With sincere apologies to Dana Carvey, it's time for the return of the Grumpy Old Blogger.
So, here's what I hate about social networking. Consider the following scenario, one I've experienced many times. I see a friend I haven't seen in, say, a month. Maybe two. And I ask how she's doing.
"Well," the reply snaps back, "if you ever looked at Facebook, you'd know that I went to California last month."
"Oh, really? Where in California?" I inquire with half-hearted interest.
"It was all on Facebook. I put up all of my pictures, and I had a link to my blog. You need to get on Facebook once in a while!"
Really? Do I? Or could we just have a pleasant conversation about this right now? Do I not get to hear about the trip to California because I wasn't compulsively combing Facebook every day, waiting with bated breath for updates and clicking through a bunch of fuzzy photos? Is that how it works now? We can only communicate virtually - - and usually one-to-many or many-to-one -- and any attempt to chat in person about something that happened more than two hours ago is just an annoyance. Get on Facebook, will you?
No, I won't. At least not very often. Back in my day, people chatted with each other face-to-face, or they talked on the phone, or they e-mailed. (Actually, back in my real day, we didn't have e-mail, either.) We didn't have fancy "social networking" with walls and Tweets and mobile apps. We could actually avoid each other if we wanted to and only communicate when we felt like it. And we liked it! We loved it!
Actually, other than talking on the phone (not my favorite pastime), I did love it. I'm still an e-mail guy, even though it's the 8-track cassette of communication. I love a long chat at the pub or in my living room (which, I suppose, would be vinyl). But I'm kind of ambivalent toward social media, with its weird unwritten rules and subtle pressures and little hashtag codes everywhere, and with its unabashed, childlike, look-at-me ethos. Hey, I told you I was grumpy.
At least there's the office, where I'm not supposed to look at Facebook, and where I only use Twitter when it's absolutely required. Work is a great excuse for ignoring people online. (Yes, I realize that most people use social networking to waste time at work, but again: grumpy.)
Now, though, Salesforce.com apparently wants me, my employer and everybody else in the business world to embrace social networking...at work. Seriously? Apparently, outspoken -- and often hilarious -- Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff has some sort of vision that involves companies embracing social networking (sensible enough) and employees forming social networks at work.
Oh, great. So, I'm going to have to check some sort of work Facebook now to know what's going on at 1105 Media? (Probably not, actually, as we don't use Salesforce.com -- as far as I know.) Instead of just talking to a colleague or sending or receiving an e-mail about a project or a meeting or whatever, I'll have to check a "news feed" or somebody's "wall" or "Tweet stream"?
Brilliant. I'm very much looking forward to this technology becoming pervasive so that my boss can ask me where a story is and I can reply, "What story?" And he can say, "The one I assigned you on your work Facebook wall that you didn't check." To be fair, my actual boss wouldn't do that. But you see what I mean.
Salesforce.com is a great company in a lot of ways. Its pure-cloud approach is pretty innovative and definitely refreshing. It walks the cloud walk while most other companies just talk the talk -- and not even all that well, at that. Benioff is a quote machine, and his company executes superbly. There's a lot to admire about Salesforce.com.
But please, please, Salesforce.com, spare me -- spare us all -- the tyranny of making social networking part of our everyday work experience. The curmudgeons among us will be forever grateful.
Do you want to mess with social networking at work? Say why or why not in the comments section below or at lpender@rcpmag.com.
Related:
Posted by Lee Pender on August 31, 2011 at 8:03 PM11 comments
Google and RIM are down. HP is out. Right now, Apple has a stranglehold on the tablet market not seen since...well, not seen since Microsoft took control of the market for PC operating systems, which it still has.
HP last week just surrendered to Apple and the iPad, killing the TouchPad (and thus bringing it to life for the first time, but we'll get to that) and announcing that it's done making devices with the webOS operating system on them.
In fact, it's done with webOS, period (mostly, although not entirely). Actually, what HP really said was that it doesn't even want to make computers anymore, which, of course, led to another round of speculation that the PC is dead or dying.
It isn't. Look, tablets and smartphones are popular. We get that. But in a world in which some organizations are still using Windows 2000 and lots are still running Windows XP, the PC still has plenty of life to live. Companies will upgrade their PCs to Windows 7 eventually -- and then possibly to Windows 8 -- because PCs are what they use for business.
They just are. Most IT departments aren't huge fans of revolutions or sudden paradigm shifts, to resurrect a phrase from the '90s. They don't keep the same schedule that vendors and innovators keep. They can't. Technology might move quickly, but enterprise technology adoption tends to happen glacially in a relative sense, for lots of reasons.
Let's put it this way: We're betting that probably 100 percent of people who start an office job today (if anybody's actually hiring) will get a standard-issue company PC. Maybe some of those people will get tablets; a good chunk will get smartphones. But how many will get just a smartphone, or just a tablet, or just a smartphone and a tablet but no PC? Our sincere guess is zero.
Maybe PCs won't sell the way they did five years ago (actually, we're pretty sure they won't). Maybe consumers really will lose some interest in them in a significant way -- although having an actual keyboard is still important to a lot of people. But in terms of function and familiarity, the PC will still be the base computer of business and probably consumers for some time to come. How long? A long time. Years, we're guessing. Double-digit. Check up on us in a decade and tell us if we were wrong.
Anyway, back to HP. The stock market pummeled HP after last week's kerfuffle, and all kinds of pundits expressed shock that the company would abandon webOS and the TouchPad after a relatively short period of time.
Of course, the funny part of this story is that after HP decided to discount the TouchPad heavily and sell the most basic version of it for about $100, the thing started flying off the shelves like candy at Halloween. The once unwanted, relatively unknown (despite Russell Brand's best efforts) device is suddenly a hot commodity.
(By the way, Russell, you're not fooling anybody. We know that, like the editor of this newsletter, you're a supporter of West Ham United, so you're not checking English Premier League scores on your TouchPad. No, you're watching the Championship after West Ham's relegation last season. Don't try to put a brave face on it. We're all struggling.)
The TouchPad fad won't last, as we all know, because the TouchPad is only big right now because it's cheap. HP knows that, too. And HP knows a lot more than that. It knows that "tablet" and "iPad" are nearly synonymous now. It knows that Apple, the world's most valuable company, owns the tablet market and is starting to crush its competitors in pretty much every market for consumer electronics it enters.
And HP knows that none of that matters, not to HP. Not anymore. Somebody there figured out that HP doesn't need to be one of the many pilot fish trying to pick morsels from Apple's shark teeth, at least not as far as tablets are concerned. (Getting out of the PC business altogether...well, that's probably a topic for another post entirely.)
HP wants to reinvent itself as an enterprise company. That's music to our ears, and Microsoft should be streaming the same song HP's singing. Microsoft's future -- and its partners' future -- lies in the enterprise, not in flailing around and failing to imitate Apple. Let Apple have the kids, the hipsters and the geeks. Shoot, let Apple have consumer computing. There's money to be made elsewhere.
Seriously, what would happen if Apple just ruled the tablet market forever and ever? If Microsoft never even came out with a tablet? If HP never sold another $100 TouchPad? For a reasonable facsimile of an answer, let's look at the market for desktop operating systems, the one Microsoft still owns with something of an iron grip.
Who were the main competitors -- the really big ones, not the small-time companies from the '70s -- Microsoft crushed en route to making Windows what it is today? IBM, Apple, maybe Linux? Those sound about right. And they're all in business and actually doing pretty well (or very well, in Apple's case).
Microsoft destroyed OS/2 pretty effectively, and, yeah, IBM suffered after that. But the company adapted, beefed up its consulting business, focused on the enterprise and eventually dropped almost all of its consumer presence nearly a decade ago when it sold of its PC arm to Lenovo. IBM lives on, even in a Windows-dominated world. IBM is doing fine.
Apple, of course, nearly did go out of business, but that was more a problem of leadership than a technology problem. Talk about adapting, though -- Steve Jobs came back (with Bill Gates' money in hand) and only managed to build the world's most valuable company on the foundation of some truly stunning innovation and some near-revolutionary marketing.
And how did Jobs send Apple rocketing past Microsoft? By winning the OS game and killing Windows with the Mac OS? Nah. He did it by moving into areas where nobody was doing anything particularly interesting and doing things that were massively interesting. Case in point: the iPad. And iPhone. And iPod (remember that?). The Mac is pretty much an afterthought these days.
As for Linux, it's very much alive and well, and plenty of Linux distributors remain active and profitable. Sure, Linux doesn't have a massive desktop presence, but it has huge market share as server software. It didn't kill Windows, and it didn't have to -- in fact, it didn't even have to compete all that effectively on the desktop (and doesn't).
Apple got the loot in the tablet market. At this point, it has no serious competition. Eventually, its would-be competitors, as HP has, will figure that out and give up trying to climb Mount iPad. That's what good companies do: They admit defeat when they have to, adapt and move on to something else. They carve out niches. They break new ground and listen to their customers and the market. They don't try to be everything to everybody or sink money into a product hole that's only going to get deeper.
HP is a good company. HP is doing the right thing in dumping the TouchPad. Short term, there will be some pain resulting from this decision. Long term (and isn't it nice when a company actually considers the long term?), it makes a lot of sense. Let Apple have the tablet market. HP is moving on.
What's your take on HP dumping the TouchPad and webOS? Leave a comment below or send it to lpender@rcpmag.com.
Related:
Posted by Lee Pender on August 25, 2011 at 10:33 AM5 comments
When I was in high school (in the early '90s; I'm not that old, no matter how grouchy I tend to be), I had to write an essay for a contest. The topic was as follows: "Agree or disagree: The world has changed more in the last 100 years than it did from the time of Christ until the end of the 19th century." I agreed. Wholeheartedly.
I won't (and can't) reproduce the essay for you here. My guess is, given my disdain for brevity, I wrote a lot, and the judges didn't read all the way to the end of my ramblings. At some point, they probably gave up; in any case, I won the competition. There's a lesson in there somewhere: If you can't beat them (whoever "they" are), grind them down. (Also, growing up in a small town means that there are fewer competitors to beat in an essay competition.)
But I digress. A lot. The reason I thought of that essay tonight for the first time in 20 years is that Steve Jobs announced his retirement from Apple on Wednesday evening. That means that a lot of people are going to write over the next few days about Steve Jobs, the future of his company, his failing health and his legacy.
All of that will be appropriate, of course, but that's not what I want to write about tonight. I'm here simply to say that with the departure of Jobs from the industry -- he'll still stay on as Apple's chairman with Tim Cook coming in as CEO, but it seems pretty obvious that Jobs really is stepping away this time -- another of the great figures of technology is effectively ending his career as a mainstream executive.
And here's where that high school essay comes in. You'd better believe that the world has changed more in the last 111 years or so than it did in the couple thousand years before that. The automobile, the airplane and the microprocessor -- among many other inventions -- have seen to that. And we've just sort of gone on from there. People like Steve Jobs have led the way.
I don't need to tell you what Steve Jobs has meant to the technology industry. What we all should think about today is what he (along with Bill Gates, and Scott McNealy, and John Warnock, and Mitch Kapor, and many others -- maybe even Larry Ellison) has meant to the world. Steve Jobs has fundamentally changed the way we entertain ourselves, the way we communicate with each other, the way many of us do our jobs, and maybe even the way we think. And that goes for those who have iWhatevers and for those who don't.
He's one of the people whose picture will someday appear in textbooks (probably iTextbooks), if it doesn't already. He's a pioneer, a titan of industry, a luminous figure not just in technology or in our modern world but in all of human history. Oh, yes. They all are. All the big names are.
This generation of innovators and entrepreneurs, this first true "computer" generation -- these are our Washingtons and our Jeffersons, our Gutenburgs and our Wright brothers. Without these people, our lives would be radically different; for one thing, many people reading this wouldn't have jobs, or at least wouldn't have jobs as rewarding and interesting as the ones they have today. (Yeah, work can stink anywhere, but technology is generally a pretty darn cool industry.)
Of course, Steve Jobs is still with us, as are many of his generation, and this isn't meant to be an epitaph. These people will move on, continue to innovate, continue to influence others and maybe even save the world (thank you, Mr. Gates). They'll all still stay rich, too, so there's no need to thank them too much. They've had their well-deserved recompense.
No, this little blog entry is meant only to be a reminder for us all to step back from our harried lives, our stressful jobs and our light-speed industry to realize that we've living in a time unparalleled by any other in human history, a time of creativity, innovation and prosperity that for thousands of years our ancestors could never have imagined. And it's a little reminder to tip our caps to the people who got us here, one of whom is Steve Jobs. Good luck, Mr. Jobs, with whatever comes next.
Related:
Posted by Lee Pender on August 24, 2011 at 11:53 AM4 comments
Darn it, Microsoft, you're going to ruin the whole thing. Well, you won't be alone -- after all, you're certainly not the only vendor to suffer an outage of cloud-based applications lately. But every time the sky falls and the cloud goes down, it hurts the whole cloud computing model.
This week's outage seems especially bad, not so much because of how long it lasted (although it was hours, apparently), but because of what actually went down. Office 365, Microsoft's long-awaited, almost-brand-new online productivity suite, was part of the crash. Office 365 is meant to be the successor to BPOS but only seemed to live up to the last three letters of its predecessor's name this week. Oh, and if you wanted to stay on BPOS and not move to Office 365, too bad. Office 365 is coming to BPOS users -- if Microsoft can keep it up and running.
The other piece of Microsoft's cloud that came down -- in an unrelated incident, apparently, although we can't decide if that's better or worse -- was Dynamics CRM Online. Now, granted, that might not be Microsoft's biggest hosted offering and it doesn't necessarily have the same impact as Office 365, but Dynamics CRM Online is one of the few facets of the (actually very good) Dynamics ERP and CRM offering that Microsoft actually seems to be actively trying to sell. While the ERP suites kind of gently rock along in Redmond, Microsoft is pushing Dynamics CRM big time.
And the hosted version, Dynamics CRM Online, is definitely one of the company's high-priority hosted products and is unquestionably the main attraction among hosted Dynamics applications. CRM is high-profile stuff by Dynamics' standards, and it looks bad when Microsoft can't manage to keep such a hard-sell hosted offering consistently available.
(As a side note, but not an unrelated one, a company called Nimbula had great timing in announcing this week its Nimbula Director 1.5 product, which lets administrators tie together geographically distributed clouds with a single set of permissions and policies. The infrastructure-as-a-service platform, as Nimbula calls it, is big with cloud service providers. Run by some ex-Amazon employees, Nimbula is already serving customers that want to be mini-Amazons.
"The interest has been heavy from service providers," Jay Judkowitz, director of product management at Nimbula, told RCPU last week. "They see what Amazon's doing and they say, 'We need to do that, too.' They're not saying we have to compete with Amazon. They want to do Amazon-like things but not compete with Amazon."
Of course, Amazon has had its share of problems with outages in the past, but what Nimbula is doing is pretty interesting nonetheless. End of digression.)
As is always the case, the anti-cloud hordes are hitting the blogs and message boards talking about how this latest hosted-software problem is just another reason why the cloud is a waste of time and money and doesn't really work. At this point, though, who's to say that they're wrong? OK, so the outages we read about might be drops in a bucket, maybe even a lake, compared to the hours and days and weeks in which cloud services run smoothly and work just fine. But drops make ripples nonetheless, and they make bigger ripples when they fall into high-profile cloud offerings. What these outages really do is show that cloud computing isn't ready to handle business-critical applications, and that in turn relegates the whole cloud model to fringe functionality within most organizations.
We at RCPU have always been supporters and proponents of the cloud. It promises cost savings to organizations and seems like a clean solution compared to the labyrinth of systems and applications that's often hiding inside corporate IT departments. We're starting to wonder why we like it so much, though. The cloud can be a real mess for partners who are trying to sell and make money off of it. It's a potential threat to IT professionals' jobs. Security and (obviously) reliability remain major concerns. And we can confirm that if your editor couldn't get to his e-mail or some other critical application for several hours during the workday, you'd hear the unprintable screaming coming all the way from Greater Boston, no matter where you are.
We in the punditsphere are always looking for the next big thing in technology (or the next big failure -- thank you, Windows Phone 7). As exciting as the industry can be, covering it every single day can actually get to be a grind. When a brand-new (actually old and repurposed, but that's another discussion) model like the cloud comes along, we tend to jump on it and hype it as much as we possibly can. Then, of course, we have to wait for it to fail a few times so that we can tear it down and talk about how it was nothing but a creation of hype, anyway, and really isn't all it's cracked up to be. Hey, it keeps people reading...we think.
And so we're in the tearing-down phase with the cloud -- although it's the service providers who are having the outages and providing those of us in the punditsphere with the fodder for destroying what we helped build. The truth about the cloud, of course -- as most partners and IT people already know -- is somewhere in the middle. Yes, it can be a cost saver. Yes, it's good for certain functions and applications. Yes, service-level agreements and choosing the right provider are massively important. And no, despite some of the success stories we've heard in recent years, it's probably not time to shift all of your business-critical applications to the cloud. It might never be. Maybe if we go years without an outage, if stories like this week's Microsoft blunders sort of fade away, the cloud will become the norm and nobody will think twice about outsourcing to it. But we're not there yet. Not even close.
How much do you trust the cloud computing model? What are you willing to outsource to the cloud? Tell your stories at lpender@rcpmag.com or leave a comment below.
Related:
Posted by Lee Pender on August 18, 2011 at 1:35 PM0 comments
Something just doesn't seem right here. We've long defended the importance of intellectual property and patents in this space, noting that IP is the lifeblood of capitalism. And we still believe that it is. But this is just weird.
Most of you know by now that Google's announced intention to buy Motorola for $12.5 billion isn't really about Motorola's hardware, manufacturing facilities or expertise in making smartphones. It's about patents -- pretty much entirely about patents. In fact, with Apple and Microsoft teaming up to try to whack Google with the patent stick and destroy Android, the whole smartphone business is now, apparently, about patents.
The idea is that if you're a smartphone maker and you're worried that you've violated a patent -- or if you're pretty sure that you have -- you can just buy a company that has a similar patent to the one you might have violated and then say, "See? We didn't do anything wrong. We own this patent. It's close enough." Or something along those lines.
It's that kind of patent-collecting frenzy that has one analyst -- who says he saw Googarola coming when nobody else did -- suggesting that Microsoft could actually swoop in and steal Motorola away from Google before the deal closes. OK, yeah, so it's just one guy giving his opinion. But apparently he's a dude who holds some sway because his story is growing legs.
At the same time, despite a fall from grace nearly worthy of Nevin Shapiro (seriously, check this guy out), Research In Motion doesn't have investors worried. Not really, anyway, because they figure that it's entirely possible that some other smartphone company will buy RIM...for the patents. So much for the supposed addictiveness of what was once called the CrackBerry.
Now, your editor is obviously not a patent lawyer (or a lawyer of any kind, for that matter), but something does seem amiss with this scenario. The reason we've always found patents important is because -- in the spirit of the law, we believe -- they encourage innovation and let companies protect hard-earned competitive advantages. In that sense, being able to buy up companies just for their patents, something we realize is hardly new, just seems to run counter to the purpose patents are supposed to serve.
OK, maybe Motorola isn't too upset about getting scooped up for a $12.5 billion price tag, and maybe its patents did serve the company well in the long run. But if Google really did violate Microsoft (and Apple, and Oracle) patents, it seems somehow unfair -- somehow counter to the idea of a patent, which we thought was supposed to be unique -- for Google to be able to cover itself by purchasing somebody else's inventions and then saying that the company is shielded from any sort of patent lawsuit with a sort of get-out-of-jail-free (or, in this case, for $12.5 billion) card. Rip off somebody else's stuff? No big deal. Just go buy some other company's IP and cover your Android. Suddenly, it was all your idea to begin with! (To be fair, we're not saying that Google did that. In fact, as a happy Android user, your editor really hopes that the company didn't. But the phrase "cover your Android" was just irresistible.)
The much bigger problem with patents, though, seems to be that companies can now patent just about any process, including tiny and mundane things that competitors almost wouldn't be able to help from "inventing" themselves at some point. ("Hey, what if we patented the process of dialing a phone number by pushing buttons!" OK, so that's not a real example, but evidently it's not too far off of how the patent process works.)
And here's where we're thinking that maybe Google might be mostly innocent, and that maybe the search giant's (or eventually Microsoft's) buyout of Motorola is kind of a necessary waste (to coin a phrase). If most of these patent-related legal actions amount in all practicality to annoyingly effective nuisance lawsuits, it seems unfortunate for the industry and maybe for the economy in general that any company would be compelled to spend double-digit billions of dollars just to fend them off.
We're guessing that patent lawsuits, if they really are just a hassle more than anything else, retard innovation rather than promote it, and we also suspect that they probably destroy more jobs than they create. Is that the purpose the lifeblood of capitalism is supposed to serve? It sure doesn't seem as though it should be.
What's your take on the patent wars in the smartphone industry? Leave a comment below or send your thoughts to lpender@rcpmag.com.
Related:
Posted by Lee Pender on August 17, 2011 at 1:15 PM3 comments
Many years ago -- well, back in the mid-'90s -- your editor slipped into a conference room where a demo of Office (or maybe even Windows 98) was taking place at a trade show. Somebody from Microsoft was showing how speech-recognition software would work integrated into Office and Windows.
Or not work, as the case was. The demo went about as well as those recent negotiations on the debt ceiling, and somebody in the audience asked when speech might actually be integrated into a release of Office or Windows. Not for quite a while, the Microsoft person said. It wasn't ready. Your editor strolled back to the press room and wrote a brief story on the whole deal -- and, for some reason, that little story got picked up all over the Web (such as it was back then). People were fascinated, we suppose, by the notion of speech recognition being native in an OS -- or even working at all.
Fast forward nearly 15 years, and...we're still waiting for speech recognition to really, actually, seriously work. Mary Jo Foley reported last week that Microsoft is trying to work all sort of speech capabilities into Windows 8, as well as into other offerings. Yes, Windows 7 handles some speech stuff, but not much.
We have a couple of problems with all of this, as you might imagine. First, although some people swear by speech software (and we do see its obvious application for blind people), your editor has never been able to get it to work. It's that simple. Beyond that, we're not sure we want to talk to our computers, TVs or whatever -- and we're pretty sure that we don't want everybody else in the office (or even at home) chatting away with the electronic devices. Typing (even on one of those little virtual keyboards) is fine, as is pointing a remote at the TV.
Microsoft wants us to touch our computer screens with Windows 8, something we find pretty bizarre (see "Windows 8: Put It on Tablets, Keep It Off PCs"), and now we're supposed to talk to our machines, too. We at RCPU say leave that stuff for spouses or pets or whatever. The day we start chatting with our PC is the day we realize we've finally reached the crest of insanity. Not that the speech-recognition software would work, anyway.
Posted by Lee Pender on August 15, 2011 at 11:15 AM1 comments
No, really. Apple is, for now, the biggest company in the world in terms of market value. What a turnaround this is from the dark days of 1997, when Bill Gates floated Steve Jobs a bundle of cash just to keep Apple alive and keep regulators away from Redmond.
Of course, Gates might have been better off letting Apple die. The Department of Justice came knocking on his door with papers, anyway, and now Apple has left Microsoft not just in its rearview mirror but in the dust created by its dust. So, what does this mean for Microsoft, once the Montreal Canadiens to Apple's Boston Bruins? (Yep, snuck another one in.)
Actually, nothing. Really, it doesn't mean anything. So Apple's bigger. The biggest. The best, No. 1. So? Microsoft still has boatloads of money and rakes in plenty of revenue. Microsoft still owns the enterprise in a way Apple likely never will. And Microsoft has a product line with massive breadth and depth. Why should Microsoft worry about losing ground to Apple when Apple makes most of its money these days from consumer devices?
Other than tablets, one important area where Microsoft really does seem lost, there's no reason for Microsoft to chase Apple in most of the markets where Apple rakes in the cash -- that is to say, markets for consumer devices. Windows is still the world's dominant operating system, at least on the desktop. Microsoft does need to solidify some sort of tablet strategy, but mobile? Personal media devices? Happy fun time computers? Microsoft has no business messing around with that stuff.
As we've said here before, Microsoft needs to focus on its business roots (even, or especially, with WP7) and leave the toys to the kids, no matter how much money the toymakers pull in.
Posted by Lee Pender on August 10, 2011 at 11:05 AM2 comments
Ugh, the summer is a beating. Oh, don't get us wrong; the weather in New England is great, and it's nice to be able to go swimming rather than having to shovel snow. That's not the problem.
The problem is that, as we've said in this space before, August is kind of pointless for anything other than going to the beach or maybe taking in a baseball game (again, not that there's anything wrong with that). What August definitely isn't good for is news, other than the terrifying fluctuations of the stock market. In the technology industry, August is more boring than an SAP product demo.
So, because he gets paid to do this sort of thing, your editor continues to harp on the fortunes, or misfortunes, of Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's lovely but unloved mobile operating system. This week, Charlie Kindel, pretty much the head of Windows Phone, revealed that he's leaving Microsoft to...well, to do just about anything else, we figure, although he says he's going to get involved with a top-secret startup of some sort.
And he will, we suppose, but his reason for leaving Microsoft sounds not unlike the classic defamed-politician line about "spending more time with my family." We're not saying that Kindel is defamed (although it couldn't help that the first three letters of his name are K-I-N), but Windows Phone 7? Well, let's just say that it's more infamous than famous. Ol' Charlie might just be getting out while the getting is good, or at least not as bad as it's going to be pretty soon.
Because not much else is going all that well for WP7. If you're left on the WP7 team at Microsoft, you have to know things are bad when your market share dips below the Samsung Bada's, Nokia is your OS's only lifeline, and Motorola -- not exactly the juggernaut it once was in the mobile space -- is saying that it might someday think about possibly working with you. Maybe. Under the right circumstances. What a ringing endorsement (see "Motorola 'Open' to Smartphone Partnership with Microsoft").
(Another terrible sign: Somebody out there thinks Microsoft should buy RIM. Yeah, because the fading BlackBerry and the non-starter WP7 would make a great team to take on iPhone and Android. That'll work.)
Just about all that is going right in the Microsoft space is the fact that it seems to own most of the patents used in the Android OS, meaning it's making more money off of Android than it is off of WP7. Actually, we kind of like this. It's sort of old-school Microsoft. Forget about innovation or clever marketing; siphon money off of the competition with legal prowess and ruthless business acumen. Hey, it has worked for Microsoft for the last 25 years or so.
Maybe Microsoft should just be some sort of holding company for Android patents and give up its other efforts in the mobile space. WP7 seems just to go from weakness to weakness. We hope that doesn't happen, though (and it won't, of course), because we really need stuff to write about in August.
Related:
Posted by Lee Pender on August 10, 2011 at 8:30 AM3 comments
Back in 2008, your editor was chatting with one of his wife's academic friends, a pretty well-known expert in politics. (Yes, your editor does sometimes take a break from talking sports to have a halfway substantive discussion about something important. But not often.) We were talking about the upcoming presidential election and discussing the fact that Barack Obama had endured a fairly bad month of August.
"Doesn't matter," this wise gentleman said. "Nobody remembers what happens in August."
Of course, he was right; the events of August turned out to be mostly inconsequential come November. It seems as though August is almost always inconsequential, though. Most of the continent of Europe takes vacation throughout most of the month of August -- an entirely sensible plan, in our view. Here in the United States, August isn't bad, if you don't mind brain-melting heat, television that's even more awful than usual and arguably the most boring period on the sporting calendar.
It's still better than, say, March, we'd contend, but August is mostly 31 forgettable, if not entirely unpleasant, days. September is when we get down to business again. School starts. Conferences kick back in. Discussions get serious at companies about budgets for the next year. Football cranks back up, and baseball actually becomes mildly interesting. September is memorable. September matters. September is real life.
Windows Phone 7 needs to be less August and more September. Yes, there is a point to this post, and this is it: There's nothing fundamentally wrong with Windows Phone 7; it's just that it doesn't matter. Nobody remembers it. Nobody thinks about it. Even the ditching of Windows Mobile for the new WP7 brand hasn't helped Microsoft's mobile operating system gain any sort of traction. Neither have multiple updates.
By most accounts, Microsoft's mobile fortunes are sinking, not rising. Last week's news that Windows Phone 7 had made just $613 million, and probably even less, in revenue for fiscal 2011 (that's a whole year) was another blow to the forlorn OS. Down in California, Apple was raking in $13.3 billion from the iPhone -- in a single quarter. And Android still owns mobile OS market share.
It actually gets worse. WP7's market share is 8 percent in the United States, and apparently much, much lower than that worldwide. And Microsoft's supposed saving grace, its deal with Nokia? Well, that's starting to look like two rocks trying to save each other from sinking in a pond. The picture is bleak.
Thus far, Microsoft has tried to take on iPhone and Android with a consumer pitch. After all, the company ultimately broke into the business of gaming systems in a serious way with the Xbox, which was once the object of cynicism and scorn (sometimes even here in this space). Why shouldn't Microsoft, with enough time and investment, be able to do the same thing with Windows Phone 7?
Honestly, we're not sure, except that Windows Phone 7, as we've said here before (see "4 Obstacles Windows Phone 7 Mango Must Overcome To Succeed"), is a pretty major departure from the iOS and Android interfaces. And as much as people who actually buy WP7 seem to like it, it's going to continue to be hard to convince the average smartphone buyer that WP7 really is a legitimate OS despite the fact that it looks very little like the other platforms everybody already knows. Retailer apathy and lukewarm marketing certainly haven't helped WP7, either. It's time for a change.
Nobody -- not Google and certainly not Apple -- does business applications like Microsoft. Nobody serves the enterprise the way Microsoft does. Nobody owns the enterprise the way Microsoft does. It's time, then, to move WP7 from being a lazy, forgettable August OS to being a down-to-business September platform. It's time for Microsoft to stop trying to be cool, stop trying to appeal to the youthful masses and go squarely for the business market it already owns with Windows and Office.
RIM's BlackBerry OS seems to be flailing and has left, we think, a gaping hole in the market for a serious mobile OS for business. Oh, sure, people can use their iPhones and Android devices for work, and they do (your editor certainly does). They work fine for business. But what if Microsoft started talking about how the iPhone is really just an expensive toy and how the Android phone is also a toy, but with more problems with malware than the iPhone has?
Don Draper -- so sorely missed this summer with "Mad Men" in a production delay -- likes to say something along the lines of, "If you don't like what people are saying about you, change the conversation." Right now, outside of the mocking trade press and a few industry bloggers, nobody is saying much of anything about WP7, and what a few select people are saying doesn't tend to be positive. Microsoft needs to change the conversation.
iPhone is neat-o for playing Angry Birds. Android is super cool for playing Angry Birds while inadvertently downloading a virus. BlackBerry is so 2006. Windows Phone 7 is the new standard for serious phone users, the sales road warriors, home-office workers and traveling executives who want to skip the kids' stuff and get down to business with a clean, simple, completely revolutionary interface. And it's from Microsoft, the enterprise software company, not from some goofy California hippies.
Keep in mind that the preceding paragraph doesn't actually reflect how we at RCPU -- happy Android and iPhone users, as far as your editor knows -- feel about WP7 or the other OSes. It's just the message we think Microsoft should send about WP7. Yes, it's early days for Microsoft's mobile OS (sort of). Let's not forget that Windows Mobile had been around for a while before Microsoft unveiled Windows Phone. But when the launch of a major new product actually sends market share reeling backward and draws embarrassingly little revenue, it's time to rethink marketing strategy, if not the product itself.
In this case, the product actually seems fine. It's the message that needs to change. Microsoft has to move Windows Phone 7 out of the hazy heat of August and into the back-to-business atmosphere of September. Of course, the funny thing about all this is that since we're posting this entry in August, it's unlikely that we or anybody else will actually remember it a month from now. Maybe, for Microsoft's benefit, we should run it again after Labor Day. Because nobody remembers what happens in August.
Do you think Microsoft needs to change is messaging for Windows Phone 7? If so, what would you do differently? Leave a comment below or send your thoughts to lpender@rcpmag.com.
Related:
Posted by Lee Pender on August 04, 2011 at 10:14 AM16 comments
IT pros, have you caught a rogue employee stealing from the company, divulging competitive secrets or engaging in some other form of malfeasance? Have you been able to use your IT skills to sniff out and put a stop to sketchy activity inside your company? If so, I'd like to hear from you. I'm doing a story for our sister publication, Redmond magazine, on IT heroes -- folks who have used their tech savvy to bust wrongdoers. If you're one of those people or know a good story about one, please contact me at lpender@rcpmag.com or leave a comment below (we won't reveal your e-mail address; confidentiality absolutely guaranteed, as always).
Posted by Lee Pender on August 01, 2011 at 12:30 PM0 comments
Most of us remember Frank Costanza's greatest creation: Festivus, the holiday "for the rest of us." Festivus was for folks who were tired of the traditional December rat race and wanted to do something different, something...less joyful.
But why are we mentioning Festivus in July? Well, because we're in the Festivus spirit thanks to Google+, the social network "for the rest of us." What follows is my own take on why Google+ might be a social network I actually stick with, so I won't be using the obnoxious royal "we" to refer to myself in this post. And, as Frank Costanza would have wanted, I'm giving this entry a Festivus theme.
Break Out the Festivus Pole!
I won't go into too much detail about how Google+ works, but if you want too much detail, check out this article. It answers just about every question you could ever have about Google+ and many you probably wouldn't have thought to ask.
Simply put, as everybody knows by now, Google+ is a social network along the lines of Facebook and Twitter. It has a sort of news feed like Facebook, and it kind of combines the "friend" function of Facebook with the "follow" model of Twitter. (Again, if you're confused, go back to that article above. Seriously.)
Now, I've been on Facebook for a few years and on the horrible Twitter for maybe a couple. I've gone into great detail here about why I hate Twitter and won't put you through that again. Needless to say, everything I said back in March still stands, despite how influential Twitter has apparently become.
Facebook, on the other hand, just faded for me. I got into it at first, for a while...but then I gradually realized that it was just kind of boring and actually a little bit soul-crushing. It's mainly a bunch of people -- many of them my good friends, but still -- screaming "look at me!" And that makes me sad for some reason. Let's all try to develop some self-assurance without craving the approval of our online "friends," shall we? Just a thought.
I'm still on Facebook, and I look at it now and then, but I only really post on it when one of my favorite sports teams (like the Rose Bowl champion TCU Horned Frogs or Stanley Cup champion Boston Bruins) wins a title. Yes, I just worked more Rose Bowl and Stanley Cup references into RCPU.
It was with some hesitation, then, and very low expectations, that I decided to jump into Google+. So far, though, I like it. It's less chummy and mundane than Facebook but also less hipster and pretentious than Twitter. Supposedly, it already has 10 million users, although it still feels kind of empty. But I hope it sticks around because there are a lot of reasons to like it.
In true Festivus spirit, though, let's talk first about what I don't like about it. (I have downloaded the Android app, but I haven't played with it much, so I'm mostly going to talk about the standard browser interface here.)
Airing of the Grievances
Not that it really matters that much, but the default interface is a little stark. It's nice that it's not too busy, but it's also not much to look at. (I actually like the colors on Twitter.) I also find the posts and comments a bit hard to read for some reason, and I haven't yet figured how to collapse a section of comments after I've expanded it. (There must be a way.)
For instance, I just read some of the 150 or so comments on a post by Robert Scoble (who seems to be way into Google+, and any tech thing he's into I should probably be into as well), so I've now got a post with a really long comments section open that I can't figure out how to close without going to a whole different page and then coming back. The comments are taking up a lot of screen space, and I have to scroll a long way to get below it to see older posts. I'm probably missing something obvious -- but it's not that obvious if I'm missing it...is it?
Parts of the interface are also a touch wonky. The Sparks feature, for example, is supposed to aggregate news headlines about particular interests -- say, college football or the NHL -- but it took me a few minutes of playing around to figure out how to make Sparks work in a way that was useful to me. It turns out to be not that hard to use, but there's kind of a learning curve to it.
 |
| Screenshot of the Google+ Sparks feature. |
If there's one recurring grievance about Google+, it's that it doesn't have the most intuitive interface I've ever seen. It's not head-slappingly obvious how everything works, and I really like for things to be super, super obvious online. I haven't even begun to tackle the Hangout video-conferencing function yet. Still, I figure Google will address all this stuff in due time.
Feats of Strength
I can live with a clunky interface if I have what I want most from a social network: control. I have that in spades with Google+. The settings on Facebook have always been a little ambiguous to me; the privacy settings have always seemed vague and any control I might have over my friends list isn't glaringly obvious.
Google+ remedies all of this. One word separates Google+ from its counterpart: circles! Yes, it deserves an exclamation point. I can drag and drop my friends into circles of my own creation and control the groups with a very simple -- and, in this case, head-slappingly obvious -- interface. I have a Friends circle, a Family circle, a Work circle, even a Who? circle for random strangers who friend (plus?) me.
If I want to send a photo from a night out with friends, I can send it to the Friend circle and not worry that a professional acquaintance is going to see it (not that I do much that I wouldn't want other people to see). I can follow Robert Scoble in my Following circle and not have to wonder whether he's going to get status posts from me bragging about, say, the Bruins (he doesn't know me and probably wouldn't care to read my thoughts on hockey).
 |
| Screenshot of the Google+ Circle editor. |
With Facebook and Twitter, I'm never totally sure what's going where, who's seeing what and whom I might be inadvertently pestering. I guess there are ways to control that sort of thing on those networks, but they don't jump out at me. The very core of Google+ is its circles concept, which means the whole thing is built on the premise of control. I like that a lot. Plus, privacy and security controls are super obvious and easy to use, and I can easily look at my profile the way a random Internet viewer would see it. Steve Jobs might say that it all just works.
And then there's the integration with everything else Google. I love this. Although I have largely abandoned writing for the four personal blogs I started over the last couple of years, they're all based on Google's Blogger platform. And I use Google News to write this newsletter and have for years. Now, in the Blogger site, or in Google News or Gmail (or Google Docs, which I also use here at work), I have the Google+ toolbar always with me at the top of the screen. (And this is in Firefox, not Chrome.) It not a browser toolbar, though, so it respectfully disappears if I go to a non-Google site, leaving me plenty of screen real estate.
The Google+ toolbar (if that's even what it's called) is useful without being intrusive. I don't have to surf over to a different site, such as Facebook or Twitter, or use some goofy aggregator to see my social stuff. It's right there in the native Google interface, and when I'm done with Google+ I'm just one click away from Google News or whatever other Google product I need to use.
All of this makes me sound like a Google fanboy, but I really don't think of myself as one. (And I'm definitely not a Google "fanboi," whatever that is.) There are just some things that Google has gotten right, and finally, after multiple failures, social networking is one of them. The beauty of Google is that its products are easy to use (ahem, Microsoft) and yet they're open enough so that I don't have to commit my first born to a single vendor (Apple). That works for me.
It's a Festivus Miracle
As you probably have, I've read lately that Microsoft is considering launching a social network of its own, which hopefully won't have the ridiculous name it currently (or allegedly) bears. (Tulalip? Isn't that where Elvis Presley was born? Or is it some sort of mouth condition?) I have no idea what Microsoft is trying to do with social networking, but I would almost put money on the effort being cringe-worthy on a Zune level. Maybe not. We'll see.
In any case, Frank Costanza, were he real, would love Google+. It's the social network for the rest of us. Facebook is now the sad domain of the mundane inanities of yapping teenagers and every boring person I ever went to high school with (although if you're reading this and I went to high school with you, I'm obviously not talking about you).
Twitter is way too hipster for an un-cool guy like me and lacks depth with its infuriating character limit. It also makes people think they're witty when they're really not. Just because you can say it in 140 characters or fewer, doesn't make it a pithy comment. It just makes it short, and I generally dislike brevity (obviously).
LinkedIn is dull and stuffy -- and, although it's supposed to be like that, that's no fun. MySpace, Friendster and a bunch of other sites have gone the way of Pets.com, mostly. But Google+ is dressed-up enough to be businesslike and yet down-to-earth enough to be fun. It's all about control, easy control, which is great. It's not cool, but it's not glaringly un-cool. It's not super-professional, but it's not Facebook-casual, either. It's just right for those of us who never really fit in anywhere else. At least until the masses find it and ruin it.
Tell me what you think of Google+ in the comments below, at lpender@rcpmag.com, at +Lee Pender (I think that's how it's noted) or, if you don't want me to actually read what you write, at @leepender on Twitter.
Posted by Lee Pender on July 21, 2011 at 9:57 AM6 comments
So, Microsoft threw down the gauntlet this week, challenging Google Apps for real this time with Office 365, an online, hosted version of the omnipresent Office productivity suite. What will follow will be a battle royale for...what, exactly?
That's the real question here. Before we ask who will win the hosted-applications war between Microsoft and Google, we have to determine exactly what the spoils will be for the victor. We're not convinced at this point that hosted applications have won enough people or businesses over for the battle between 365 and Apps to be for much more than bragging rights at this point.
That will change at some point, of course -- probably. We're big believers in the cloud here at RCPU and have been for a long time. We can see the end of client software on the horizon. We can see everything running on a mobile device of some sort (something between a tablet and a phone) in either app form or in a browser. And we can see a day when workers will use that technology for almost everything they do and businesses will run on it.
But we're not there yet. Sure, lots of people have smartphones and tablets now that they use for work, and some folks use those devices almost exclusively. It's certainly possible to do most of what an office (small "o") worker does using just a portable device and maybe a wireless keyboard. It's very possible to do everything in the cloud. And both Microsoft and Google have been trumpeting big cloud wins of late.
Go into most offices, though, and you'll still see laptop and even desktop computers, most of them running some version of Windows and Office. That's how most folks who work with computers every day get their work done, using a PC of some sort and software running on the client. OK, so maybe that model isn't growing the way it once did (why would it?), but it's still dominant.
Besides that, a lot of partners and IT professionals still don't trust the cloud. Not really. Not for running their or their clients' businesses. (A lot of partners are still wondering how they're going to make money off of it, too.) It's not hard to see why. High-profile outages are still pretty common among most of the big vendors, and despite the promise of cost savings, questions remain about how secure and private data is resting in the cloud rather than sitting on a server in some company's own building.
Plus, is anybody ready to ditch versions of Office that run on PCs? Really ditch them and do everything in the cloud, where network lag time and other only marginally controllable factors can screw up everything from data archiving to sending a simple e-mail? Are we really ready to surrender everything we do every day to the whims of the Internet? Even as a big believer in the cloud, your editor is typing this right now in old-school Microsoft Word and will send it via e-mail to RCPU editors in California. That's still the way a lot of -- probably most -- work gets done in offices around the world.
Right now, it's not Microsoft or Google that needs to win the battle, it's the cloud itself. That means that both vendors need to provide useful, trustworthy services that offer not only cost savings but also functionality that's realistic for everyday office use. They need to keep those services up and running and avoid the kinds of outages that do nothing but fuel skeptics' arguments and give the naysayers a legitimate chance to spread their anti-cloud rhetoric. The number one thing the cloud has to fear is fear itself.
And if Microsoft and Google can manage to pull all that off (which they haven't yet, really), they'll still need to take on the "we've-always-done-it-this-way" syndrome that permeates corporate America and much of the corporate world. Step outside the technology industry and look at how many companies still run not just Windows XP but Windows 2000. They're out there. (Many of you partners know what we mean here.) If this cloud model is going to take off in a serious way, at least some of those Luddites are going to have to convert from on-premises software to the cloud. Early adopters alone won't keep the model afloat forever.
Then again, Microsoft makes so much money off of old-school Office that it might not be in too much of a rush to kill the on-premises model. That's another post for another time, though. For now, as they fight with each other for cloud supremacy, Google and Microsoft need to make sure they're winning the war for the cloud and not just taking shots at each other in a battle with low stakes and few rewards.
Have you considered moving to Office 365 or Google Apps? Why or why not? Send your thoughts to lpender@rcpmag.com or leave a comment below.
Related:
Posted by Lee Pender on June 28, 2011 at 2:10 PM5 comments