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.

The company’s angst, I believe, stems fundamentally from the fact that Apple and other vendors have come to understand that increasingly mobile phones are a consumer purchase decision, and not a corporate one.  And when people can choose, they choose the products they fetishize.  And no one has captured the consumer market’s imagination like Apple, with the iPhone and iPad.  But you, dear reader, already know all of this.

I firmly believe that any turnaround involves deep pain and difficult choices, and I have not seen any sincere effort by the co-CEOs (and now co-COOs) of RIM to make these decisions and brace for the sting.  In fact, judging by their actions it’s not even clear that Messers Balsillie and Lazaridis actually agree with the prevailing notion that there actually is anything wrong with their company.  These layoffs and strategic pronouncements feel mostly like lip service.

At any rate, in the unlikely event that I were to suddenly become the CEO of RIM, a company that is about 1,300 times larger than my own modest startup, here is what I would do:

1. Split the company in two.
   RIM is really the composite of two companies — network and messaging services for carriers and consumers, and smartphones which we users decreasingly hold in our hands.  For the majority of RIM’s lifecycle these two components were strategically and inextricably bound — cool devices with unique features drove demand for the services carriers needed to obtain in order to be able to fulfill that demand, and thus sell more devices — however now that RIM’s infiltration of the carrier market is largely ubiquitous that delta into the mobile network needs to be taken in two directions.  The devices and the network services are now loosely coupled, and the need to tie them together feels more like an albatross.  In order to progress on both fronts these cannot be constrained by the need to support the other’s objectives.
2. Kill the Playbook.
   I’m really not sure why anyone would enter a race not intending to take a stab at winning it.  We have lived with the PlayBook for months now and it still doesn’t have an email client — akin to BMW selling a car without an accelerator pedal.   It is clear to all that aside from the potential for limited enterprise and government sales there is very little chance for the Playbook market to expand.  It has no raison d’etre; no killer app; no je ne sais quoi.  Apparently RIM doesn’t sais quoi either, as the Product Manager for the Playbook and the one of company’s VPs of Marketing have just quit — not a good sign.  As far as branding and marketing is concerned, the Playbook is an attention and messaging sinkhole; and it almost certainly has distracted R&D, preventing RIM from building an iPhone competitor that we could get behind.
3. Focus on 3rd-party developers.
   It would be impossible to deny that much of the demand for iOS is driven by the myriad things that one can do with an iPhone or iPad.  In fact, the iPhone is actually quite a terrible telephonic device, with a bad chipset choice and terrible RF engineering, and it’s consistently suffered supply chain problems as Apple struggles to keep up with demand.  None of these issues matters.  Most iPhone apps suck.  But they suck a lot more on Blackberries, where they exist there at all.  Developers have to run a gauntlet of a horrifically bad developer ecosystem, fragmentation (the need to have multiple versions of each app) that reminds most of us of J2ME, a distribution system which is spotty, and even an enterprise policy shield which allows IT managers to lock down phones and prevent apps from being installed.  If I see an iPhone in someone’s hand I know I can get the ONE version of our app onto it.  If I see a Blackberry in someone’s hand the odds of that user being able to get and run our app may be as low as 3 in 10.
4. Understand that BlackBerry Messenger, and messaging, is the company’s strategic future and open it up to other platforms.
   RIM fears cross-platform messaging apps like Kik and WhatsApp enough to take steps toward actively blocking them.  However nothing could possibly be more powerful, or useful, than a cross-platform BlackBerry Messenger network.  This could subsume the lowly phone number as a primary identifier for communications, and subvert the wireless carriers in a way that Apple has actually been executing on much more poorly than you’d expect.  As part of this strategy I would help the company understand that messaging is not simply “WHAT R U DOING LOL” messages flying back and forth, but also includes Push Notifications for apps, call setup requests, and social networking.  As part of this strategy I would acquire Urban Airship, a modestly-funded private company that could be bought for <$100M and would become a catalyst for radical change within RIM, again leveraging the company’s delta into carriers.  Messaging is the one thing RIM has going for it that is hugely viral, and they’ve got a massive critical mass to build upon in the existing BlackBerry market that they simply need to unlock.
5. Stop dicking around with cheap plastic phones, and own the keyboard.
   One area in which Apple has exhibited significant leadership is the use of real materials, such as glass and metal, in their devices.  This gives them a stronger and indeed perennial feel, while the plastic on most BBs tends to fade in colour and begins to look tired and damaged within a few short months.  Everything about the BlackBerry needs to feel solid — including the keys.  Speaking of which, the domain of the keyboard is an area that the iPhone is unlikely ever to tread upon.  Use this to differentiate the BB and shame Apple.  There are many many users (among them women with long fingernails) who will NOT give up their keyboard for a touch screen, and a generation of teens who have known text messaging as their primary means of communication for more than a decade.  The focus on the keyboard is one of RIM’s core strengths.

I’ve purposefully attempted to avoid reading others’ prescriptions for RIM so I apologize in advance if any of these represents overlap.

I’ve been a shoulder to cry on for colleagues from Telus and Cisco often enough to not want to witness the death of what may well be the last great Canadian telecom company.  Even as recently as 5 years ago, RIM was lauded for its culture of innovation and relentless aggression.  However, the current wave of layoffs and strategic pronouncements are nothing more than hackneyed Wall Street pandering — a movie we’ve seen before at other declining giants that have never recovered — and these moves have already killed that culture.  I have seen what this kind of short-term management thinking and denial can do to a company’s culture, nurturing an internal environment where lifers sandbag their turf and the company’s former wunderkind rest and vest.  Neither behaviour is conducive to the kind of thinking or the can-do attitude that gets companies turned around quickly.  And really, who would want to be CEO and lead that sort of army into battle?  Not me.

I’m not an Apple apologist, but they are in this regard very clearly being held to a higher standard than their competitors.  It is a fact of life in the design of mobile devices that contact with our flesh and our electromagnetic energy  attenuates the signal.  On the plus side these lofty expectations are a (continued) sign that people still expect Apple to remedy the ills that befall wireless communications in general, however the down side is that in this case the laws of physics are tough to defeat.

Apple’s mistake was in hyping the antenna as newer/faster/better which in reality may be true (apparently not true enough), however that brings focus to bear on a technology that is weak in every mobile device, including the iPhone 4.  Reception quality is not something you use to market a mobile phone unless you’re suicidal or incredibly arrogant as they all tend to devolve to the similar orders of entropy.

And so no, they did not apologize.  They tried to use logic in explaining that it’s a problem common to any phone, not just those that errantly promise to be better.  But this is no longer a logical debate, it’s a semantic war… a classic case of Tall Poppy Syndrome.  Now that APPL is top dog, germinalists will try to make their bones knocking them off the pedestal.

And so obviously, giving away a few bumper cases and delving into the facts of the matter didn’t work.  I don’t think this is a situation where an apology is necessary, however it is a situation in which Apple must reassess where they will dig the trenchline.  And as with prior “scandals” Apple is learning the hard way what the pitfalls of marketing in the wireless industry truly are.

I thought, as I read Fred Wilson’s now infamous Inflection Point screed last week, that it foreshadowed something significant.  Turns out I was correct.  Turns out that Fred, who is an investor in and boardmember of Twitter, was speaking in veiled nuances of Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie maker AteBits.  In this post, which appears now to have been a ham-fisted attempt to soft-pedal the traumatic news which was to follow, Fred says:

Much of the early work on the Twitter Platform has been filling holes in the Twitter product. It is the kind of work General Computer was doing in Cambridge in the early 80s. Some of the most popular third party services on Twitter are like that. Mobile clients come to mind. Photo sharing services come to mind. URL shorteners come to mind. Search comes to mind. Twitter really should have had all of that when it launched or it should have built those services right into the Twitter experience.

This assumes a lot, it seems to me.  As a relatively early user of Twitter, and an entrepreneur who was experimenting in the same space circa late 2006, I think it was pretty clear to me that no one knew precisely what Twitter was at the time of its launch (TechCrunch agrees).  No… as a totally wide-open platform with a simple API and syndication model, Twitter could have become anything.  As such, different people found different utility within the Twitter framework, until user behaviour congealed around a core set of ideas about what exactly Twitter is.

Twitter couldn’t have had all of these features prior to launch, because no one at Twitter was aware that it needed them.  The very definition of what Twitter was at the time — and is today — was and is entirely negotiated within the marketplace.

Many hands in Twitter’s success so far

In addition to the critically influential early users, what made Twitter a wider phenomenon (it’s still not a mass market phenomenon) was the growing number of third party developers extending the platform — publishing, subscribing and syndicating to and from everything from desktop clients to social networks to refrigerators.  In its early stages, Twitter couldn’t have afforded to hire more than one or two dozen staff to fulfill engineering and product management roles, and most of those were tasked with more mundane “keep things running” tasks, keeping up with scale.

This created a significant gap in evolving the platform and productizing the service.  This gap was rapidly filled by an ecosystem of third party developers functioning as an unpaid R&D department, which has grown and now crests on a scale that the company could not ever sustain on its own — even today.

Keeping the plates spinning while walking the tightrope

So maintaining that ecosystem in balance is a critical function, as it allows Twitter to evolve and grow at minimal cost and with highly limited risk.  It’s a dance which requires deftness, sensitivity, and subtlety; and most importantly a profound understanding of the co-dependence that the platform has with those who seek to extend it.  Companies that successfully navigate these waters maintain a strong internal dialogue — something akin to Star Trek’s Prime Directive – regarding partners which seeks, inasmuch as it can obtain, equanimity within the ecosystem.

Twitter “got away” with the acquisition of Summize in 2008 because that ecosystem was immature, Summize had no obvious competitors, and the platform itself had yet to establish its dominance on the tech scene.  But nowadays, moves by Twitter’s management are scrutinized, debunked, and analyzed — they are the pied piper of “realtime” media, and they have a difficult relationship with a roiling, rowdy group of developers, some of whom love to hate them.

What happens when you churn the waters of the ecosystem too much is pretty simple, and pretty catastrophic:  developers leave.  And what Twitter may have done on Friday is decrease exponentially the number of people who are dedicating their best effort toward plotting a course for Twitter’s future.  This is at a critical time when Twitter’s growth seems to be hitting plateaus and struggling to work its way into the mainstream.

Pick your battles

So when you walk straight into such a fray, and knowingly increase the turbulence in these waters, one would think that some consideration would be given to the worthiness of the battleground in question.  Is getting control over a Desktop and iPhone Twitter client a cause worth the down-side risk?  Is this really a critical choke point in Twitter’s growth that the company needs to take control over?

There are many different approaches to publishing and subscribing to and from Twitter on the Desktop and on iPhones and other mobile devices.  However I would suspect that many developers are considering either walking away completely from, or decreasing the prominence of Twitter within, their applications.  More succinctly — the business model for these apps as freestanding Twitter user agents using a paid model is now evaporated.

This means a far shorter list of UI paradigms and design approaches to interfacing with Twitter.  Probably not a good thing given that Twitter still has some difficulty explaining to Mom & Pop Trailer Park why or how it can be useful in their lives.  While Twitter likely believes it now has the reins on a critical component to breaking into the mass market, it has essentially insourced innovation and assigned it to a very small team, whereas the community’s growth to date was nurtured by a massively outsourced team.

What Twitter doesn’t need, in my opinion, is absolute control over the User Agent.  What it needs is an App Store — a directory, if you will, which provides navigable routes to the wealth of clients and solutions available in the wild.  Furthermore Twitter needs someone who has some success managing an ecosystem of this size in balance over the course of years; who knows how to speak to developers and to encourage them; and who will act as an internal conscience for the developer community that is increasingly fearful of Twitter’s aggression.

Twitter’s challenge is so great and its opportunity is so broad that it is impossible to conceive that it can be properly stickhandled by a small group of visionaries.  Its strength in the past was its ambivalence to 3rd Party developers; but now that ambivalence has taken a dangerous turn.  I certainly hope that the company and its investors do not suffer for this decision, as many of its developers clearly are.

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the technology that has entered and exited our lives over the past 10 years.  Over the ten-year lifespan of this blog and the mailing list that preceeded it much has changed in the technologies that permeate our daily lives — when we began this journey in 1999, desktops outsold notebooks by 4:1, Apple was a novelty computer maker for uber-geeks, and no one you knew had ever ‘googled’ themselves in public.  I thought I’d run down the most disappointing aspects of our jaunty shuffle into modernity.

What makes a technology disappointing?  Many products fail in obscurity because they try to solve something irrelevant.  What you need to do to make this list, friends, is aim high and fail wildly.   While most of the FAILs described herein are products, I did also find a couple of product categories which have really disappointed.. and one entire industry.  After all, disappointment is invariably the result of a combination of promise (our hopes & goals for the product or service) and the provider’s failure to achieve that promise.  Sometimes the predisposition for failure afflicts not just one company or product team, but an entire industry.  So here we go:

Motorola ROKR

In 2005, the fact that Apple was working on a mobile device to follow-up the iPod was a very poorly-kept secret, but the specifics were the source of much speculation.  And oh, how the fan boys wept when they thought that the sum-total of this effort was the ROKR, an epic piece of crap on which Apple collaborated with Motorola to produce a re-labelled Moto E398 with an iTunes client.  Although the ROKR had 512MB of memory on-board, the device was software-limited to 100 songs — and downloading them was a painful process as the device lacked USB 2.0.  Predictably the product was a #FAIL and Jobs and co. left Zander in the dust with the iPhone, but for those who actually believed that this was Apple’s solitary foray into mobile, there were a few sleepless months.

Satellite Radio

FM radio sucks.  There’s probably a JACK-FM station in your city, where the DeeJays “play what they want”.  Only, they don’t really.. they play exclusively Top 10 hits from the past 20 years regardless of musical genre, the result of which can easily result in a computer-controlled segue from Katrina and the Waves to a Beyonce track.  That the radio business considers this format to be innovative explains why we need alternatives, and satellite radio was supposed to be that alternative.  Sirius and XM radio both got off the ground in 2001, so to speak.  In 2003 I predicted a merger between the two, which was announced February 2007.  And while Satellite radio does permit greater diversity, and thus narrower focus, in channels there are many problems.  Foremost of these is the audio compression technology, called Lucent PAC, which according to studies has lower perceptual quality than even MP3 at the same bitrate; and the rumoured limitation of stream bandwidth to 64Kbps per channel… far worse than the MP3s on your hard drive and light years from the “CD Quality” that Sirius et al used to advertise.  This makes Satellite radio a no-go for audiophiles, but OK for talk radio and sports.  We continue to wait for decent music without wires.

Nokia N-Gage

It’s likely that the N-Gage failed simply because it failed to.. uh.. engage the game development community with much enthusiasm.  Launched in 2004, the device’s total failure was predicted by a string of awful reviews stemming from substantial usability problems, such as the fact that users had to essentially disassemble the device to swap games, or the fact that one couldn’t receive calls while playing a game, or that the device was weighty and uncomfortable and impractical for use as a phone, or the fact that the screen could not display horizontally, or its $299 price tag (substantially higher than the Game Boy Advance).  Developers probably saw the writing on the wall when evaluating early test units of the N-Gage.

The PDA

Remember the iPaq?  Or the early Palm devices?  Today, the notion of a mobile address book device that isn’t coupled to a telephone seems positively stupid.  In November 2000, I asked the market to build me a mobile handheld device that married my email to my phone and tied it together via my address book — all of which synced to my PC.  In my mind at the time, PDAs were gap fillers until we could field broadband wireless IP networks that provided persistent connectivity.  The smartphone — devices like the iPhone and Droid — killed the PDA and for most of us I suspect that is good riddance.  Nobody wants to walk around looking like Batman, their belt burdened by half-a-dozen devices beeping and squawking.  How many people bought these things or received them as gifts, only to abandon them within months?  Still, credit where it’s due — the PDA begat the SmartPhone, and we’re all better for it.

Modo.NET

I’m betting you never heard of Modo.NET because it was launched exclusively in San Francisco, LA and New York in the summer of  2000, but Scout Electromedia, the company that created it, collapsed within 3 months (in fact the device was available in SF for only 1 day before the business folded dramatically).  Like Dodgeball, which launched shortly after Modo’s collapse, Modo was all about the urban hipster lifestyle.  Built around yet another PDA-like device with a hugely innovative design, the Modo leveraged the paging network to update its users with happenings in and around the city… it was like the pager you carried with you when going out on the town on Friday nights.  Two major design compromises crippled the Modo, however… it had no keyboard; and was receive-only.  Also… like Dodgeball, the Modo was an idea ahead of its time: all of Scout’s business and consumer goals are now attainable on smartphones:  no stand-alone device or clunky SMSing necessary.  Today many of these goals are embodied in Foursquare and other services.

Motorola DVR Series

Hello again, Motorola!  Let me make this crystal clear for you, Mr. Zander:  Dude, I just want to be able to watch TV and record things for playback later with a minimum of interference.  In response, Motorola created an underpowered set-top device that frequently overheats, trashes its own hard drive, and has a user interface that is akin to debating Keynesian Economics with a three-year-old.  Perhaps it’s because you have an effective duopoly, along with your buddies from Scientific Atlanta, on the cable set-top-box market even despite the FCC’s insistence on the CableCard standard.  Perhaps you simply lack the kind of employees that have any affinity for user experience design.  What is evident is that you and your cable partners are under no specific motivation to improve this product, as it has now been in circulation for nearly 5 years with zero material improvement.  In fact, your products in this category, including the DCT-6412 with which I am famously saddled (this article is the number one most visited on ianbell.com) are so crappy that the FCC believes they are discouraging people from adopting Cable Television itself.  Be ashamed.  You suck.

The AppleTV

Like Afghanistan, the set top box seems to be a graveyard of empires — so much so that even Silicon Valley’s King Midas, Steve Jobs, has been laid humble before it.  The AppleTV is, like many other set top boxes, underpowered for the task at hand.  More like an iPod than a Mac Mini, the AppleTV fails to meet user expectations as an all-rounder, lacks CODECs for popular formats and wrappers like .MKV and .AVI, and only works effectively when you pay for and download all of your content from the iTunes walled garden.  Set top boxes that do satisfy tend to allow users to get their content from wherever and sync/stream it from a media server elsewhere in the house — this is true of the iPod lineup, and that is a lesson Apple should have carried forward into this product.  Moreover, the AppleTV doesn’t even have an OFF button.

Green Cars

In 2006, when I bought my Jetta GLI, I promised myself that it would be my last gas-guzzler.  I just bought another vanilla car last month, though, after seeking and failing to find a suitable practical alternative in the diesel, hybrid, pure electric, or hydrogen vehicle.  It’s important to understand that gasoline, hydrogen, and batteries are simply storage media for energy.  Where energy is derived from — whether it’s nuclear, solar, wind, coal, crude oil, or whatever else you can come up with — determines the sustainability, not what it burns or farts out the tailpipe.  Moreover for me, like most consumers, a next-generation car needs to fulfill my usual manly requirement for sportiness or (for others) accessibility or safety, with some added convenience — such as not needing to buy gas at stations or being able to drive long distances without a refuel.  The zero tailpipe emissions is a nice benefit, but not a buying feature for most.  As I pointed out last year, mainstream auto manufacturers have consistently failed to figure this out.  And if you live in a region where all of the energy on the grid is derived from coal or natural gas then you are not doing the environment any favours by purchasing a plug-in.

Pet Robots

Since Robbie the Robot did the rounds on TV sitcoms in the 1950s, Americans have fantasized about having a jetsons-style friend rendered in metal and silicon adorning their living room.  With the launch of Sony’s AIBO in late 1999, things were looking up for us.  At a price tag of $2500 though, there was still some room for improvement, and robots began to emerge all up and down the cost and capability matrix.  The most successful by far was iRobot’s Roomba, which fulfills the robot servant role quite nicely but falls flat on the personality index.  In the latter category resides the Pleo, and I will confess I have always wanted one.  Unlike the Aibo, though, the Pleo isn’t really autonomous.  It gets an hour at the most out of its batteries, and cannot return by itself to its charging station.  The Pleo is a great demonstration of how pre-programmed behaviour can trigger emotions — not in the robot itself, but in its owner — but sadly disappoints and is not viable as a “pet” robot.  Maybe next decade, Robbie.

Music Revolution

At the end of the last decade, with the massive growth of Napster, the writing was on the wall.  People clearly voted with their feet in showing how they wanted to use music.  While this had been the case for decades, with mix tapes and pirate radio, the internet as in other industries was a key enabler.  Yet rather than embrace and extend this revolution, as tech industry companies tend to do, the music industry went on the warpath via the RIAA.  Lawyers mobilized, suing 12-year-old kids, single moms, and other obvious villains.  The only accomplishment of the RIAA has been to effectively kill internet radio, which would serve to promote their artists, while music sharing has continued unabated.  Yet, at the end of the decade came one smattering of good news, and further proof of industry executives’ failure to appreciate irony:  a lawsuit revealed that the Canadian music industry has been stealing from artists for 25+ years, and faces a $6Bn liability.  Small justice, I suppose.  So while the technologies (that’s what this post is about after all) that came from the publishers has been an abject failure, the technologies, such as BitTorrent, WebJay, Pandora, et al created by users and lovers of music has flowered.  Imagine what would happen if the innovators actually had the support of that industry?

Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you through the teens.

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.

… but here’s the rub.  It’s just a demo.  You can’t have it.  Sorry.

It has been a year since Apple and Rogers Wireless launched the iPhone 3G in Canada.  It was that summer, in 2008, I unloaded my first-generation unlocked iPhone for a legit iPhone 3G from Rogers Wireless.  One of the benefits of having a carrier-supported iPhone is, of course, supposed to be seamless warranty replacement.  Shortly after I got it, my iPhone began dropping calls and failing to dial out on the network.  I assumed this to be A) a problem with Rogers’ network, B) a firmware bug in the iPhone itself, or C) a combination of both.

I had heard things about chipset problems afflicting AT&T iPhone customers so I assumed this would be remedied in a soon-to-follow update from Apple.  By October of 2008, I had given up.  I called Rogers tech support and was walked thru the usual “wipe it clean and pray it’s fixed” procedure and tried it for two more weeks but no joy, so in November I instigated the phone swap process from Rogers.  The call was short and sweet and all seemed to be well with a new iPhone winging its way to our house.

On the Friday before my iPhone was to arrive, my SIM suddenly stopped working and my iPhone could not connect to the Rogers network at all.  I later found out that this was due to the fact that my phone number had been reprovisioned to a new SIM that was in the box accompanying my iPhone.  Odd.  It was obviously my iPhone that was broken, not the SIM, and I just couldn’t fathom why they wouldn’t just give me a 1-800 number to call to activate the new SIM when it arrived versus forwarding my phone service to a brown box in the back of a UPS truck, leaving me without my phone service for 3 days.  I called Rogers (from my Vonage line) to complain, spent an hour and a half on the phone, and could not get this resolved after bouncing around 3-4 agents.

On the following Tuesday, the replacement iPhone arrived.  I tried starting it up, but it wouldn’t boot.  It had a substantial hardware problem that led to garbage on the screen and all kinds of other garbage, but in effect the replacement phone was DOA.  As I had to go on a business trip that day, I put the new SIM in my old iPhone and left the new iPhone for a week or so before I tried it again, this time putting the replacement thru all kinds of hardware resets and software reloads.  I could not resurrect it from the dead despite hours of trying.

So I called Rogers.  Again.  After two hours bouncing around various agents in various departments, I could not get an agent to take responsibility for my problem, instead each agent dispatched me to another department as I (admittedly) became increasingly irate.  One agent accused me of lying, and/or not knowing what I am talking about.  Finally I threatened to QUIT Rogers, switch to Telus, and sue them for breach of contract — I was transferred to a magic save department where I met a very nice lady who calmed me down, promised to solve all of my problems, and who would call me the following week which was, now 7 weeks after the Odyssey began, Christmas.

Needless to say, she never did call back.  Never solved my problem.  Probably got laid off.  Might be working for Bell Canada right now, for all I know.

Next I began to receive a torrent of threatening letters demanding that I return my old, somewhat functioning iPhone or I’d be charged $780.    I called Rogers again in January trying to resolve the issue, but to no avail:  Rogers Wireless wouldn’t take the badly broken replacement iPhone back without also sending my other one, leaving me phoneless.  I gave up after the best I could do was an agent telling me I had to send BOTH iPhones in one shipment to their call centre.  Fuming, I waited another few days to call back.

Eventually on my next call,  an agent relented: I kept the semi-working iPhone, sent back the badly broken replacement iPhone.  I packaged up the replacement phone and sent it back, recording the shipping tracking number from UPS.

Then the predictable happened.  They charged $780 to my card.  I was furious, but sugar-coated my attitude and called back AGAIN to ask for a refund.  After bouncing around to various departments, each complaining about the slowness of their computers, they could not track the whereabouts of the iPhone I had returned, despite the fact that I could even tell them the name of the signing agent who had received the package.  I nearly hit the ceiling.  I threatened a complaint to the CRTC (which, in fairness, I have every right to do).  Finally someone agreed to help me.  One quirk:  They couldn’t refund the $780.Instead I got a credit — in effect I was loaning Rogers money — against future use.  A compromise that irritates me, but was under the circumstances acceptable.

Now it was March.  By my logs of various telephone calls to Rogers, I had now spent about 9 hours on the phone with Rogers attempting to address a single issue spanning more than 6 months.  I was so exhausted with the process that I accepted the neutrality of being exactly where I was technically, and further behind financially, than when the problems began — with an iPhone that didn’t fully work and with my wallet $780 lighter but an account credit.

It wasn’t until late last month that I mustered the courage to call again and try to get a new replacement iPhone.  I had assumed that these processes, immature at the time I first endured them, may have seasoned and smoothened with time and experience.  I called again, had a very pleasant half-hour call with an agent, who whisked me a new iPhone 3G toot sweet.  As before, my phone service was disconnected for a couple of days after they shipped the replacement phone, but by now Stockholm Syndrome was taking effect and I was becoming numb to the varied mistreatments by my captor.

The very same day the new iPhone 3G arrived, I cracked open the box, dropped in the new SIM, zeroed my old iPhone, and boxed it up for shipping.  UPS picked it up that very day, May 28, 2009.  I expected to hear nothing of the issue further.  According to the UPS tracking data, the package arrived the following week, on June 6th.  On June 14th, Rogers sent me a letter threatening to charge me $730.

I cannot fathom that within 8 days, Rogers could not process and acknowledge the receipt of my RMA’d iPhone 3G.  I furthermore cannot fathom that when they do overcharge you due to their own error, they cannot refund the excess back to your credit card (which is how I pay for my phone service).

Rogers is a company clearly hampered by its own hugely restricted billing, provisioning, and customer service systems.  Ted Rogers, five weeks before his death last year, spoke to an audience marshalled by the local YEO chapter, which I gratefully attended as a guest of Mario from ShowTime Tickets.  Two thoughts of Ted’s permeated his frailly-voiced speech that day.  He said, of customer service, that “the secret to good customer service is always saying yes” and that his success as CEO was directly tied to the number of layers that existed between him and his customers — the fewer the better.

I know that it’s difficult dealing with the kinds of customers iPhone brings to the table and the scale of operations necessary to support the volume that a device like the iPhone can generate for Rogers.  Not easy.  But I wonder what Ted would think after reading this story?

I’m thinking that might be a dramatic oversimplification, and a statement made by a PR flack who can’t be expected to understand or even correctly parrot the complexities of this kind of issue.  Since Skype uses its own CODECs in many applications it is in a position to choose whichever is most convenient among those which they license and proprietarily own.  I am unaware of any CODECs which apply to the mobile VoIP space, which would be patented exclusively in Canada, that Skype might trip over. 

I’m going to guess that this is probably more related to signaling and/or call setup and I am aware of a few granted patents in Canada that might foul up Skype.  Regardless: given the murky nature of patent disputes, if they were to take on the patent holder in Canada and lose that might have a negative effect on their intellectual property claims elsewhere.  Given the cost and the risk, they may have decided it was easier to fold up the tent and give up on Canada until whomever the stool pigeon is comes to them with a reasonable settlement.

There is, fellow Canadians, an interim solution that’s pretty easy.  Thanks to a commenter from TMCNet, here’s the easy way to get it:

1. De-authorize the computer you use to sync to the iPhone from within iTunes
2. Grab a coupon code from a place like here.   This allows you to bypass the credit card payment process later.
3. Redeem the code from within the iTunes Music Store … the “Redeem” button is cleverly hidden in the top right-hand side of the screen.
4. Create a new account.  Where it asks for payment select “None” and enter a US address and zip code.  I hear 90210 is FILLED with millions of people!
5. Search for Skype, download, and Sync.  This will *NOT* destroy existing apps you have installed, curiously enough.  YRMV.

I am really hoping that some work I did in 2005 with EQO is not responsible for this everybody-but-Canada restriction.  Here’s Skype’s preview: