From the perspective of any modern corporation, Steve Jobs was a misfit and never should have made it to the top of the world’s largest technology company.  Compared to his peers at AT&T, RIM, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Samsung, LG, Lucent, Nokia, and even Google, one of these things is not like the others.  These people, while they are for the most part talented managers and/or innovators, are not brave and unconventional visionaries questioning — and challenging — the status quo.  The template of a contemporary CEO simply does not apply to Jobs.. yet it is safe to say that he created more shareholder value during his split tenure at the helm of Apple than all of these combined.

Jobs doesn’t fit as CEO material because, as I wrote a few years ago, the design of corporations systemically weeds out and ultimately purges people like Steve Jobs, tending to favour evolution over revolution; hedgehogs over foxes.  Insodoing these institutions prefer making incremental steps toward that which can be known and quantified versus embracing risk and opportunity to make great leaps forward.  HP or Microsoft would never have brought us the iPod.  Certainly not the iPhone.  And the efforts of Apple’s competitors in the tablet space?  Hmph.

The lesson with the greatest gravitas from Steve Jobs’ famous 2005 Commencement Address is in my opinion the following:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

So what made Steve special is that, having ascended to the top of the technology industry ecosystem, he was seemingly a fluke.  Those dots — The iPod led to the iTunes Music Store and to a flattening of media distribution and to the iPhone and iPad and beyond — all connected back to a single leap where a computer company decided to sell some portable music devices and see what happened.  Jobs made big bets all the way along and knew that the dots would somehow connect down the road, and staked his personal and corporate reputation on quality in every regard.  No focus group or market research could have supported the decision to place these bets, and so no other CEO did.

Many of us think that we have the courage to make big bets.  Far fewer among us are given the resources and leeway to execute these broadly.  Still fewer among those are actually successful in both ideation and execution.  Steve Jobs danced on that razor’s edge and always came away unscathed, teaching us all that it can be done and that the rewards for success await.

Steve Jobs created new markets and made us crave things we didn’t know we would need; he helped us consume information and ideas in ways we never knew we could; he literally tore apart the media business and set forth reshaping it to be more consumer-friendly.  All the while he dazzled us with things which are ‘insanely great’ like a magician entertaining a crowd of transfixed six-year-olds.

The saddest aspect of Steve Jobs’ passing is simply that without him it will be a long time before a similar revolutionary will ascend the treacherous climes of corporataucracy to lead another hugely successful company to create things which dazzle and inspire us.  If ever.

Here’s hoping there’s another Steve in the wings somewhere.  Until then, we’ll likely have to make do with a whole lot less magic in our world.

So I suppose it is no surprise that the in-crowd is gleeful about the judgment.  It has all of the requisite keywords to invoke the sort of self-satirizing knee-jerk rejectionism that we have come to expect from the cornball neopop blogosphere types that take the time to type these missives (I can be fairly accused of being one of them, too).

But isn’t it time to progress beyond our cliched fear of Microsoft?  The DoJ hurricane blew past their ranch years ago; the company’s dominance in Operating Systems is now respectably challenged by Apple’s OSX and various flavours of Linux (and, if only in vapour, by Google Android); and their web browser is being resoundingly thumped by an influx of not dissimilar offerings from Firefox, Apple, Google, and even Opera.  The Zune is an also-ran MP3 player next to the iPod, and Windows Mobile has become a running joke in the telecom industry while the iPhone has become the dominant player in a little under two years.  The next penny to drop for Microsoft may well be Enterprise apps, with Office and Exchange as the cornerstone.  If someone figures out Shared Calendaring, my friends, that latter jig may be up but soon.

So it’s probably fairer now to conceptualize Microsoft as the aged, embattled warhorse that it is; as bloated and sweaty as its present CEO; both of them a heart seizure waiting to happen.  With billions in the bank it’s hard to feel too sorry for them, but would we be cheering so loudly if the party on the losing end of this patent dispute was any other company?

In recent months the company has been sued by patent holders and licensors over a litany of fairly benign and long-implemented technologies from instant messaging to Windows Update to  its Product Activation System.  Each of these is a clear improvement without which Windows, an already unusable operating system, would be significantly worse.  And so in a worst-case scenario Microsoft is now hampered from delivering you a higher-quality, more innovative product not due to lack of imagination on the part of its engineers, but due to a wellspring of imagination emanating from patent attorneys and their litigious clients.

i4i isn’t strictly a patent troll, but they’re not the original inventors of the technology either.  They are also clearly using this patenet defensively, to prevent Microsoft from encroaching on their market.  This is really an obstacle for anyone who wants to do complex document workflow automation (and lots do).

We actually need for Microsoft to win some of these disputes.  We will all benefit.  Each sets a dangerous precedent that will affect all comers upstream of these cases, and a patent troll armed with a lucrative victory on something so obvious and derivative of open-standards as the ability to edit custom XML is dangerous to the web as a whole and will create a substantial speedbump to innovation.

So maybe just for a while keep your malicious joy in check when reviewing this case.  Microsoft is presently doing the web a favour acting as a breakwater for all of us.  I’ll hold my judgment until we see how they put their own patents in this arena to use (or disuse).

I haven’t ever really thought of Facebook as a productivity tool (more the opposite) until lately.  I have tried using many feedreaders, including Google Reader, Firefox, YahOo, NewsGator, and more over the years.  More recently I have abandoned many of those in favour of a desktop client like Nambu or  Tweetie in respect of the fact that I think my friends (or at least those that I choose to follow on Twitter) are the best filter imaginable — and far better than any search engine algorithm could ever produce.  Therefore, Twitter has quickly usurped my consumption of RSS as mediated through most aggregation tools — simply because no search engine I’ve found is good enough at understanding me and filtering the crap.

However, as more and more of my friends are adding the Twitter tool to their Facebook accounts, and thereby syndicating their tweets to the Facebook status updates, I am turning to the desktop clients less and less and spending more time watching the event stream in Facebook.

I still post 100% of the time from within a twitter client on my Macbook Pro or my iPhone (fanboi) however the time I spend reading stuff that comes to me via those clients is decelerating pretty rapidly. In fact, my biggest gripe about Nambu for the iPhone is that it insists on loading up my event stream before I can post a new tweet (try that on EDGE).

Facebook’s event stream has one key advantage that Twitter doesn’t.  If I find someone on Twitter is annoying me with their posts, the relationship is fairly binary: I either follow them or I don’t.  However, with Facebook this is quite nuanced.  Specifically, I can Hide updates from people I’m friends with who post garbage.  This is an improvement over Twitter, but is again too binary (and is punitive to Facebook’s parity-centric follow model).

What I think both Facebook and Twitter users would benefit from are two nuanced approaches to promoting or demoting content in the event stream.  There are computational effects here that are not trivial, but this is the kind of stuff we were working on at Something Simpler.  I want a thumbs up / thumbs down on both users and content.  In the user context, a thumbs up promotes the user in the priority tree, thumbs down demotes.  In the context of the content item (a tweet or otherwise) I am training a bayesian filter that pulls keywords out of the content and promotes or demotes similar future items depending on which I selected.  The engine must then score the content based on who it came from and what the extracted keywords are.  It can also look at my OWN event stream to train the Bayesian filter and surmise that the things I post about are likely to be similar to the things that I want to read.  These embrace the peer relationship while increasing the quality of my event stream.

I think this is a rejection of the hypothesis that I held when we were originally offered the chance to find a place for the PubSub assets:  that machines could judge this on their own, without our help.  The reality is that’s expensive, inefficient, takes too long to train, and doesn’t return enough immediate near-term benefit to the user.  However the methods described above are very relevant, embrace the social nature of online networks, and displace the heavy lifting of filtering on to my friend networks, which Twitter et al already accomplish.

The first tool to implement these features gets my vote to be my primary feedreader.  Nothing’s more relevant to me than my friends.  Neither Facebook nor Twitter is doing enough to make their knowledge of who my friends are useful day-to-day.  That’s all they’ve got versus other tools today.

Many Western technology companies have heeded that call, but have found themselves cast into the rocks on Chinese shores — including companies like Microsoft, Google, Cisco, eBay, and YahoO!  The massive markets just never seem to have materialized in the Orient for these giants, or when success has loomed on the horizon the murky Chinese bureaucracy has stepped in to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  Partnerships have vapourized overnight, and (particularly in the case of Cisco) core Intellectual Property has been outright stolen, reverse-engineered, or redistributed.  Perilous waters, indeed.

So it was with this skepticism that my friend Gersham viewed the latest piece of propaganda emerging from our friends in China that we have now reached the new height of 338 million Chinese Internet users — a 13 percent increase since the end of 2008, and just about exactly one quarter of the country’s population.  All of this, of course, seems to have been tabulated and distributed by the slightly inaccurately-acronymed Chinese Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC) which, by its own admission “takes orders from the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) to conduct daily business.”  In fact, Google “Chinese Internet Traffic” and you’d be hard-pressed to find data that did NOT originate from the CNNIC.  Hmm.  Call me a cynic.

It is likely difficult for most (any) of us to corroborate or even conceptualize these high numbers, but it seems suspicious nonetheless — particularly from a country whose median income is around $3400 and whose Per-Capita GDP is ranked 104th, right behind Armenia.  In trying to substantiate this, once can point to Alexa’s site rankings which currently reveal that 3 Chinese-language web sites rank in the Top 20:  Search Engine Baidu (#9), IM chat and portal QQ (#14), and portal Sina.com.cn (#18).  Sounds good, right?  But look closely at the rankings.  Baidu, an undisputed leader in Search for China, reaches 5.73% of the internet populace, whereas Google.DE (#13) reaches roughly 3% of global internet users while servicing German, Swiss and Austrian users exclusively.  Combine the populations of these three countries and they don’t even add up to 100 million people.

Gersham pointed me toward the Firefox Download Stats, where as of this writing Germans have made 4,948,666 downloads of various firefox versions compared to only 672,972 for China.  Again, Germany has a population of 82Million vs. 1.3Billion in China.  As a control, Americans have downloaded Firefox 7,959,727 times as of this writing.  Do the Chinese really just prefer Internet Explorer?

In January 2009, Comscore measured the Chinese internet audience at closer to 180 Million users, still an impressive 18% of the Internet population.   This site quotes murky Nielsen Online data pegging Chinese Internet Users at roughly 300 Million.  Beyond these heresy reports, empirical measurements are difficult to come by.

So, let’s throw up our hands and try to reverse-engineer the data using published stats.  According to June 2009 data from Comscore, Google has captured 65% or so of US Search Traffic.  This made it the #1 web site in the world, with 157 Million US Visitors in June, according to Comscore.  In the Chinese Market, Baidu has captured 73% of Chinese search, with Google in the Number Two spot.  Yet Baidu.com barely moves the needle by comparison, according to compete.com, alexa.com, and others.. hitting roughly 600,000 unique visitors per month globally.   High-side estimates of the Internet’s penetration in the US peg it at 72.5% of the populace, or about 220 million.  This makes the data on Google’s penetration vs the addressable market reasonably accurate (71% if you do the math).  Following this logic, if Baidu in fact has 73% of China’s purported 338 Million users, it should be ranking as the #1 web site by far, with >246 Million unique visitors per month.  In fact if any of this data were true, then Chinese sites should occupy at least 4 of the Top Ten global web sites.

Whatever your opinion of Compete’s and Alexa’s relative methodologies, it’s impossible to reconcile anything even close to the numbers coming from the Chinese Government.  If that isn’t good enough for you, let’s turn to profits.  While serving what was allegedly the world’s largest internet audience, Baidu appears to be tracking to earn about $500 Million in revenue this year.  Google’s revenue appears to be tracking to about $23 Billion for 2009 with its pithy 157 Million unique visitors.  Any way you slice it, if China’s internet userbase is as large as Beijing says it is, and if Baidu’s market share of that audience is what it’s widely purported to be, then both the number of uniques reported by external traffic sites and the revenues reported by the public company that owns Baidu should be exponentially greater.

These stats seem to either indicate that Chinese do not use search very often, or that there just aren’t too many of them heading out into the wilds of the Internet.  Either way, statistics emanating exclusively from bureaucratic sources within Beijing, particularly those which seem to fly in the face of all other external metrics, are not to be believed.  The thesis of this post is not to suggest that China is NOT a massive opportunity for online properties and other technology purveyors, it is simply an attempt to point out that, like in a lot of cases in dealing with the Peoples’ Republic of China, things are not what they may seem.  Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

During this time the practise of Policy by Press Release rose to prominence as ill-founded concepts like the “Bomber Gap“, “Missile Gap“, and “Submarine Gap” were leveraged to justify a massive expansion in military spending.  U.S. Doctrine from the end of the Vietnam era to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was to essentially outspend the Soviets while engaging them in proxy guerilla wars in weak communist ally states and financing developing countries through the World Bank.  It is thought by many (mostly Pro-Reagan) historians that it was indeed the US Military-Industrial Complex that won the Cold War and bankrupted the Soviet Union by simply outspending them.

Nowadays, we live under the spectre of far more benign [perceived] enemies.  Most of us in the technology industry fear Microsoft’s Goliath and align with Google’s David more meaningfully than any political discourse, though we only rarely cower under our desks in fear of a Vodka-soaked phone call between Steve Ballmer and Eric Schmidt (which I am positive has happened).

Google only stumbled its way into Microsoft’s crosshairs nine years ago, whereas Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates has long sought to get in on the action on the Internet and the Web in particular.  The two are presently in a pitched battle on a number of fronts, including Search (Microsoft recently launched Bing), Mobile (Google’s Android is a pattern-cut copy of MSFT’s Windows Mobile strategy), The Browser (Chrome versus the dreaded IE), Email (Google is making inroads into institutional and corporate email services), and Productivity Applications (Microsoft Office as an app and a hosted service versus a number of nascent Google Apps).

Most recently, Google responded to the Bing launch by going after MSFT’s supposed crown jewels with an announcement about Chrome OS.  Microsoft then parried with its own vapourware announcement about Web Office.  Engaging Microsoft on another front on an increasingly expansive battlefield might seem like the smart thing to do, but as Kevin wrote, Spite is not a business strategy. This is akin to pissing in your neighbour’s yard just because he took a whiz in yours.

The Soviets, like our more modern evil empire whose Kremlin sleeps in the dales just outside Seattle, were more cagey than we might have thought in those days.  They didn’t match the US and NATO move-for-move in force expansion, and rather than counter Reagan’s famous SDI initiative with a Star Wars system of its own, they simply rejiggered their ICBMs to penetrate airspace using different methods and geared fighters up to be able to shoot down satellites from within the mundane confines of our atmosphere.

No … the Soviets didn’t join in the arms race — instead they were quite content to watch their enemy blow its own brains out, expanding US debt in leaps and bounds (US debt doubled under Reagan in a single year, mostly on the back of military spending) while their own programs pursued less lofty goals, financing battlefield weaponry and troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

We didn’t know it at the time, thanks to a lot of propaganda from our own leaders, but the Commies were actually the underdog.  And like any underdog, the Soviets capitalized on American fear and loathing to nurture an inflated perception of its own militarism and level of armament, hoping that the US would collapse under its own weight trying to keep up — and it nearly worked.  Some would argue that it has — and that our current and previous economic hiccups, heaped atop rampant social problems in the US, are the reckoning for decades of rampant Cold War spending — and may not be remedied anytime soon.

Google is apparently trying to match Microsoft on every front in the technology industry — but it too is an underdog.  It’s attempting to do so with far fewer employees (Google has 20K employees – Microsoft has 90K), far fewer financial resources, and no apparent profit model associated with many of these businesses.  Microsoft has also had the benefit of nearly 30 years — all supported by revenue growth in the rising tide of the PC revolution — to expand its business aspirations from its core business of supplying Operating Systems.  Furthermore I would argue that the core of Microsoft is no longer Windows, and has instead long been its much more expensive product offering, Office.

If Google is attempting to parlay its underdog status into some sort of puffer fish role, in forcing Microsoft to compete on many more fronts than search, then the insincerity of these efforts is pretty transparent to most of us.  And it will fail.  I use MS Word and Apple’s Pages, but would not even consider using Google Docs.  As a web app, it delivers a far poorer user experience at the point of my absolute maximum requirement for efficiency and dexterity.  Google’s Chrome browser isn’t much better than Firefox, and as I’ve pointed out frequently, Android is a duplicate of Microsoft’s own floundering efforts in the mobile space with little improvement.

Microsoft is likely snickering (I know I am) as it watches Google’s many flailing attempts to strike it in different arenas.  Particularly so in Operating Systems.  Slapping a GUI onto Linux, particularly when said GUI developer is Google — a company apparently bereft of UX designers — is a cynical, me-too play that will alienate the Linux Community and pale in comparison to OSX.

According to Yahoo Finance! on MSFT and GOOG, Microsoft has 3x the revenue and 20% more cash reserves than Google.  That’s an amiable war chest and revenue stream that means it’s unlikely that Google can cause Microsoft to spend itself into oblivion.  Google, on the other hand, is moving in too many areas and executing poorly in most of them.

If Google truly wants to hurt Microsoft it needs to double-down on a sincere effort to unseat Microsoft Office and Exchange and thereby dominate the ways in which we communicate at work.   Otherwise, much as the Soviet Union really collapsed due to radical downward shifts in the price of oil and lack of access to credit, Google may suffer from a decline in CPC advertising and all of the air will spew out from its puffer fish act.

In May Day parades, the Soviets would invite Western leaders to the review stand, as bombers and missile launchers would run circles past the parade ground.  These Westerners would return to their peers wide-eyed with parables of impressive arrays of weaponry and massively inflated estimates of actual force sizes.  Unlike during the real Cold War, Google’s foe is not self-invested in grandiose estimates of its enemy’s fortitude and the rest of us are quite aware that in many cases, such as the ill-fated Orkut and other flailing products, Google’s emperor has no clothes.

And unlike our former evil empire’s round-faced leader, Ballmer is under no pressure for Perestroika.