impair the performance of your Mac, even if you install software that does background scanning.

While it’s encouraging that Apple has started to step up to the plate to protect Mac users from malware, I do not think they plan to replace third-party antivirus software, but merely provide basic protection. Surprisingly, that’s what Microsoft has already done under Windows.

I’ve had a rough time with Outlook for the Mac 2011, which is Microsoft’s attempt to build a business-grade email and contact management app. It was meant to be a leg up from Entourage, with more comprehensive support for Exchange servers, but actually getting it to work has been a job and a half.

With the release of the Office for Mac 2011 Service Pack 2, I had hopes that the worst offenses of Outlook would be eradicated, that perhaps Microsoft would begin to focus on making the app actually usable. For me, it hasn’t been, and I can only begin to summarize the problems.

At first blush, it seemed a fairly promising app, though the implementation of Microsoft’s infamous ribbon, a new take on the traditional contextual toolbar, is poor. Buttons appear to have been thrown together without a true sense of design, though the key functionality is there. That assumes, of course, that the functions actually work, and therein lies a tale.

Continue Reading…

You might consider me a recovered computer book author. I wrote loads of them from 1994 through the early part of this century, before I grew weary of churning out four or five titles a year for a pittance. I decided there had to be a better way to make a living, although I grant you that some authors are still busy writing “Dummies,” “Missing Manuals” and other series books covering all sorts of tech subjects, and sometimes subjects that have nothing to do with technology. There are, in fact, Dummies books on religion, rugby, marriage, divorce, and lots of other subjects. But I didn’t see a “UFOs for Dummies” anywhere, so maybe I should pitch that concept.

But I never got into the e-book game, although the sci-fi novels my son and I wrote will shortly appear in that form.

On the other hand, I was intrigued by the news that the U.S. Department is going after Apple and five major book publishers for alleged collusion to set prices on e-books. Sure, a quick read leads you to believe that this is the classic conspiracy of larger companies to increase prices on the things you buy.

This whole nasty affair appears to be the outgrowth of the response by these publishers — and Apple — to Amazon’s dominance of the e-book marketplace. It wasn’t so long ago that Amazon owned the e-book market. They pulled a common stunt retailers know full well, which is the loss leader. It involves selling products at or near their wholesale cost to entice you to come to the store (or the online storefront), in the hope that you’ll buy other merchandise at the regular price.

That’s what Amazon is doing already with the Kindle e-book readers and the Fire tablet. These devices are designed to serve as portable ordering gadgets designed to conveniently display Amazon’s e-books and other merchandise.

Now with Amazon selling e-books for wholesale prices or lower, they were crowding out other merchants big time, with an over 90% share of the market. Well, the publishers decided to employ something called the “agency model,” which sets a floor for prices to be charged by retailers, so that you end up paying pretty much the same for e-books regardless of where you buy them. Now if one publisher does that, fine and dandy. If more two or more publishers come together to make such an agreement, it becomes a conspiracy, and collusion to fix prices. That appears to be the essence of the DOJ’s civil lawsuit.

So far, three of the major publishers have evidently agreed to a settlement that, in essence, will kill the agency model. Two publishers and Apple reportedly said no, which is why the lawsuit is moving forward. In a brief statement, Apple denies the charges. What’s more, the government’s chances for success may not be certain according to some published reports.

As you see, the agency model was supposedly designed to fight Amazon’s alleged “monopoly” behavior. It’s also not at all clear if all the publishers — and even Apple for that matter — actually communicated with one another to agree to use agency pricing. According to a blog post from Macmillan CEO John Sergent, that company did not make their decision in concert with any other company. He writes: “I am Macmillan’s CEO and I made the decision to move Macmillan to the agency model. After days of thought and worry, I made the decision on January 22nd, 2010 a little after 4:00 AM, on an exercise bike in my basement. It remains the loneliest decision I have ever made, and I see no reason to go back on it now.”

Now unless the DOJ can prove that Sergent’s counterparts at the other publishing companies met with him during that little exercise routine or elsewhere to jointly reach that pricing decision, this may be a difficult case to establish, at  least for some of those publishers. However, the DOJ’s allegations do mention dinner meetings involving some of them.

In a sense, this whole affair seems yet further proof of the law of unintended consequences. Book publishers try to get a leg up on a supposed monopoly retailer, and end up with egg on their face.

Understand that this agency model, for however long it lasts, doesn’t necessarily impact the small publisher, or even an individual who is self-publishing. You can still set the prices you want, and Apple, Amazon or another vendor will still take their cut if they sell your book.

I suppose the larger question is how Apple’s reputation might be impacted. Their prestige may already be somewhat tarnished because of the late reaction to the Flashback malware outbreak. In the end, though, it probably won’t matter. The so-called price fixing issues that are being litigated are probably of little interest to most people. If the prices you pay for the e-books you want go down, that’s great. But how the prices got there, and whether it involved legal action or just a corporate decision, will probably be of little interest. This is one case that won’t get near the publicity of that famous antitrust action against Microsoft some years back, nor the actions taken against Microsoft by the European Union.