Since Apple announced the 3G upgrade for its (now) venerable iPhone, I’ve been chomping at the bit to get one. I’m not a line waiter, so I ordered one through AT&T’s National Business Ordering department at the uncommitted price ($399 for the 8GB). I received the phone yesterday and was ready to activate it by the evening.

Since my employer, who pays my phone bill, and I have decided to part ways things have changed with regard to my mobile needs. I decided to activate the phone on my family’s account instead. With any other phone this would not be an issue at all. With iPhone things are different.

I called up what AT&T calls “Customer Care” at about 7pm last night to begin what I thought would be an easy process, after all I had the phone in my hand and it wasn’t configured for any account as of yet. Then things went wonky.

The first thing the agent said was “How did you get this phone?” I told her that I had ordered it via phone on my business account, but that I now needed to add a line and activate it on my family’s consumer account. She said that no one could order a phone and that they all had to be purchased at an AT&T Core store or from Apple. I retorted that I did exactly that and had the phone in my hands. She then asked for the SIM card number, did some things, and the iPhone magically came to life. Then my father looked at his phone and saw “SIM Card not Provisioned. Error: A05″. Not good.

It turns out that the representative had turned the iPhone into my father’s phone. This had the knock-on effect of deactivating my father’s SIM making it useless and leaving him without a phone until he could go to AT&T to get a new one. This would not do, as one could imagine. After making a brick out of both my iPhone and my father’s phone, the representative told us that she couldn’t add a line or activate iPhones. Nice of her to think of this before causing pain to the customer.

We then were transferred to the “Add a Line” department where they informed us that they couldn’t activate an iPhone either. This happed at about 9pm. I gave up.

This morning, I went to the AT&T store here in Redmond to get a new SIM card, which they happily provided. The man at the counter told me he couldn’t activate the iPhone or do anything else on the family’s account, which is based in North Carolina, because it was out of his market. He said I could call customer care and that they could activate the phone instead. This did not bode well for the day’s activation activities.

I came home and got on the phone to customer care once more. I got a person in their Austin call center who was convinced that I had picked up the phone at a retail location. No matter what she was told. This made me laugh with disgust. She transferred me to another person who talked to his supervisor and tried to make good, but he was told that he had to find the source of the order first. He couldn’t figure it out and transferred me yet again to Small Business Care to see if they could sort it out. This is when I met Don Blackmon. After 44 minutes on the phone I had finally found who I thought was my savior.

Don was a fabulous fellow who really did want to treat me with respect and believe what I had to say. He pulled up my order quickly (as quickly as the always slow AT&T systems would allow at least) and listened to my story. He tried to pull up the family’s account, but was hit by the barrier that exists between different disparate systems within AT&T.

He dug and dug through documents and procedures that are on the company’s Intranet to find a way to make it happen. Apparently there are certain things (which were not named) that could have gotten him fired, but actually helping a customer was apparently not one of them. After the digging he finally found a nugget of gold buried in an iPhone 3G provisioning document under a section entitled “Consumer Customer Requesting to Add a Line” that gave another phone number to call. We called.

Don stayed with me as we went through the standard voice prompts of AT&T’s customer care obfuscation mechanism (aka menu system) and were finally connected to a representative. She gave the same spiel as the other consumer representatives I had talked to and told us that I would have to talk to sales to add a line, but that she wasn’t sure that they could activate the iPhone since that had to be done in-store. I told her that I was in Washington and that the account owner, my mother, was in North Carolina and it would be nigh-on impossible for us to be in the same place at the same time to get this done. She went off to talk to someone and Don had to leave to handle other issues.

She came back and told me that sales could add a line, but they weren’t sure that they could activate the iPhone even if I gave them the SIM number. I had to go, since I had been on the phone for 1 hour and 45 minutes and I have an actual life with things to do and blog posts to write about my experiences. She gave me the sales department’s number and wished me luck.

There will be more to this story, I am sure, as I continute to try to activate a phone. Thanks Don Blackmon of AT&T’s Small Business Care department in Joplin, Missouri for doing what you felt was right and taking the time to make the customer happy. He is doing his job very well where others in his company are falling over left and right. Let’s hope his example propagates. More in a bit.

Well well well. It seems that AT&T hasn’t learned anything from the sham that was iPhone 1.0 activation for corporate users. Instead of allowing anyone to switch to the new iPhone 3G, they have decided to impose the über ridiculous 2 year upgrade cycle on everyone. At least they’re equally distributing the pain.

I inquired of friends at the company about how to switch my current Blackberry Curve to the new iPhone. They informed me that since the line I am using was opened just over a month ago, I am not eligible for an upgrade at this time. I’m on a corporate plan with 20 or so lines all sharing the same pool of minutes and every device has unlimited text and data, so we aren’t a tiny customer for them — not huge either, but good solid monthly revenue.

Not only am I ineligible for an upgrade, but they insist that they cannot simply add the iPhone 3G to our existing pool of minutes. Every iPhone must use the iPhone plans. Period. If a small company has an account like ours, that apparently means nothing to AT&T. My friend then suggested that I either open a new line or purchase the iPhone at the noncommitted price of $699 (!). Ridiculous. Again.

Of course the guy blamed Apple for all of this nonsense. Published reports say that AT&T and Apple no longer have a revenue sharing deal and that AT&T just buys the devices outright from Apple. Therefore Apple no longer has a say in the plans or deals that AT&T makes with its customers. Not to mention, Apple has completely ceded the customer’s initial experience with their device.

So in summary, our company gives AT&T a decent amount of recurring revenue and are, in most ways, their ideal customer that delivers very high ARPU month over month…for years. They aren’t willing or able to provide us with a device that we want because of politics and flawed marketing. If I were to open a new line under their new iPhone plans, they would actually be making LESS money from us than if they just added it to the pool. Go figure.

AT&T continues to not value its existing customers in any way. They force us to use devices for two years, regardless of whether the device was purchased on contract or not (mine was brought in and not purchased from AT&T). They are willing to lose money in the name of strange policies and contractual “obligations”. When will they learn that the customer just wants what they want and they should give it to them so that they can preserve their market and improve their reputation?

Read this recent email from Netflix:

This makes exactly zero sense. How could removing a somewhat useful feature, that some portion of their user base must use, “improve the Netflix website for all our customers”?

When they launched this feature a while back I thought it was great and showed very forward thinking on the company’s part. Customization of queues based on different family members or users within a household is a great idea, and removing this feature without apparent replacement is quizzical at best.

Finally, when you are getting rid of something maybe you should actually copy edit the email that goes out to insure that it makes sense. Amazing. Enjoy your new, improved Netflix!

I’m getting sick and tired of everyone knowing how to “fix” Twitter. There is little use for this speculation. They don’t need help, but they do need time and space to do what they need to do. The general health of a service has little, if anything, to do with input from users. The fact is that no one knows what the problems are outside of the company and no one will know them unless they get a job there. The site goes down and the world blogs about it, tweets about it, screams about it in podcasts and no one cares. Even Techmeme put a one-word post from the intrepid Michael Arrington that said “Twitter!” on their front page.

The latest of these “thought leaders” happens to be someone named Nick Halsted. On his blog, he outlines an overly complex, ill advised strategy to fix Twitter. Please note that if your “system” involves a graph that looks like this, you are probably doing something wrong:

People who live in glass houses…

Stop talking about it and go do some work, for heaven’s sake.

I wrote this as a comment to Nick O’Neill’s excellent post on the ridiculousness of the recent Gillmor Gang podcast on “Data Portability” between some of the Internet’s most vocal folks:

This is a discussion about protocols. The only difference between talking about “data portability” and email is that SMTP was designed by some geeks in a back room and this one is being designed by some geeks with loud mouths.

The truth of the matter is that they want this “ecosystem” to thrive outside of just Facebook, et al. They want social networking features everywhere because they think that it will make money. But it is truly only an echo chamber thusfar and the users just don’t care.

The fact still remains that no one has yet made a dime on any of this except the founders of these companies and they aren’t likely to any time soon. Protocols are all nice, but until there is a true financial incentive for companies to implement them they are only specifications.

Moreover this discussion is as much about egos as anything. The “Gillmor Gang” is only the tip of the iceberg of folks that think their opinion actually matters. It mostly doesn’t. The “rank and file” users of these services plain don’t care if they can sync Facebook, Myspace and Bebo or even use their profiles off-site. So this is, in my opinion, a bunch of self-important folks talking about nonsense in their ever-expanding fight to remain (become?) relevant.

The Internet is so much more than the sum of its parts or the protocols that it is based on. It is itself a community tool and has been since its inception. This seems to have been forgotten by these folks.

This is a great day for homosexual couples in California. The rule of law has prevailed and freedom for homosexuals is now guaranteed in that state as the Supreme Court overturned laws against Gay Marriage. But this is not why I want to write tonight.

The argument against the ruling by groups like the Family Research Council and others mindlessly twist the facts and take advantage of people who only partially pay attention to this issue. They assume that if you are prone to disagree with Gay Marriage that you will agree with them and don’t really give people all of the right information, or even allow them to intelligently consider the issue. In their press release, the FRC’s President Tony Perkins said the following:

“The California Supreme Court has taken a jackhammer to the democratic process, and the right of the people to affect change in public policy. Four judges discarded the votes of 4,618,673 Californians who approved the state’s ‘Defense of Marriage Act.’ Voters understand that children should not be deprived of a mother or a father.”

This is patently absurd on the face of it. The Supreme Courts of this country exist not to forward the will of the people. They are meant to be independent of the opinions of the populace. In this instance the court in California decided to overturn laws voted on by the people as unconstitutional. They did not say “the people were wrong”, but they said “the people are not lawyers”. This does not constitute a “change in public policy” as Mr Perkins says, but is an enforcement of existing public policy. The courts rarely, if ever, take an activist stance for the sole purpose of activism.

Law is difficult and nuanced. There is a reason that people go to school for many years and study as much as doctors to get Law degrees. These judges are some of the most seasoned lawyers in our country. To dismiss them out of hand demeans their status and their knowledge of the law in the favor of cynicism and sound-bites. This is irresponsible at best and reprehensible at worst.

I’m in no way saying that the opponents of this ruling don’t have a right to complain. They do. They should, however, take into account the institutions of this country and the intelligence of those that would hear them. Groups like the FRC claim to support families, but this sort of action only teaches children to blindly absorb what they hear and not think for themselves. Instead they should form an argument based on the facts as they see them instead of mindlessly attacking the court.

I’m here at the Pangea Day screening at MSStudios’ Studio C. We’re awaiting the start of the event. The folks in LA just recorded the intro for the one-hour summary show and the set looks AMAZING. I’ll be updating this post periodically with my thoughts about the event.

If you aren’t at a screening, I hope that you will check out the streaming feeds on pangeaday.org and get around the “global campfire”

[11:06AM PDT]

It amazes me that this whole thing came out of a TED talk. The cynicism of the world, especially my little geek world, forgets the power of people so often. This event will no doubt be panned by skeptics and cynics alike, but the importance of things like this should not be questioned.

[12:00PM PDT]

The first hour of the show was absolutely stunning. The organizers of this event have done an amazing job finding films that really do get to the heart of the human spirit. From Carl Sagan’s wonderful story “Pale Blue Dot” to a film about soccer balls made from condoms. They have focused on “human universals” — emotions that we all share the world around like Love, Hope and Sorrow. Helping regain perspective and see the world as it is.

[1:00PM PDT]

This hour was much more intense. It started with a montage of people all over the world talking about their dreams and was followed by Gilberto Gil singing. After that, things were about identification of differences and why we might open our minds to ignoring differences.

Then we saw an amazing film from a soldier who simply told a story about a car accident in Iraq. It was simply a sequence of renactment photos with his voice, but the power of his words was unquestionable. We are all capable of feeling for those that we imagine are our enemies. We are all the same and there are no “accidents” in war.

Every few months there are bloggers out there who seem to completely miss the point and see something of a power grab by our friends at O’Reilly Media. Daya Baran of Bay Area WebGuild penned the latest piece of incendiary nonsense. His post is a rant about how O’Reilly strongarmed WebGuild’s apparent sugardaddy Google into dropping their support for their upcoming event entitled “Web 2.0 Conference & Expo”.

He quotes an email from Google that explains the situation and why they cancelled their sponsorship, notably this sentence: “I asked you three times to change the name of this weeks event in order to maintain the relationship and since you did not budge we will no longer support Webguild.” This says it all to me. Google made a decision not to piss off a strong ally in O’Reilly. That’s it. Baran’s claims to the contrary are patently ridiculous.

Baran says “O’Reilly contacted these old-timers and asked them to demand that WebGuild change the name of our event and conference and to cease supporting WebGuild.” This is probably not the case. Even if it were, it was more than likely in deference to the work of WebGuild that it would have happened. Keeping things under the radar and avoiding the PR flack it got the last time they tried to enforce their intellectual property rights would be in their best interest, after all. Instead of suing WebGuild for using their trademark, they may have just decided to take control of things from the back-end and get the event cancelled. This course of action would not be ideal, but certainly more gentle than previously.

The big deal behind all of this is not O’Reilly’s “model which is based on withholding knowledge and gouging attendees, companies, and sponsors,” as Baran puts it. They are obligated by trademark law to enforce their trademarks. Trademarks become null and void as soon as they are ignored and try as they might, opponents of the “Web 2.0″ trademark will never stop O’Reilly from doing this. The company is a business and as such is required to do what’s in the best interest of its shareholders, not what’s in the best interest of the community at large. If O’Reilly’s intellectual property becomes worthless, that would be one of the worst things possible for the company and its shareholders.

One final note. Baran chose to get personal with my friend Tim O’Reilly. He said, “Presently, O’Reilly is promoting keynote speaker Saul Griffith calling him a “genius” and “a scientist and engineering polymath” without disclosing the fact that he is his son-in-law. When I met him, I cordially introduced myself, however, O’Reilly was a despicable individual. He is a dinosaur whose time has past.” This is completely useless and poor behavior. I wish that Baran would retract this statement and issue an apology. I understand that he is angry over the situation, but this action by Google, and possibly O’Reilly at some low-level, was most certainly not personally targeted against Daya Baran or any of the folks at WebGuild. O’Reilly is nothing if not a professionally run organization with very smart people who don’t deserve that kind of treatment.

“O’Reilly Hate” is nothing new to the company. Any company with a measure of success is bound to have similar issues, but this is getting ridiculous. They are a company and do what’s best for them. Sometimes that means being completely open and sometimes that means they have to make hard decisions. O’Reilly has been great at building community and they will continue to, but people shouldn’t take that as owning a piece of the company or even having a say in what they do.

You may have read my earlier piece on Clearwire’s strange bandwidth management practices. Shortly after I wrote it, a representative from the company called me to see what they could do to make my life better. I informed him that I needed better data regarding what they saw as my overuse of bandwidth such as usage figures, time of day, etc. I also told this gentleman that I would have preferred a phone call or email prior to their intervention. He agreed to “look into it with engineering.”The following day, he called me back and basically told me the same thing that the Level-2 technician had said earlier that week: Clearwire couldn’t give out “proprietary usage information” to me - even though it was my account I wanted usage for. He also said that he noted my account so that prior to intervention I would be notified and given a chance to more closely monitor traffic.As a carrot to them, I offered to closely monitor my traffic for the following month and send them the data for comparison with what their systems saw. He didn’t really seem to understand this, but said he’d call me back in a month for an update.I received a second email from Clearwire today:

A message from Clearwire - Immediate Response Required: Second Email 555335

Mr. Aaron Huslage, We have recently notified you regarding an issue with your account.  An excessive amount of Internet traffic on your Clearwire connection is negatively impacting other Clearwire customers in your area.  These issues can be caused by a virus or spyware on your computer, by having a wireless router with no password set or by using peer to peer/file-sharing and FTP programs.

Until the issue is resolved, we have modified your connection to the network.  Please contact us at 888-657-1456 as soon as possible so we can assist you in resolving the issue.

I haven’t gotten a phone call or email from the gentleman who called me, level-2 support or engineering at Clearwire, but my account has once again been throttled. This isn’t unusual in this day and age, since good customer service is more often than not just placating the customer and moving on with business as usual, but my situation is particularly interesting.

You see, shortly after my second phone conversation I unplugged my router from the Clearwire modem and switched back to Comcast until my DSL line is installed tomorrow. I left the modem on, but disconnected all ethernet from it. There is simply no way that I can be sending any traffic on this link. No bandwidth should be being used at all!

I was mistaken. Apparently at some point during all of these fits of changing things around, I switched back to the Clearwire modem. My opinion of the company has still not changed, but in all fairness I am using the bandwidth.

Indeed this is a conundrum and I hope that someone from Clearwire will see fit to refund the money I’ve spent over the past two months and cancel my account. I’m not particularly angry or surprised over this, but my bandwidth needs are such that I cannot handle incompetence from my provider or inconsistency such as Clearwire has shown over the past 9 months I’ve been a customer of theirs.

Wireless technology is great, but the wireless ISPs out there need to step up and play the same game as others in their industry or they will continue to fall like flies.

Comcast, one of the US’s largest broadband providers, issued a press release today in which it said it would “undertake a collaborative effort” with BitTorrent  ”to more effectively address issues associated with rich media content and network capacity management”. This is in response to their recently being caught with their ”hand in the cookie jar” of bandwidth management with the BitTorrent and eDonkey file sharing protocols. They have said that they will work to find new ways of managing bandwidth (while still creating an obviously tiered network).

Comcast has done a clever thing with this press release that I have yet to see anyone chime in on. The company has effectively shifted the focus of the debate on bandwidth management away from the core issue of network investment and on to the overlayed problem of file sharing as the source of their woes.  The real issue is that they won’t upgrade the network, not that people are sharing files.

Comcast refuses to upgrade its network to meet the needs of its customers. This is the ultimate in turning “no press is bad press” into reality for Comcast. They have effectively said “we’re not the bad guys here, those file sharers are making you all pay” and put the onus on their own customers to change their behaviors. The customer is never right in this day and age with broadband service. The customer pays Comcast, but Comcast is apparently ceding it’s responsibility to give good service. In lieu of that they punish their customers for using what they pay for.

Where are the customer advocates? Who is yelling about this instead of regurgitating the press release and saying what good boys and girls these people are?

Start a company that buys electrical generating equipment, installs it on or near customers and then sells them the energy that you produce. SunEdison has done this. Great idea. There should be hundreds of these companies.

I just received this lovely email from Clearwire, my current main broadband provider:

Dear Mr. Huslage,
 
While monitoring our network, we noticed that an excessive amount of internet traffic from your Clearwire connection is negatively impacting other Clearwire customers in your area.  These issues can be caused by a virus or spyware on your computer, by having a wireless router with no password set or by using peer to peer/file-sharing and FTP programs.
To prevent further strain on Clearwire’s network resources we are actively managing your connection per our terms of service.  Please contact us as soon as possible at 888-253-2794 so we can help resolve the problem.
 
For more information on Clearwire’s Acceptable Use Policy, please follow this link:
https://www.clearwire.com/company/legal/aup.htm
 
Thank you for your prompt attention.

This is enough to chill my bones and make me think about going back to dialup. I called the number, gave my account info and the tier 1 person sent me on to the 2nd line person to be dealt with. The 2nd line person said that my bandwidth had been degraded to aid other users in my area and I was emailed to see what I might be doing on my link. He said that engineering had been looking at my neighborhood and noticed a “large continuous upload use over the past 5 days.” I haven’t been running Bittorrent, a big server or any large file transfers over the past 5 days. I have Macs at home, not prone to the usual virii or trojan horses that might occur on an open link.  My wife plays World of Warcraft, but that’s hardly a big bandwidth hog. I informed the gentleman of these things and he promptly “fixed my modem to the Clear Premium bandwidth level” from what he called dial-up speeds. On top of this, he said that per the Acceptible Use Policy I could “do this” 3 times, but that I was okay because this was the first time.

I pay Clearwire $50 a month for the privilege of getting a 2Mbps wireless link, but I can reasonably expect to see the same modem speeds that I got in 1993 on average. Clearwire turns around and tells me that I use the thing too much and they are really turning the screws to make me feel the burn and stop using what I pay for. They try to appeal to the needs of my “neighbors” on the network. Then they have the hubris to threaten me. Forget you. I pay for service at a certain level which you never actually deliver on a consistent basis.

This sort of behavior has become commonplace in the ISP world and is very disconcerting. Back in 1993 when I helped found a large-ish ISP in North Carolina, we always strived to have the customary 20% overhead in Internet network bandwidth while maintaining at least a 30% oversubscription rate. Today’s ISPs seem to be running at somewhere greater than 100% oversubscription with no overhead in Internet network bandwidth (this is anecdotal, I have no clue what the real numbers are).

What has changed to make this happen? Bandwidth is cheaper than in 1993. Infrastructure is cheaper than in 1993. The wireless access points that Clearwire uses are even cheaper than when they started 3 years ago. The consumer has to pay the price for poor node distribution, low Internet network bandwidth and lack of infrastructure in general. The customer’s needs require them to utilize their connections fully, often through much of the day yet ISPs continue to fight to not do the investments necessary to insure customer service levels.

I sure am happy that I ordered the ADSL2 line from my friends at ISOMEDIA today. I hope they have more sense than Clearwire, who is clearly treating the customer as a liability.

I live in one of the most well connected communities in the United States. Redmond, WA is home to my employer Microsoft and countless other large bandwidth-hogging companies. One would think that with all of these high-tech workers in the city of 51,000 it would be pretty easy to get good, reliable broadband at my house. It isn’t.

It appears that in this place, with these consumers and this large number of smart and affluent people that I live in a broadband wasteland. I have had Comcast cable modem since moving here in the middle of last year, and it has been sub-par at best. The quality of the link is good (as measured by upstream signal-to-noise ratio of 34db) and the bandwidth averages about 3mbits down and 256k up at non-peak times, but during peak times it slows to a crawl of less than 1mbit down and 56k up. This sort of service level is intolerable for someone who uses their connection as heavily as I do. I have asked Comcast for different service tiers, had their service tech come out and replace my cable line and even said a prayer over the cable modem. Nothing I have done has had any measurable effect and short of contacting the local authoroties I don’t see what else there is.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to try using our local wireless provider Clearwire, which has been getting good press in the area. I went to Best Buy, bought a modem and hooked it up straight to my laptop. After opening my browser, filling out the signup form and giving away the keys to my bank account I was allowed to use my precious Internet. The link has been solid, if a little pokey for my tastes, at about 2mbits down and 256k up. The fact that the service is wireless means that latency can spike from 50ms to 200ms on a simple ping test over a period of 5 minutes. This spikey behavior can cause havoc on streaming video and large file transfers. I’ve had a few problems, but it’s overall just OK in my opinion.

I’m off to try other options. Over the next few months I hope to try out ADSL2 service from both Verizon and Covad. This should give me the full gamut of what’s available in the area without moving house. I’m not sure what else to check out, considering my upcoming optional accessory and his financial responsibilities. I’m happy to listen to ideas, and stay tuned for your man-on-the-street opinion.

I’m looking to get hold of some OLPC XO laptops for prototyping ideas. If anyone knows of a person who could facilitate this within their organization it would be much appreciated.

Tune in to CNN on Saturday or Sunday or almost any other afternoon for that matter and you’ll see Ballot Bowl, which CNN describes thusly:

CNN Ballot Bowl: CNN brings viewers rare, in-depth access to the people, places and events impacting our world and our lives.

To the naked eye this sounds pretty cool. You get to hear the candidates “Live and unfiltered” and commentary from “The Best Political Team on TV” to boot. Wow. Nice, huh? CNN has taken time out of its busy schedule to show you all the candidates’ stump speeches and press conferences without bothering to edit them. CNN is also letting you hear the latest polls and what “Ordinary Americans” think from their Election Express bus. They must be giving you more information, right? Wrong.

Stump speeches aren’t supposed to give their viewers information. They are designed to excite the audience into action. They are speeches that have been honed and sculpted to get the audience to go out and canvass or give money or evangelize the candidate. They are the ultimate in preaching to the choir. There is no new information given in the typical speech given by any candidate.

The simple act of CNN giving the candidates access to the national TV audience has changed what the stump speech used to be. They still don’t usually convey anything new, but they do speak to a larger audience than those gathered in the room to hear it. Candidates have recently come to “respond” to what the issues of the day are, because they have a national audience in what is essentially an intimate and local affair. This is the case of the Uncertainty Principle in action every day.

I don’t really think this is bad per se, but I do think that it further dilutes the messages of the candidates and contributes to fatigue in the electorate. The US voter is already tired of the elections, and now CNN is helping to make it worse. They aren’t helping people make a better decision for their favorite candidate. They aren’t letting the viewer know any more about what the candidate stands for. They are misrepresenting what they are doing as journalism and informative. The typical US voter doesn’t care about the election until they walk in to the voting booth. They don’t even really make up their mind until their finger is on the button. So piping rhetoric into these addled brains is not really helping much.

This idea about how Obama has no platform to run on and is just spouting hope for hope’s sake is a perfect example of what happens when people hear the same stuff over and over. Obama has all of his position papers and white papers posted handily at his website, the same as all the other candidates. The reason this incorrect rumor persists, I think, is because people hear McCain and Clinton talking about it all day every day on shows like Ballot Bowl.

This just proves to me that TV won’t really set you free. If you’re a voter in the US you have an obligation to vote not only with your heart, but with your mind. You should know who you are voting for and educate yourself independently of any media sources. In the hour you sit down to watch Ballot Bowl, you could read papers on all 3 of the big player’s web sites about an issue that you care about. You could actually know more about these people and what they say. You would be less ignorant and susceptible to rumors like the Obama one and make up your own mind. Go read and understand. Here are the links:

• Barack Obama
• Hillary Clinton
• John McCain

Enjoy yourself!

I am continually amazed at the inability to add basic things to the UIs of media players. I’ll confess to being a mac head and as such iTunes is my preferred program for listening, but I like to play the field once in a while to help remind me why it is so good.

My employer’s operating system comes with what is billed as their best media player ever, and indeed it does work well for playing media, but it should also do a few other things. A good media player organizes your songs intuitively and also allows you to save off frequently listened to tracks and streams. Windows Media Player seems to fall down in the library arena. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to save the stream for KEXP Radio as a favorite. Here’s the UI as it’s playing:

There are no options evident. Even right-clicking shows me a little menu with nothing obvious to add this stream to my library or save it as a favorite.

 With iTunes, however, things are quite different. Here’s the UI:

Here we see a convenient listing of radio stations and all I need to do to allow iTunes to remember it is drag the track to the Music tab on the left. It’s now saved forever. Anything that is playing can be done this way. Dragging the stream to “Library” on Windows Media Player doesn’t do anything obvious for me.

I could go on and on about the hideous UI tragedy that is Windows Media Player. Microsoft keeps wondering why it’s not “winning” at stuff and often overlooks what’s right under its nose. Users hate interfaces that make no sense and don’t do what they want out of the box. You can study this stuff in a vacuum all you want, but the real test is comparative/competitive testing with real-world scenarios. Fear not your competition, but learn from them and make something even better.

I didn’t want to put the info about our coming baby here, but if you are interested please check out baby.hact.net for pictures and talk from Chrissey and I.

Basically. the reason we are driving ourselves to death is because there aren’t any incentives not to. So we remove barriers to ownership of cars, while charging based on usage. People would drive less, the roads would be paid for by the users of them and cars would naturally become more efficient.

What if the road and the car were intimately linked? What if the car negotiated with the road to determine how much your trip was going to cost based on carbon usage? What if, given this new economic model, the car cost was amortized based on how much you drove (the road pays the car manufacturer too)?

Firstly, Microsoft is not evil. Microsoft is not organized enough to be evil, in and of themselves. They don’t really have the capability of being evil at this point even if they wanted to be what with the constant audits by legal entities and governments. This company has a monopoly on desktop operating systems and office suites, but that monopoly does not extend any further. There is no hegemony in servers or enterprise systems. There is certainly no monopoly in Internet properties. Microsoft might have had some evil tendencies in the past, but that was then and this is now.

Secondly, Microsoft has proven that outside of the areas within which it dominates they cannot execute at all. Even leaving the humble Internet offerings aside, there is not one single shining star where Microsoft has competed in an overwhelming fashion. Windows Mobile is a modest success, built on the back of other modest successes in the server business. Exchange server might be the de-facto corporate email standard, but it doesn’t hold a candle to other high-volume email servers out there that service consumers’ billions of email accounts. Office Communications Server is a failure in the VOIP arena even with the new version’s great improvements. I could go on, but you get the point. Microsoft follows the market in every instance.

Thirdly, Microsoft is consumed by process. There are myriad processes for doing anything at Microsoft. Some days I’m surprised I don’t need a hall pass to go to the bathroom. Certainly any company that has 80,000+ employees needs processes to survive, but this level of process fetishism is absurd by any measure. Everything has checks and re-checks, code gets reviewed sometimes 4 or 5 times before it can be checked in to main branches. Network changes require two or three triage processes to get done. There are these daily scrum meetings all over the company to triage bugs and tickets and assign the work. There are meetings about meetings. There are documents and forms to be filled. I want someone to come ask me where my TPS report is, or if my 27B/6 in triplicate has been submitted. I understand that taken singularly, any of these processes can be justified by many people and I’m not suggesting that everything go away, but process in this respect kills creativity and stifles the work that people are here to do.

Finally, Microsoft is risk averse. All of the previous points culminate in this one statement. When a company becomes afraid of change, it dies. When Microsoft decided that it would follow the market instead of create the market, it started to die. Some would say that started with Windows, but I disagree. Windows was not a “me-too” product, like so many of the company’s current lineup today - it was the natural evolution of computer interface and as such was bound to happen. I think the company tipped over after it acquired its monopoly in the desktop space. As soon as that happened, the world became much smaller for Microsoft as it attempted to duplicate enterprise applications and become dominant there. Microsoft decided that it would survey the market and make “me-too” platforms upon which it could expand in the future. The problem with this approach is that they are just modifying existing markets and no longer working on innovation. Microsoft became insular and not forward thinking. Sure there were parts of the company that continued to expand on these bases, but true innovation was left to ISVs and startup companies which were then purchased by Microsoft in order to fuel its expansion. Leave the risk outside of the company and you assume little of it yourself. If you have no risk to take, the employees become cogs in the wheel, ready to do service but not listened to when their ideas might help.

Microsoft will continue to fail in the markets that it competes in. It will struggle to regain relevance in the technology world as long as it continues to make the decisions it makes. I have no answers for these problems only suggestions, and those often fall on deaf ears. The Powers That Be say I couldn’t possibly understand what goes on here, since I’ve only spent 6 months looking at the problem. They become defensive when I suggest that we have these problems, and even more reticent to talk when I try to suggest solutions. Microsoft is dying a slow, painful death. In 20 years, this company will cease to be and one of its competitor will rule the roost. To make the same mistakes again.

http://www.finslippy.com/finslippy/2008/01/down-the-rabbit.html

This is me to a tee. I am currently in the Microsoft wait-it-out rut…preparing for a U-Turn into something else sooner or later.

There are many places to see roundups of today’s Steve Jobs keynote from the Macworld Expo in San Francisco, so I won’t bore you with the details. I have one major takeaway from today’s keynote. Apple may have lost the thread with the iTunes Store.

Apple created the iTunes Store in a market that was originally hostile to its very existence. The record companies had no clue about how to market music online and Apple had a white-hot device that set the standards for usability, size and a whole host of other features for an entire market segment. Apple created a great webapp , then called the iTunes Music Store, and DRM system called FairPlay and integrated it with their iTunes music player. They shopped it around to the record companies with a price-per-song (99 cents) already in mind. Apple knew that at that price they had no prayer of making much money off the store, but they also knew that selling tunes to the market at that price would make them rich off the sales of iPods. iTunes Music Store was, in essence, a modern loss-leader. This created an entire market and almost every other music store online has followed Apple’s lead in their attempts to compete. Apple wrote the business model for online music sales.

The progression from music to television and movies was deemed by most to be inevitable. Apple soon started to make contacts with the licensing departments at the major TV and movie studios, but their success has not been nearly so easy. Up until today Apple only sold a handful of movies from Disney properties (due to Steve Jobs’ position on the Disney board, this was a no brainer), and those haven’t exactly been blockbusters for Apple. The TV shows were initially a huge hit, but as downloading bootlegged copies for free has become easier these have trailed off and Apple has started to lose major partners in this business (NBC/Universal most notably).

I see the relative failure of movies on iTunes as a failure of Apple to recognize the fundamental differences in markets. The business models are similar between music and movies, but the perception of market realities is not. Music is cheaper to produce and cheaper to sell than movies, with a huge catalog of new and old content that seems to grow almost exponentially year over year. Movies are very expensive to produce, expensive to market and the number of available content tends to be fairly static. The investment in both time and money that the consumer must make to consume a Movie is much much greater than that of Music. This doesn’t even take into account the complexities of marketing different content to different segments of the market (TV series on DVDs vs. Movies, for instance).

The movie studios are narcissistic and vain. They see their industry as very important to the entire world and will not listen to those with new ideas about how to do business. Music companies have been long suffering from their loss of control of the content they produce, they are inherently more willing to listen to those with new ideas about how to make their business viable again.

Apple clearly thought that their success in music would translate directly into a success with movies. They saw their ties with behemoth Disney as being golden. The vanity of the movie studios was not something they saw as a threat to Apple hegemony. Apple’s vanity, ironically made them blind to that of the movie studios. While Apple waited for other studios to come around and let them sell movies on iTunes, others like Amazon and Vudu were more flexible with their terms and allowed the movie companies to set prices and terms for movie sales and rentals online. The going rate for movies online was no longer even a negotiating point for Apple.

So now we’re at today’s announcement of rentals via iTunes. Apple, coming from its position of weakness, had no way of negotiating good pricing or terms for its rentals. They are releasing a product that is overpriced and very restrictive. People don’t want restrictions on how they use content. They want to pay $2 for a movie rental, keep it for however long they want it and watch it in as many sittings as they can.  I think Apple knows this. They had a chance to release a product that would succeed, instead they released a product that is more or less an already proven failure. Apple has ceded the market for video to their more flexible (weaker?) competitors and in so doing have created a situation that is untenable.

Apple should have waited for one of their competitors to fail in the movie game and then gone back to the negotiating table with ample evidence that the pricing and restrictions on content were not proven by the market. They then would have had the upper hand at setting prices and allowed the market to have a new movie rental experience. Instead they released a me-too product that is only differentiated by the ability to watch movies on its own devices.  This is a missed opportunity and one that I believe Apple will come to regret in time.

Friends will know that I am by no means bashful about politics. I am a big democrat and a couple of weeks ago I really decided I loved Barack Obama for president this time around. So tonight I was thrilled when I heard that he had won the Iowa caucuses. This bodes well for him, since many had written him off as running for VP.

The Democrats really did take the spotlight from the Republicans today. The Republicans looked like complete clods with no direction and their only real message being Fear. While the Democrats came out looking like they had a clear direction, a good group of candidates with some real differentiation, but all with a “unity” and iconoclastic message.

I just got home and was reading what Salon had to say about the whole thing, and noticed this in the middle of the article:

Wow. Interesting. There has been a TON of talk regarding Bloomberg in the press tonight. All of this was no doubt floated by the Republicans and pre-planned in the event that they ended up looking like complete strange people. They need to move the focus off of their failure to capitalize on months and months of press coverage and muddying up the waters with something like Bloomberg is right up their alley. The Republicans are running scared, and that’s really good to see again.

I’d like to send out my best wishes to Om Malik whom I’ve been working with only a few weeks. We’ve just started to get to know each other, but I know our relationship will grow quickly. For those that don’t know Om suffered from a heart attack on December 28.

 Best of luck to him and the staff at GigaOmniMedia.

Sit down at your TV and turn it on. Welcome to one of the most engrained behavioral activities of modern life. It’s also totally obsolete. There is no technical reason to channel surf anymore. Your TV likely has a set-top box that also happens to be a very capable computer. All that power is being wasted on displaying poor quality “guide” data that is patched on top of a linear channel stream filled with content you don’t want to watch. Explain the efficiency of this system. The interaction model is completely useless in this modern age. There is not a single technical reason, aside from lame excuses like “the infrastructure is already there” or “people already know how to make this work”, to keep the current system in place.

The original reasons for TV Channels were technical in nature. Analog signals had to be broadcast in one linear stream over the air on a particular frequency and guardbands had to be placed around those frequencies to make sure one channel didn’t interfere with the other. With the advent of digital distribution and transmission technologies (ATSC, DVB, Digital Cable and Digital Satellite, and others) these frequency limitations have been taken care of. Modern transmission and distribution systems have more in common with computer networks (either wired or wireless) than they do with traditional analog systems. We now stream huge amounts of data around the air and through our cable and telephone systems every day. Companies have built the largest one-way data network ever built.

When you think of it that way, this network has a ton of possibility for innovation. No longer is a TV station able to broadcast only one stream of video and audio, but now they can send out multiple streams at differing bandwidths and for different purposes. No longer are cable systems only able to give you 99 channels of programming, but 500+ with video-on-demand and raw IP networking on top of that. DSL and PON lines to your house send in not only data but TV. All of the purpose-built cable head-end equipment from behemoths like Motorola and Scientific Atlanta is quickly becoming obsolete. We don’t need to constantly stream 500 2mbit/second TV channels 24 hours a day. This one size fits all model is completely useless to most consumers.

So the technology exists to better utilize the over-the-air spectrum we have available along with the huge bandwidth available on telco and cable lines. The rise of TiVo and DVRs proves that people watch TV shows and not channels. They are happy to find a show they like, sit down and watch it without having to go page-by-page through a huge list of junk they don’t care about.

Consumers are also happier if they can watch what they want, when they want it. They don’t want to operate on some faceless network’s schedule, they have busy lives and can only watch when they have time. Timeshifting is important. The availability of many shows from various Internet sources, both legal and not so legal, has made timeshifting easier even though it has drastically lowered the quality bar. Bittorrent counts as one of the most popular ways to download TV and movies and that says a lot about what many consumers want.

Another indicator that TV channels are outmoded is the rapid decline in revenue that the networks have seen over the past few years. People simply aren’t watching channels for long enough every day to make it worthwhile to advertisers. The current system of revenue is based on what networks call Dayparts. This system assumes that by chaining together programs in creative ways on the schedule, a viewer will be less likely to surf and thus become a better target for advertising. The traditional argument by larger broadcast networks for the failure of this model is that people have more choices and are fleeing to cable to get what they want. I think this argument may have held true 10 years ago, but now I think the reason is that technology is starting to catch up with how the viewer wants to watch TV. The viewer simply doesn’t care about the TV network they are watching. It’s not even close to the first thing they think about when choosing what to watch. They care about the program, and now they have the ability to shift things around to meet their time and preferences better. A consumer never even thinks about sitting on one channel for hours on end, but they do assign value to the brand of that channel and what it represents in terms of programming style and editorial value.

I’ve established that the current TV channel system is not cutting it. Consumers want to be able to watch what they want, when they want it with a minimum of fuss. The DVR has gone a long way to fixing this problem, but the EPG and linear distribution mechanism still get in the way.

Let’s think about what it would be like if the user was presented with an ontology instead of a list of channels with programs. The user could search genres, topics, user generated tags, transcripts, descriptions or titles for the programs that interest them. They could watch a small preview of the show and then if they like it, watch the whole thing. Each show would have a branding associated with it that would replace the current channel. This brand would be the network that produced or distributed the show. The program would still have advertisements, but they would be sold more like Internet ads (by impression, click-through or action). At the end of the program, or if the user got tired of watching, they could choose to switch to something else or continue on with similar programs from that network. If the consumer just wants to sit down and watch programs, they can go into a more casual mode that uses their stored preferences, ratings and viewing history to dynamically generate a channel or set of them that is just right.

This interaction model could be very powerful if properly researched and tested. My hunch is that many people would be more than happy to throw out their existing set-top in order to watch this. This is more than just video-on-demand or network DVR, it is a sea change in how people use television. It turns TV into a better platform. It allows for new business models, expanded revenue and high quality distribution with better bandwidth efficiency and higher consumer conversion.

This is technically possible to accomplish now. A sample system could be set up in fairly short order by simply recording the programming of the channels on the air now, leaving in the commercials and promos. It would be a platform to develop the system with real consumers and real advertisers. Networks would still retain their branding and promotion methods, which will remain important to the viewer.

TV needs a kick in the rear end. The business models are horribly broken and now the technology exists to make things better. Consumers are ready and the networks are ready.

What is required to move one’s career out of the slumps? How important is it to “move up” or “onwards” in a career path? Is one’s career a reflection of their persona or simply a means to an end?

My thoughts of late have centered on these things. I’ve been a System Administrator since 1993. That’s pretty much my station in life, it appears. I’ve tried doing other things: I’ve been a CTO at a failing company and an infrastructure consultant for Internet companies. But the key is that both of these forays into other career territory have ultimately just brought me back around to being a sysadmin in some way, shape or form. I’m really pretty good at it, not the best but not the worst. I’m proud of my accomplishments and resume. Some would say that from a career standpoint, I’m at the top of my game with a primo Microsoft job.

The problem is that I really hate it. I just don’t care anymore about what I’m doing. I sit at work all day and wish that I was doing something else. My job consists of mainly editing configuration files and dealing with silly politics that have nothing really to do with me. I have a ton of ideas about what Microsoft should be doing (who around here doesn’t), but I know that my ideas, like almost everyone else’s, will ultimately not be heard. I feel like my career has stopped. I make the same amount of money (on par) as I did in 2001. I have approximately the same amount of influence over the company I work for as I did then. I have zero creative outlets at my job, so I get home and I have tons of cool things that I want to do, but my mind is adrift by then and I end up slouching on the sofa and IMming with friends and being a slob. It’s very hard for me not to feel sorry for myself.

I deserve more for myself. I deserve to have my ideas heard. I deserve at least some creativity in my workplace so that when I come home from work, I can feel free to spend time with my wife (and the baby in June) and not think about it. I deserve to make more money. I deserve to be happy and fulfilled in my home and in my work, not just one or the other.

Now what?

There is a major flaw in current reporting around Internet video stemming from the thought that online video (and video on demaind) and the technology used to watch them are inextricably linked. I’ve been using many services lately trying to figure this out and I’m nowhere near an answer.

I have a Tivo HD, Comcast DVR, AppleTV, DVD player and a PC all hooked up to my tv and a Vudu on the way. I use my iPod for music that I buy chiefly off of iTunes. I’ve tried some movies on the thing, but I simply don’t care. It’s not something I’ve been interested in using for video very much. 

The Tivo wins for accessibility for me. It’s easy to use and I can get Rhapsody and Unbox downloads on it in addition to my normal tv/movies from cablecard. I hardly ever use the awful Comcast DVR anymore as there is simply no compelling reason for it to exist. The AppleTV is great for my iTunes library, but to be honest with Rhapsody on the Tivo I hardly ever use it. The PC is great for viewing net content like Netflix streaming, ABC TV shows and the occasional BitTorrented something, but the experience is far from compelling and I highly doubt that a non-geek would touch it. The DVD player still sees quite a bit of use from my Netflix shipments, but ideally it will go away at some point. We’ll see what the Vudu brings to the table. I’m very interested in how it performs and if the video quality is up to snuff. The interface looks quite nice and the remote is nothing short of revolutionary. 

So I’m a high use person, but I still mostly watch Tivo when I want to watch something. Maybe it’s because I’ve been a Tivo user for as long as there has been Tivo, or maybe it’s because the experience is simply amazing. But none of it has to do with the DRM restrictions that Forrester has been fond of quoting for some time. While I dislike it from a philosophical point of view, it doesn’t really matter to me on the practical level. These things have been worked out to the point where they are more or less invisible to me as a consumer of media. If I were to try to take any of this content with me, then I would certainly be more annoyed.

All of these things are helping to evolve entertainment media, but the content companies should learn to understand that fearing them is no longer useful. The delivery medium and how I use the content are not ways of further monitization, they are annoying consumers. They are not even linked.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking for the past few days about production values on the web. The advent of social networks, video sites, podcasts and blogs has made them really take a nose dive. We’re back in the age of high-school video production classes, horrid writing and reverb saturated audio. This effect has made it acceptable, if not desirable, for the so-called professional media to embrace as their main aesthetic quality. It’s as if for you to be “cool” you have to make junk productions.

The fact is that in this day and age there is absolutely no excuse to make a poor quality product. The equipment I can buy in my local Best Buy is leaps-and-bounds better than the stuff I could buy 5 years ago. Even a cheap microphone has great quality. A couple of hardware store clip-on lights can properly illuminate a “set”. This stuff is simply not difficult. The only thing it takes to make a video production of very acceptable quality is a decent microphone, camera and some lights.

Take a look at the work of Ze Frank’s “The Show” to see what I’m talking about. He used a decent mic, camera and the lighting available to him in a smart way. It took him all of 10 minutes to set up the day’s shot. Sure, he actually took some time to write what he was going to talk about and memorize it. Sure, he took some time to edit things well. Sure, he’s a very talented and funny guy by nature. But none of these things is difficult to achieve if you’re a reasonably creative person.

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