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.

In the video above you see examples of fuzzy search, a touch-screen UI, a tablet form factor, social search, a recommendation engine, and of course speech-to-text as the main user input paradigm.  It isn’t so interesting that someone as brilliant as Alan Kay had this vision in the first place, but what is amazing is the degree to which Apple has been focused on delivering this vision — a vision telegraphed by a company nearly 25 years ago that was itself less than half that age at the time.

Just as NASA engineers and designers have accredited a great deal of their vision to the work of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick (via his visual adaptation of 2001) so Apple has slavishly pursued this vision of pervasive and hugely interactive computing with acquisitions like Siri and innovations like the iPad.  Sure, there are many reasons for Apple’s market success in this post-PC era — but I would heap disproportionate credit toward building a corporate culture that cultivates, communicates, and ultimately has pursued that vision over the course of the past 30 years.

The tough nut to crack has always been the speech recognition part.  We are perhaps 25 years into a 50 year cycle in helping computers to understand most nuances of human communication.  Humans have ways to convey context, via body language etc., that computers cannot yet pick up.  Speech is not effectively used without all of these cues and there are many ships on the rocks of this technology frontier.  As such I and most of the consumer marketplace have never taken it very seriously, and I don’t expect this to change with Apple’s emphasis on speech reco this morning.

The question is:  When we’ve checked off all of the boxes from this video what’s next?  What’s the vision for 30 years hence?

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.

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.

Now, I was an early adopter of the Apple TV.  Since then I have had a love/hate relationship with the device, which I think is rather something Steve wishes he had not hit the launch button for.

There is an obscure feature (Steve has an aversion to buttons) wherein if you hold down the “PLAY” button for five seconds, the Apple TV appears to turn off.  But here’s the rub:  It doesn’t, really.  To perform its magic, the AppleTV needs to be able to sync with or stream from a remote PC/Mac.  However, this doesn’t mean it needs to be on all the time.  But it is.   

Strangely, Apple TVs cannot, under any circumstance, be turned off.  This is kind of a pain when you sleep in the same room as an Apple TV, or when it’s summertime.  Or worse:  both.  The tiny little fan desperately struggling to keep your Apple TV’s processor, hard drive and logic board from melting works pretty hard.  As a result, it spins .. well .. all the time.  The only way to give your Apple TV a break is to unplug it.

An OFF function that actually turns the Apple TV OFF (from a user’s perspective .. this would probably actually hibernate) would be a novel and downright sensible function, don’t you think Steve?

In the Apple TV’s world, the “standby” functions merely disable video output.  Otherwise the Apple TV functions as normal — chewing up power, creating heat, and making noise.  Most of this time it’s doing nothing … just waiting to sync.  How boring life as an Apple TV must be!

Myriad problems are created by Apple’s aversion to this simple function:

1. Frequent overheating of the device (this past August you could cook with it)
2. Unwelcome fan/drive noise (my ATV is in the bedroom) … which leads to
3. Media corruptions when users shut off the ATV the only way they can, by unplugging it or kicking the OFF button on a power bar

I admit that last problem afflicts me frequently, and I am on my second hard drive.. with such small hard drives (40GB or 160GB?  come ON) syncing a large library fills up the drive on the ATV pretty fast, and leads inevitably to various corruptions.. all made worse when power is roughly disconnected by sleepless owners like me.

There is nothing whatsoever to prevent the Apple TV from implementing a soft-power-off and waking the device sporadically to see if there’s new content on the iTunes library or store and then deep-sleeping again after a sync is done.  Nothing to inhibit a simple click of the all-powerful PLAY button on the remote from waking the Apple TV from its slumber within a few seconds, rising to the challenge of trying to render HD video — as it so often struggles to do.

The frustrating thing about the Apple TV is that it’s so very close to being the best product in the category — but inattention to detail and downright boneheadedness in its software implementation, combined with very poor hardware performance, make it almost useless as a mainstream consumer device.

I have hundreds of consumer electronics products in my home. The only other device that doesn’t turn OFF is my fridge.  Get with the program, guys.  Now that Apple is trying to “go green” and appease board member Al Gore, among others, the always-on AppleTV is a black eye.

You’ll notice the Apple TV is conspicuously lacking an EnergySTAR compliance logo.  Wonder why?

Which one are you?  The ancient parable of the fox and the hedgehog has come into increasing view in popular culture lately.  And while its origins are somewhat ambiguous, the allegory has been applied to entrepreneurs, scientists, philosophers, playwrights, business leaders, economists, and even US presidents.

One of the fables goes something like this (sorry, no link to a source … I am paraphrasing a story from my childhood):

A fox and a hedgehog were strolling through a country path.  Periodically, they were threatened by hungry wolves.  The fox — being blessed with smarts, speed and agility — would lead packs of wolves on a wild chase through the fields, up and down trees, and over hill and dale.  Eventually the fox would return to the path, breathless but having lost the wolves, and continue walking.  The hedgehog, being endowed with a coat of spikes, simply hunkered down on its haunches when menaced by the wolves and fended them off without moving.  When they gave up, he would return to his stroll unperturbed.

According to the great liberal (before that was a dirty word) historian and thinker Isaiah Berlin who in 1953 wrote the Essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox“, interpreting the works of Tolstoy, Foxes are complex thinkers who account for a variety of circumstances and experiences while hedgehogs have the keen ability to focus and drive along a single path.  As examples, Berlin flags such thinkers as Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust as Hedgehogs and slots Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson as Foxes.

More recently, Jim Collins (author of “Good to Great“) took this concept into the business world in his book and it is one of the central unifying themes of his work.  In his book and other writings Collins comes down pretty hard on Foxes:

Those who built the good-to-great companies were, to one degree or another, hedgehogs. They used their hedgehog nature to drive toward what we came to call a Hedgehog Concept for their companies. Those who led the comparison companies tended to be foxes, never gaining the clarifying advantage of a Hedgehog Concept, being instead scattered, diffused, and inconsistent.

This is understandable.  Collins, a former Stanford University Business Professor, comes from a hedgehog factory.  He has made a career of spooling hedgehogs into mainstream companies at the mid-management level and consulting with large, heavily-matrixed companies on business strategy and leadership.  In many respects he lives in a world constructed by and for hedgehogs — so it makes sense that he could see the “Great” companies he writes about in his books (all typically fortune 500 players) as hedgehogs.  On a long enough timeline we are ALL wrong, but it is worth pointing out that a number of Collins’ “Great” companies have suffered badly from (and others have caused) the current economic downturn, eg. Circuit City.

As Nicholas Kristof describes the dichotomy in the NY Times:

Hedgehogs tend to have a focused worldview, an ideological leaning, strong convictions; foxes are more cautious, more centrist, more likely to adjust their views, more pragmatic, more prone to self-doubt, more inclined to see complexity and nuance. And it turns out that while foxes don’t give great sound-bites, they are far more likely to get things right.

John Kerry is clearly a Fox: A self-doubting; complicated; unable to present absolute, sound byte-friendly answers to complex questions.  George W. Bush, however, presents himself as a hedgehog: simple, direct, ideological, and absolutely assured of his correctness.  In 2004, America signed up for its second term of 4 years of hedgehog leadership to substantial effect.

In our industry, hedgehogs have the benefit of focus and the ability to keep their heads down and companies out of trouble during tough times.  They succeed through the avoidance of substantial risk and through the ability to see things through.  When they fail, it’s because their conservatism holds them back, and markets move past them; or because they can’t release their death grip on that singular idea and move on to the next thing.

The Fox has the benefit of broad vision and the ability to perceive the complex interaction of seemingly dissonant ideas, and they succeed because they are able to travel outside of marked pathways with their ideas and make substantial gains.  When they fail it’s because their reach exceeds their grasp, because they are too far ahead of the market, or because they have difficulty maintaining focus to see things through.

The one problem that Mr. Collins cannot cop to is that while Hedgehogs are mass-produceable through training and discipline (this is what MBA factories do), Foxes are not so easy to come by:  their behaviour is learned but it is most likely interdisciplinary and tangential.  As a modern example, one could strongly argue that Steve Jobs, Reid Hoffman, and many successful tech entrepreneurs are foxes.

On the other hand Bill Gates, who at one time was the richest man in the world:  pure hedgehog.  Rupert Murdoch?  Count the spikes.  There are many successful hedgehogs in the mainstream business world and far fewer Foxes.  The structure of businesses, after all, are generally designed around hedgehogs. In general larger corporate structures aren’t great at absorbing foxes.  It’s why Jobs quit Apple, before going back as CEO under a mandate that embraced his wide-ranging aspirations.  It’s probably why entrepreneurs such as Evan Williams, who blew out of Google as soon as he could after selling blogger.com to them, generally can’t wait to get out of the mother ship after a their lock-up periods are done.  A friend and the CEO of a company acquired by Microsoft always referred to Redmond as “they” and never “we” even while he took down an amazing salary serving as a VP for two years.

Innovation is a concept which we modernists tie into every description of a person’s thinking process.  Wikipedia says there are a few different types of innovation:  “It may refer to incremental, radical, and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations.”  Perhaps the razor cuts this way:  Perhaps hedgehogs deliver incremental changes while foxes deliver radical, revolutionary changes.

As a fox, I know that many of my successes have come when paired with hedgehogs.  A hedgehog can pluck a singular concept from the maelstrom of energy emanating from the fox and run with it along a narrow path.  Steve Jobs had Wozniak on the engineering side, and just as significantly Mike Markkula on the financing and business affairs side.  The latter two are quintessential hedgehogs.

While it’s valuable to know whether you’re a fox or whether you’re a hedgehog, it is not particularly constructive to assign a static value judgment to one versus the other.  At varying points in the arc of a business, a prevalence of influence from either a fox or a hedgehog can make or break a company.  Witness the foxes that artificially inflated hyper-economies at Enron (Jeff Skilling) and AIG (Joseph Cassano) to great personal benefit but ultimately destroyed hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth.  And meet the Hedgehogs, Gil Amelio and John Sculley, who sapped the growth of Apple, diluted its brand value, and very nearly bankrupted the company.

So figure out what you’re good at, chase the visions you believe in, and if you’re fortunate enough to work in an environment that embraces and supports your particular attributes, you’ll ultimately be successful.

Apple’s customers, embracing the simplicity of its products, want to move their music and movies around (particularly ones they actually pay for) unfettered by DRM: Apple says no. With its market clout, Apple has the opportunity to take a stand against the music insultry and the movie biz. It has consciously chosen not to.

Apple’s customers want to buy its slick new iPhone and use it anywhere in the world, on the network of their choosing. Apple says no. With its brand power, Apple could have created and released an unlocked phone (like, say, Palm) and allowed the market to embrace it as a platform. And as users and hackers have developed workarounds to get what they want, Apple is attempting to punish them by frying infringing iPhone firmware.

In the case of iTunes, the market has been free to work around Apple’s ignorance as there has long been a thriving DIVX and MP3 bazaar thanks to a number of file sharing networks over which to exchange them, and with some effort those are playable in iTunes and transferable to iPod. In the case of the iPhone, though, Apple has inadvertently catalyzed a real revolution. From the iPhoneSimFree.com web site today:

“…for our customers who have no immediate need to use alternate providers and are still using their AT&T card, you are welcome to update your phone. For the rest please be patient, as the jailbreak issue is something that affects much more than just the unlocking. The thousands of open source developers who have put a cumulative 10s of thousands of man hours into various apps and tools now have no way to get them onto the phone as well. We are all looking into the jailbreak issue as it affects us all, and we will keep updating our site as well as the open source community at large with any information we can about this.”

In both operating modes, Apple has partnered with a cabal and taken their side, rather than the market’s side. They’ve thoroughly misjudged the ingenuity of the mob and the ill will that has been built up over decades between the market and the companies that service them. And by sitting at the wrong side of the table in the ongoing war, Apple has not only passed over a perfect opportunity to affect positive change, shift the lumbering elephants of industry, and stimulate growth, but it has jeopardized its credibility and brand equity.

Apple doesn’t just need to “Think Different” … it needs to “Act Different”. People will not forget their behaviour through this era, just as Mac enthusiasts still vilify John Sculley for rejecting numerous fundamentals that made the original Mac (even in its time) as successful as it was.

Thinking Different was supposed to be Apple’s raison-d’etre. Here’s the text from the icon above, originally penned by Jack Kerouac, which is the TextEdit icon in OS X Leopard:

“Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes – the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing that you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things.”

This was the cornerstone of Apple’s 1997 “Think Different” campaign, and it’s unsurprising that it lives on as an Easter Egg nestled within a core application of their operating system. Since the 1980s, Apple has leveraged its entire brand identity on rebelliousness. Every campaign, up to and including the smug, polarizing “I’m a Mac” series have extended this equity, largely with products that truly were “different”.

In dancing with the devil by partnering with the Movie, Music, and Wireless industries, Apple has achieved things that few other companies could have and to a limited extent has torn down some walls.  But the compromises, such as its revenue sharing arrangement with wireless carriers, are downright faustian.  And as Apple has been attempting to “evolve” these arrangements to greater customer-friendliness and openness, they are learning the price one pays when one’s business (and quarterly reporting) becomes enmeshed with the whims of a dinosaur.

The iPhone takes this the furthest at both extremes: It’s the most limited platform Apple has created, and it’s also the one with the most potential to be revolutionary. Like a date with Ann Coulter, buying and using an iPhone begins all shiny and pretty and ends up on the rocks amid a boil of hostility, frustration and creative limitations. That the source of all of that negativity is the smoldering heap of what used to be Cingular wireless is not something that the market will acknowledge or forgive.

With these two bubbling issues, Apple is quickly approaching a brand crisis. It has drawn to its corner just the sort of people who are revolutionaries, who affect change, and who decry cronyism. These people have actively laboured to help Apple to continue to push the envelope there, but at the same time they are prone to fickleness.

Miller Brooks, an ad firm, points out that a Brand Crisis can hit any company, no matter how well-entrenched — and quickly. They recommend starting to manage the situation by finding your ethical compass, and then rapidly thereafter accepting reality. Apple is fortunate in that it need only look to its users to find its ethical compass. Many of them are bloggers. All of them are vociferous. 🙂

Apple needs to listen to the wisdom of the crowd. I believe they are at a critical fork in the road. “Brand Crisis” and “Apple” are not terms usually read in the same paragraph, but perhaps this is a sign of things to come.

When the Fake Steve Jobs is more in touch with the market than the Real Steve Jobs, Apple may have officially jumped the shark.

But if there ever was cause for you to question your sanity for avoiding the first-generation iPhuss, then let this be an affirmation: buy an iPhone and you’ll be exactly as cool as Paris “Born Again” Hilton.

Here she is spotted by the paparazzi in her most conspicuous finery attending the “Sicko” premiere wearing sensitive green jungle attire and sporting the uber-trendy device, of course discussing things of great import with people of great influence. Either that, or she’s giving jailhouse tips to Lindsay Lohan.

Speaking of Lindsay Lohan, here she is sporting her own iPhone. aaargh! Will the assault of the vapid on Silicon Valley never cease?

Perhaps these are plants, mere props cynically designed to attract the masses. Maybe even personally signed by Steve Jobs, or part of some gift bag at a Planet Hollywood ceremony?

er.. well … maybe not. Anyway, the iPhone has now officially jumped the shark.

Sorry, Steve.  You used to be cool.

Yesterday’s launch of the Palm Foleo probably did not yield the expected huzzahs and praise that normally heralds a product launch from one of Silicon Valley’s product design luminaries, especially one by Mr. Jeff Hawkins. Palm chose to use Mossberg‘s All Things Digital conference in San Diego as a springboard for its media assault, but what should have been a watershed product launch was rapidly overshadowed by a brief chat between two billionaires. The criticism of the Foleo since the buzz started yesterday … and has been nearly uniform in slamming the device.

In fact, the jeers from the peanut gallery are rising to a deafening roar. Carlo Longino @ TechDirt thinks that Palm is done like dinner with this abortion of a product. Even (the fake) Steve Jobs thinks it blows. Much more damaging, though, the mainstream tech press (whatever that is) is joining the chorus: PCmag questions who will buy the thing, InformationWeek calls it a yawn. Matt Hamblen questions whether they did their research. This is actually one of the worst product launches from a large company that I’ve seen in quite a while.

What’s wrong with Palm is difficult to pinpoint. I doubt that, if you did your standard market research, you’d be able to plumb much support for a product like this. However, that’s also true of the original Palm Pilot, which launched on the heels of the death of Apple’s Newton in 1996. And let’s not forget that the Treo practically catalyzed the SmartPhone market all on its own. With these two incredible successes, Jeff Hawkins hasn’t exactly been given the opportunity to learn from his mistakes in being ahead of the curve.

But this time he might. The product smacks of founder-itis. This is an affliction common to mature tech companies and/or startups created by rich tech executives, where the brains behind past successes begin to tinker and approach new design problems, rather than ask questions about what it is that people want. In other words, did Jeff Hawkins run amok and create a big white elephant, simply to amuse himself? Did he sell dazzled co-workers on his vision that the Foleo is the “next big thing”? It’s apparent that they believe it is, given that resources have clearly been diverted from such projects as putting linux on the treo and revving the Treo’s design, which is getting pretty long-in-the-tooth.

The reality is that a company like Palm can only really effectively market one, maybe two, product lines at a time. If there’s a market for the Foleo, the product would be better served by financing, developing, and marketing this proclaimed “mobile companion” externally from Palm, just like the Treo. The Folio’s audience is probably going to turn out to be a LOT different from the Treo’s (one potential market is folks who want email and web on a cheap easy-to-put-away computing device — like seniors) and probably a lot less sexy.

Besides, the Treo (despite the fact that it’s a great product) has yet to really hit it’s stride. This is hard to remember when you visit Silicon Valley, where the Treo is practically ubiquitous. But find someone using a Treo in Europe or Asia (or on the Eastern Seaboard) and you’re just as likely to get struck by lightning.

Either way, the launch of the Foleo (careful to spell it correctly) is not the watershed event that was the Pilot or the Treo… so maybe Hawkins will finally have a mistake from which to learn.

-Ian.

Give people choice and freedom and they’ll pay. Try to sue your own frickin’ customers into oblivion and we’ll see you in bankruptcy.

-Ian.

—— http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/washpost/20030909/ tc_washpost/a47297_2003sep9&e=1 RIAA vs. the People Tue Sep 9,11:06 AM ET

By Cynthia L. Webb, washingtonpost.com Staff Writer

The Recording Industry Association of America ( news -web sites )made good on its promise to prosecute Americans who engage in the illegal downloading and trading of pirated music, filing 261 copyright violation suits yesterday.

“Legal actions have been taken on a sporadic basis against operators of pirate servers or sites, but ordinary computer users have never before been at serious risk of liability for widespread behavior. The RIAA said that’s the point it’s underlining with the unprecedented legal action,” CNET’s News.com reported.

But in an editorial today, the San Jose Mercury News said the RIAA’s legal campaign is bad policy: “Suing your customers, as a long-term strategy, is dumb — even if they bring misfortune upon themselves. … The suits are the unfortunate, but predictable response of an industry that failed to see the Internet until it stared it in the face. Since Napster ( news -web sites ) first appeared four years ago and declared the death of the compact disc, music CD sales have fallen more than 25 percent. A generation of music fans don’t think twice about copyrights, which they associate with overpriced CDs and parasitic studio execs.”

According to the Mercury News editorial board, the music labels “won’t win back many of those customers until they make their full catalog of tunes easily accessible over the Internet, in formats that people want, at prices they’re willing to pay. That’s starting to happen — Apple Computer ‘s iTunes Music Store and BuyMusic.com are offering songs from 49 cents to $1 — but the offerings are limited. The music studios are still dragging their feet. For now, the big labels hope to scare people straight, particularly parents, since copyright owners can sue children for theft.”

The New York Times pointed out an even larger implication of the RIAA suits: “With the club of lawsuits and the olive branch of an amnesty program, the music industry is waging a campaign against online piracy that relies on both public relations and economics to attack the idea that everything in cyberspace can be free,” the article said. “That will not be easy. The Internet sprang from a research culture where information of all kinds was freely shared. That mentality still resonates with the millions of Internet users who routinely download music onto their computers. But the emphatic message of the music industry’s two-step program announced yesterday is that the days of plucking copyrighted songs off the Internet without paying for them are numbered.”

An Escalating Fight Against Ordinary People

Thousands more lawsuits against fileswappers are expected in the coming months as the RIAA looks to make examples of the worst digital pirates: People accused of downloading and sharing on average more than 1,000 illegally downloaded songs, thanks to Gnutella ( news -web sites ),Kazaa ,Grokster and other popular file-trading services.

The Washington Post said the “legal offensive aims to stem the tide of online song sharing launched by Napster in the late 1990s, and it is likely to strike fear into the hearts of parents who have not closely monitored their teenagers’ computer habits. That’s because the lawsuits were filed against the holders of Internet service accounts, regardless of who in the household was responsible for swapping the songs.”

The Los Angeles Times said the “cases — the first of thousands the labels expect to file in federal courts — mark a turning point in the music industry’s four-year battle against rampant piracy on the Internet. For the first time, the recording industry is training its considerable legal firepower on individuals, not the companies profiting from the public’s hunger for free music,” The Los Angeles Times said. “One quirk in the process, though, is that the defendants named aren’t necessarily the people using file-sharing networks. That’s because the Recording Industry Assn. of America’s investigation identified only the people whose Internet access accounts were being used to share files. They might be the parents, roommates or spouses of the alleged pirates.”

The RIAA suits hit the young and old and stretched across economic lines too. Among those sued is the Bassett family from Northern California. ” Scott Bassett said neither he nor his wife used the family PC in Redwood City, Calif., for music, but their teenagers and dozens of their friends do. Had he known what was going on, he said, ‘I would have pulled the plug,'” The Los Angeles Times reported, quoting the former junkyard operator who, like other targets of the suits, was confused about what to do. “Do I really need to hire a lawyer? Can I just call them up and say I’m sorry and give them back all the music that was downloaded? I’m just a little guy,” Bassett told the paper.

The Bassetts were darlings of the media yesterday, appearing in a number of articles, perhaps since they illustrated so nicely the ironic twist of the suits, which can target people who own the ISP accounts, not necessarily the file-swappers themselves. “I can’t believe this,” Vonnie Bassett , mother of a 17-year-old file-swapper, told The San Jose Mercury News. “To think I might actually have to pay money to these people. I think it’s the stupidest thing that the recording industry would do this.”

Lisa Schamis , a 26-year-old New Yorker, “said her Internet provider warned her two months ago that record industry lawyers had asked for her name and address, but she said she had no idea she might be sued. She acknowledged downloading ‘lots’ of music over file-sharing networks,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. “This is ridiculous,” Schamis said. “People like me who did this, I didn’t understand it was illegal.” Neither did Nancy Davis , a Sanol, Calif. schoolbus driver. “From what I understood — and I’m not the most computer-savvy person in the world — I thought it was becoming legal,” Davis told The San Francisco Chronicle. “I’m completely shocked by the whole thing,” Heather McGough , a single mom of two children from Santa Clarita, Calif., told The Los Angeles Times. She “figured that the music-sharing services that survived after Napster was shut down must be legal. She said she let a friend install a program for the Kazaa file-sharing network on her computer so that she could listen to music — songs she already owned on CDs — while she worked.”

Paying the Piper

So what’s in store for those snared in the RIAA lawsuits? “The RIAA suits seek an injunction to stop the defendants’ file sharing, as well as damages and court costs. Copyright law allows for damages of up to $150,000 per infringement — in other words, per swapped song,” The Washington Post noted. More from The Boston Globe: “Accusing the defendants of copyright infringement, the music association is requesting statutory damages of $750 to $150,000 for each song, bringing the potential liability of some file-sharers into the millions of dollars.”

“Individuals, I’m sure no matter who they are, simply don’t have that kind of money,” Atlanta attorney Doug Isenberg , who specializes in Internet law, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “And there’s no way possible the RIAA can sue even a meaningful number of people, because there are tens of millions of potential defendants.”

Perhaps some good news for those being sued: The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the “RIAA has been settling for less: Yesterday, it announced $3,000 agreements with fewer than 10 people whose Internet service providers had received subpoenas.”

RIAA President Cary Sherman told The Los Angeles Times “he would welcome cases going to trial because it would help establish for the public that file sharing is illegal. The proceeds from any trials or settlements will be kept by the RIAA to cover the cost of its anti-piracy campaigns, he said, rather than being used to compensate labels and artists. Several lawyers warned that the RIAA’s amnesty offer may be a bad deal. Those who apply for amnesty from the RIAA must confess their past transgressions, but that won’t protect them from being pursued by music publishers, independent labels or even federal prosecutors.” The RIAA is offering amnesty to those who admitted to file-swapping, erase their digital libraries of songs and sign a notarized promise not to do it again.

Criticism From the Usual Suspects

Critics of the RIAA’s move were vocal in their objections to yesterday’s developments. The Electronic Frontier Foundation clearly hates the idea of the lawsuits. “Does anyone think that suing 60 million American file-sharers is going to motivate them to buy more CDs?,” EFF Staff Attorney Wendy Seltzer asked in a statement . “File sharing networks represent the greatest library of music in history, and music fans would be happy to pay for access to it, if only the recording industry would let them.”

Bill Evans , founder of Boycott-RIAA.com , told The Baltimore Sun that the lawsuits amount to a witch hunt. “They are trying to intimidate people and to stop file-sharing because they can’t control it,” Evans said. “If that’s the case, we believe they should take over a portion of the market and make it more affordable to people.”

Elan Oren , chief executive of file-sharing site iMesh , told The New York Times that “rather than filing huge lawsuits, record labels should work with file-sharing services to devise a method of compensation in exchange for legally distributing their music over the peer-to-peer networks. But record companies say creating a compensation system for file sharing — for instance, imposing a tax that could be redistributed to copyright holders — would be extremely difficult.”

“Michael McGuire , research director at the GartnerG2 research firm, said the threat of legal action needs to be just one part of a more widespread effort by the recording industry to deal with illegal Internet music swapping,” The Chicago Tribune said. “Are hard-core traders going to see the light and see the error of their ways?” McGuire told the paper. “I don’t think so.”

RIAA Strategy Paying Off

The music industry’s tactics, while controversial, have made a dent to some file-swapping. “Still, there is little agreement about whether the industry’s tactics are having much impact on music piracy. The recording industry has cited data from research firm NPD Group that estimated the number of households downloading music from the Internet declined 28% to 10.4 million in June from 14.5 million in April, around the time music companies began publicizing a campaign to target individual file sharers. Music companies have also been trying to wean music fans off file-sharing programs by licensing their songs to commercial music sites like Apple Computer Inc.’s Music Store,” The Wall Street Journal reported. “But services like Morpheus, LimeWire and Grokster all report that usage of their services has grown, especially as students have returned from vacation.”

But the music industry has a long way to go before it stamps out piracy. “From the rise of Napster until today, tens of millions of people have started trading songs, movies and software online through services such as Kazaa with little thought for the legality of their actions,” News.com noted. “Even as the threat of Monday’s lawsuits loomed, more than 2.8 million copies of the Kazaa software were downloaded last week, according to Download.com , a software aggregation site operated by CNET News.com publisher CNET Networks . Indeed, a recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 67 percent of people downloading music said they did not care whether the music was copyrighted or not.”

The Future of E-Music?

Apple’s iTunes is being held up as a successful, legal alternative to secret file-swapping. The pay-for-play service has been a hit with music fans and everyone from Sony to Microsoft is looking for a comparable match to compete with the service. Apple’s service has sold 10 million songs since its launch in May. “Legally selling 10 million songs online in just four months is a historic milestone for the music industry, musicians and music lovers everywhere,” Apple head Steve Jobs ( news -web sites )said, according to BBC News Online, which noted (how ironic, in light of the complications of the RIAA’s legal suits) that the 10 millionth song sold on the service was “Complicated,” by Avril Lavigne .