April 2012 – Page 2 – Tech.pinions

Facebook is for Old People

“FACEBOOK IS STUPID AND FOR OLD PEOPLE“, my 12 year old daughter texted me yesterday after FaceBook offered to purchase Instagram. If you have teenage or pre-teen girls or boys, this demonstrative behavior isn’t anything new. What I didn’t fully understand at the time is what a firestorm the acquisition set off in the community. Of deeper and longer-term significance, however, was the spotlight my daughter’s text to me shined upon the newest and most natural trend in social media; verticalization or specialization, which will reshape social media as we know it today.

As I probed to better understand what my daughter meant and how she felt by her text to me, she explained that with Facebook owning Instagram, it would ruin its entire purpose. Probing further, she feared that Facebook, because it’s for “old people”, would “change Instagram.” Taking this offline, she explained a few fears. For her, Instagram is a world for her and her friends in her grade that was protected from Facebook gawkers and lurkers. Her thinking was that by Facebook owning Instagram, those gawkers and lurkers would invade her and her young friend’s world. Mark Zuckerberg promises a standalone Instagram, but will, of course, import all the pictures in their context and metadata, to be monetized like everything else is in the Facebook network. My daughter wasn’t alone in her fears.

Like Mathew Ingram reported in GigaOM, many other people, including grown adults, were airing their grievances. Many even retweeted my daughter’s text in a sign of protest. As of right now, the text had been viewed on Twitpic over 71,000 times and was retweeted over 3,200 times. While the protesters probably represented small but vocal minority, they certainly were a passionate and diverse group. All of this passion highlights a theme I’ve been researching for a few months, the verticalization of social media.

Over an extended period of time, all markets go vertical or specialize, all the way to the point where the market cannot support any more divisions. Sometimes the segmentation is too gray and not demonstrable enough to support the business model. Look at TV channels, cars, tooth paste, and shampoo. They have all segmented beyond belief if you been alive long enough to see it from the beginnings. Cars are a good example. At one point, there were very few different types of cars consumers would want to buy and that manufactures offered. Now it seems that every brand has sedans, coupes, mini-vans, station wagons, SUVs, “minis”, sports cars, trucks, hybrids, etc. TV sport is another good example of specializtion. When I gew up, I could only watch sports on one of four network TV stations at very regimented times of the day. Now, from Austin’s Time Warner Cable, I can get access to over 50 different sports channels whenever I want, 24 hours a day. I see the same situation playing out with social media.

Socal media is now starting to mature, fragment and specialize. Facebook, for now, are many people’s “home base”, but as in life, all people have to leave home sometimes. That’s exactly what people started doing with a few sites like these:

Pinterest– Lifestlye social interactions around the “beautiful things you find on the web”.
GetGlue– Entertainment social interaction around what people are watching on TV, at the movies, playing, reading or listening to.
Foodspotting– Food social interaction between people who like to eat out and show off what they’re eating.
Goba-Face to face social interaction by bringing people together in the real world.

There are hundreds more services like these that cater to narrower slices of social interaction, but it’s not all rosy in the specialized social media world.

There are gating factors all markets need to overcome to move to specialization. For cars, it was a market large enough to warrant specialization plus the “sharing” of key parts like engines and chassis. For social media to specalize, it needed a home base, like Facebook, to provide login, authentication and open APIs to cross-post content and opinions.

Facebook has enabled the growth of these specialized social media sites. It’s a good thing they did, or Google would have done it and Facebook may not had nearly the lead they have today. This doesn’t mean Facebook will continue to leave its door open forever, though. Another potential growth-inhibiting factor is obvious; the number of active users and friends. There has to at least be enough users and friends to warrant going there in the first place. This is killer #1, but is facilitated by Facebook’s APIs. With today’s UIs and interaction models, I believe that consumers can really only tolerate one major social media “hub” like Facebook then one, maybe two specialized social media sites that are somewhat connected back to the home base. This could change over time due to aggregation work like Microsoft does with its “People” apps, but for now it’s a reality that there’s only so many sites we can handle. The final growth inhibitor is linked to the first. If you cannot gain scale, then you won’t be large enough to make enough money to stay in business. Most social media experiences who pass gate #1 fail gate #2.

Can we learn anything from a pre-teen girl’s reaction to a $100B company purchasing a tiny company with less than 15 employees for $1B? I hope so. I know I did. Consumers are very picky and if we offer them thin enough social media slices with enough mass to be considered a community, they like it. We only have to look at Instagram and Pinterest’s fast growing bases of active users as evidence that this is only the beginning of the social media specialization revolution. What does this mean for Facebook? Facebook needs to be the best “home base” it can be, integrating and facilitating traffic between smaller, specialized social media services. While Facebook has trumped Google many times in the last few years, they should get the YouTube playbook from them to show them how to do a branded integration the right way.

Apple’s iPad Trademark Is Not in Danger

When I was an editor, I used to regularly receive form letters from corporate lawyers complaining about the use of “xerox” to describe copying or, my favorite, “realtor” rather than “Realtor®.” I threw them away, and never heard anything further. The game was simple: Companies that own value trademarks must defend their claims of exclusive use, and these letters, meant to be ignored, were part of the process.

So I was a bit startled by a silly Associated Press story suggesting that Apple might be in danger of losing its iPad trademark as people come to use “iPad” as a generic term for a tablet. This is not going to happen. For one thing, people don’t seem to be using iPad as a generic term for a tablet. They call iPads iPads, Kindles Kindles, and Nooks Nooks. There isn’t much reason to call anything else anything. (The same seems to be true for iPods after 10 years. Usually when people take about an iPod, they are referring to a an Apple product.)

About the only way to lose a trademark is to fail to make an effort to defend it. Company’s with very valuable trademarks go to great lengths to defend them. Coca-Cola® is known to send inspector to a restaurants where they order a Coke® and send it back to a lab to make sure It’s The Real Thing (trademark #78339744). Disney has gone after amateur Winnie-the-Pooh® sewing patterns not out of insane greed but because of a need to show vigilance. It is very rare these days for a company to lose a trademark to generic use; Wikipedia has a list of them and the most recent case seems to involve the yo-yo, in 1965.

Apple has earned a reputation as a ferocious defender of its intellectual property. It’s not about to lose iPad, iPhone, iMac, or i-anything else.

Is there a future for dedicated eReaders?

When Amazon introduced their first Kindle eReader, there were a lot of articles that suggested that this device represented the future of books. Many wrote that thanks to the Kindle, eBooks would go mainstream and be the most popular way people would read a book in the future. To some degree, there was a lot of logic and truth in this idea. eBooks can be downloaded instantly and in that sense they are much more convenient then having to go to the local bookstore and pick them up or order them online and wait for them to arrive days later.

The Kindle also had another thing going for it. It had an extremely long battery life and you could read it in direct sunlight. Not too long after the Kindle was released, other eBook readers came out from Kobo, Barnes and Noble and many more and even publishers started to jump on the eReader bandwagon and began releasing thousands of books in eReader formats. Over the last two years, prices have also come down so that you can get some eBook readers for as low as $79.00 today.

While eBook readers have had solid sales up to know, the entry of Apple’s iPad and other tablets are set to challenge their need to exist. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo all realize this and have apps to their eBook stores on almost all tablet platforms today and in the case of Amazon and Barnes and Noble, they are also embracing tablets in a big way and, in a sense, starting to downplay their dedicated eReaders and pushing their customers to their tablet versions instead.

Do Amazon and Barnes and Noble think that demand for dedicated eReaders will completely disappear? Not necessarily. But they do know that something big is going on with tablets and that these types of devices will soon become the major platform for reading eBooks. In fact, Amazon is leading the way with their Kindle Fire and adding a key ingredient into their mix that has the potential of really shaking up the entire tablet market and potentially doom the eReader in the future.

The key ingredient is something called subsidization. The Kindle Fire sells for $199, but sources tell us that the bill of materials (BOM) for the Kindle Fire is at least $215.00. But Amazon is willing to sell it at this price because they expect a Kindle Fire buyer to purchase perhaps at last 10 ebooks, rent at least 5 movies and buy various products through the Kindle Fire from the Amazon store that they can amortize against the actual cost of the Kindle Fire and actually make a profit on it.

But Amazon does not have a patent on this idea. Indeed, Walmart has all of the things needed, included an eCommerce store for all of their products along with a real interest in renting eMovies, selling eMusic, etc online to do something similar. And in their case they also have the storefronts to back this up. They may count on the fact that their users will buy even more products from them if they own a Walmart tablet and make it really easy to buy eBooks, eMusic, download eMovies and buy products from their online store. They can use it also as an advertising vehicle for special Walmart offers. And in Walmart’s case, maybe they sell their subsidized tablet for $99 or in some cases, even give it away with special promotions. Although Walmart has shown no interest in doing this, they are the one major retailer who could map Amazon’s model and do something very interesting in the tablet space if they wanted to.

Take Proctor and Gamble as another example. They have over a hundred products they would like to sell you through their retail partners. What if they can get a reasonably priced P&G tablet built and branded for them and then uses it to drive promotions to the users and subsidize part of the cost of the tablet for their customers. From the users standpoint, the Web apps drive their broad content and app needs. But P&G now has a captive audience who is willing to get their ads in return for paying a very low price for this tablet.

If you add the subsidization equation to tablets, you might be able to see that the future for tablets may be where families could have four or five scattered around the house at their disposal and some could be subsidized by various vendors so that owning more than one is the norm. While the OS may still be important to handle localized apps for some, the most used feature will be the Web browser and Web apps, tied to the cloud where most of your personal digital life will reside. And since the Kindle app could be on all of them, your entire library could be in sync and you just pick up the tablet closest to you at the time and start reading where you left off.

The bottom line is that today’s tablets are great and thanks to Apple, the role of tablets in our lives is being flushed out now. But I believe that the tablets of the future will just be screens that use a browser to connect us to everything we need from the cloud and be cheap enough thanks to subsidization so that each room in our homes might have one and when you need one, you just pick up the one that is closest to you. Although there may be some people who would still want to buy a dedicated eReader, it seems to me that subsidized tablets could become so ubiquitous within the home that it could some day become the eReader of choice and the need for dedicated eReaders will disappear.

Internet Voting Is Years Away, And Maybe Always Will Be

In today’s New York Times Magazine, political writer Matt Bai grumbles in a short piece about his inability to vote online in an era where nearly everything else can be done over the Internet. “The best argument against Internet voting,” he writes, “is that it stacks the system against old and poor people who can’t afford or use computers, but the same could be said about cars.” That, he argues, is a problem that could easily be solved by the electronic equivalent of giving people rides to a polling place. If only it were so simple.

Voting, alas, has unique characteristics that make internet implementations all but impossible given current technology. The big problem is that we make two demands of it that cannot be met simultaneously. We want voting to be very, very secure. And we want it to be very, very anonymous.

Internet security is difficult under the best of conditions. But voting has the additional complication that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to remedy a breach. Most of the time, all that is at stake is money, and we know how to fix that. Identity theft is more complex but still there are remedies. A stolen vote is gone forever.

Anonymity complicated the problem immensely. The usual way to secure an internet transaction to to make certain that both the server and the person at the other end and who or what they claim to be. To cast a ballot at a poling place or vote an absentee ballot, you have to produce identification or, at a minimum, a signature that matches one on file. It’s not perfect. but it’s generally better than we can do on the internet. Then you are given a ballot or a card that activates an electronic voting machine, but there is no link between the ballot and your identity, guaranteeing anonymity. This is really, really hard to simulate online. The more that is done to assure your identity, the harder it is to separate that identity from the vote that is cast.

Furthermore, trust is central to elections and people, rightly, have their doubts about trusting online voting. In 2010, the District of Columbia set up a web-based voting system for residents living abroad. A team from the University of Michigan was able to compromise the system in minutes. The test was quickly aborted.

We will see more trials in this year’s voting. But widespread internet voting is still waiting for a day that may never come.

We Have Personal Clouds, Now We Need Family Clouds

Prior to the launch of iCloud last year I wrote a column looking at ways that iCloud might work well for families not just individuals. I have a houseful of Macs and other iOS devices and I like to keep them in sync. The problem is they aren’t all mine. Some are my kids and some are my wife’s. There are digital assets that we own that are communal and shared and there are ones that are personal. I had hoped that iCloud would address these issues more fully than it currently does but unfortunately iCloud is designed to be more a personal cloud than a communal one. It is the communal or family cloud that I think needs to be addressed.

Synchronization is at the foundation of any good personal cloud. If I have a multitude of connected devices which I use regularly I want them all to stay in sync. The power of this lies in software that contains what we call a change and detect engine. That means that when a change is made on one device, it makes a change across all devices. Take a photo on one device, it is already on the others. Buy a song on one device, it is already on the others. Edit a document on one device it is already on the others, etc. This solution has manifested itself in the marketplace for quite some time but only recently has it been any good. Personal clouds are evolving nicely but we need hardware and software makers to start thinking more communally as well.

Communal Clouds

One of the things that needs to be pointed out about personal clouds is that they only matter when you have more than one connected device which you use on a regular basis. If I only used one personal computing product, I wouldn’t really have a need to keep it in sync with other devices. But once you get a desktop/ notebook, smart phone and or tablet then the cloud data synchronization becomes important. This is also true with communal clouds.

When only one member of the family has multiple computing products then the notion of the person cloud works. But once several members of a family start getting connected devices then the problem grows. Link that up with the reality that not all family members share a same roof and you can see how a communal cloud could be of value.

There is certain data that is communal and of value to a larger group and there is certain data that is valuable to just the person. A solution in the market needs to exist that makes communal data sync as easy as personal data sync.

For Apple, they have built iCloud with mostly the personal cloud in mind. There are of course ways to sync libraries of photos or other digital data but they are mostly manual processes. iTunes library sync is great and to some degree. Home Sharing is a good start but what about photos for example? Perhaps some of the most communal content in any family ecosystem is photos and currently keeping photo libraries in sync across a number of devices and iCloud accounts in the family is a pain. My wife constantly complains that none of our photos are ever on her computer because I download them all to mine. My iCloud account helps me to a degree but she has her own iCloud account and both act and sync independently of each other.

Other areas of shared sync that could be of use are things like family calendar, chores or to do lists, family documents or spread sheets which can be worked on collaboratively– just to name a few.

Interestingly this is a concept Microsoft has actually marketed to a small degree. There was a line in commercial I saw earlier in the year during a commercial for Windows which said “It’s good to be a family again.” In the commercial the father was using a Word document on his Windows Phone as a shopping list. As he was shopping, new items kept appearing on the list for things like candy and other junk food items. He quickly realized what was going on and the commercial ended showing his kids adding to his shopping list from their Windows PC at home. Changes they made to a document were instantly there in real time on his phone. This idea of how a family uses the cloud in a more holistic way is one that I think needs further development in this new era of commuting.

This extends outside the home as well. It would be great if new photos I took were not just synced across mine and my wife’s iCloud account but also with my parents and her parents and her grandparents. I am constantly putting photos on thumb drives and moving them or uploading chunks the cloud or to DropBox to get them from one place to another. There are solutions in the market but I want the manual processes removed and key communal data to simply stay in sync with those for whom it is relevant.

The bottom line is personal clouds are great but if they only work for me personally than they are useless at a communal level. People don’t use technology in a vacuum and we need hardware and software manufactures to not only solve problems for the personal computing ecosystem but for the family computing ecosystem as well.

Men of Modern Mathematics Lives!

In 1961, IBM commissioned designers Charles and Ray Eames to assemble a museum exhibition entitled “Mathematica: A World of Numbers …. And Beyond.” It was widely seen, probably most widely in a display at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair. In 1966, much of the exhibit was condensed into a 2-foot by 12-foot poster called Men of Modern Mathematics that displayed a detailed timeline of mathematical discovery from 1000 to 1950. (I was lucky enough to cadge two of the now-rare posters from IBM; one hangs in my math teacher wife’s classroom, the other in my math professor son’s

Photo of poster — Section of the original poster (Photo: computerhistory.org)

home.)

Now the poster and the exhibit has been gloriously reborn as a free iPad app from IBM, renamed “Minds of Modern Mathematics.” (Despite the political correction of the title, the great algebraist Emmy Noether still appears to be the only woman to make the cut.) The app contains a facsimile of the original poster, plus an interactive reconstruction that includes the same contents, but where tapping on each item reveals considerably more information.

The app also includes nine wonderful Eames short animated videos on mathematical topics.

If you, or your kids, have the slightest interest in math, download this app. And be grateful to IBM and Charles and Ray Eames for the original exhibit, and to the Eames Office for making the content available for the app.

U.S. Government Support Won’t Save BlackBerry

The fact that the U.S. government is not about to abandon the BlackBerry as its smartphone of choice is a bit of good news for Research In Motion, a company that hasn’t had much to cheer about lately. But it is unlikely to help much in the long run, let alone provide salvation for RIM.

RIM got a giant leg up in the government market by building security deep into the design of both BlackBerry handsets and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES). For a long time it was the only mobile messaging device with Federal Information Processing Standard certification to handle “sensitive” government information, the highest level for unclassified data. But as in other areas, the competition hasn’t been standing still. Apple has been working hard at upgrading iOS security and is awaiting native FIPS approval for the iPhone and iPad. Good Technology offers FIPS-certified messaging systems that provide BES-like services to iOS devices, Android, and Windows Phone. The National Security Agency has developed a secure version of Android for federal sector use.

The government will be sticking with BlackBerry because it already owns many thousands of them. Money is always tight, and the feds tend to hang on to hardware for as long as they can. But I don’t see much evidence that the government is buying a lot of new BlackBerrys. And a quick perusal of FedBizOpps.gov shows lots of solicitations for Android and iOS software development projects, an ill omen for RIM.

The federal government is more successful than the private sector at resisting bring-your-own-device initiatives–not even the most senior officials can defy security rules and Federal Acquisition Regulations–and it remains a very conservative buyer. But over time, I expect to see it shift its emphasis away from BlackBerrys. RIM will continue to collect monthly fees for BES services, but the RIM’s days os the fed’s darling seem numbered.

Why the iPad Will Not Reform Higher Education Anytime Soon

Lindsay Pund is a junior studying English and Business at Whitworth University. She is completing several writing assignments for a class and was given the topic by the Tech.pinions columnists of forming an opinion on iPad and higher education from a college students perspective.

Although Apple is clearly making adjustments and trying to modify the iPad so that it is more compatible and practical for higher education, a shift towards solo iPad learning is not likely.

Since 2010, a few universities have been experimenting with the iPad for more efficient classroom learning. Among these universities, some of the notable programs are at George Fox, where they give incoming freshman the choice between a MacBook or iPad, and Abilene Christian University, where they have implemented the mobile-learning initiative. This program, for the iPad specifically, is the inclusion of two classes on campus where each student is issued an iPad for the course. One of these classes is Economics, a required course for all undergrad students at ACU. While the professor of this course praises the iPad for assisting in increased classroom participation, it would be rare for an entire classroom of students to all own iPads and moreover, this poll-induced classroom participation is not only accessible through the iPad, but can be brought about by laptops as well.

While there are campuses that are attempting to implement the iPad into classroom learning, the majority of universities are not. And it is students on those campuses who are struggling the most to integrate the iPad into their learning experience. Although the iPad is touted for its ease of portability and compactness, for many college students, the praises end there when it comes to educational use.

In theory, the iPad would be the perfect tool for a college student. But as for now, the majority just aren’t buying it. This is not due to a lack of belief in Apple products. Looking around most college campuses today, there are MacBooks, iTouches, and iPhones everywhere. (This can be mainly attributed to the Apple back-to-school promotional) The current generation of college students believes in Apple products and are Apple consumers at large. However, when it comes to the iPad, hesitations arise.

After surveying a few college students who are iPad owners, I was able to better pinpoint my theory. While the iPad has its strong areas, there were many places where it falls short of college student’s needs and convenience. For most college students who own iPads, the device was purchased in attempt to replace their computer. However, Whitworth University Sophomore International Business major, Alexa Williams said, “The keyboard is electronic so it is not at all sufficient for typing papers.” This statement is testament to one of the key components keeping the iPad out of the hands of college students. When the primary role of a student is to type papers, having a main device without a keyboard is simply not practical.

Whitworth University sophomore Marketing major, Seth Owens encountered a similar problem when replacing his old laptop with an iPad. He said, “I had to buy the external keyboard so I could type my papers, but it is still a bit inconvenient because then I have two things to carry around instead of just one.” In carrying around two products, the plus side of iPads being compact deteriorates.
One possible solution to this predicament would be the ZAGG folio, an iPad case with a keyboard that essentially turns the iPad into the MacBook Air (size included). With this separately purchased ad-on, it is difficult to pinpoint what it is that sets the iPad above the Air, if anything.

Another aspect of iPads that has been assumed to make life easier is the ease it provides for note taking. However, when asked whether or not students found the iPad helpful for taking notes in class, all of them responded that it proves to be more distracting than anything, and even with the iPad they prefer to take their notes by hand or by typing.

Recently, with Apple’s announcement to partner with publishing companies and make digital textbooks more accessible, hopes for greater interest in iPads have risen again. However, when surveyed, studies show that 75% of students still prefer paper textbooks. In theory, having compact and lightweight textbooks is an improvement. However, in practice, this results in students trying to use the device for referencing material while simultaneously trying to type papers on that same device. I can see the benefits of interactive and compact textbooks, but there is still something to be said for having a textbook open while working on a paper without have to switch from one screen to another. Also, for many college students, studying is done in their dorm room or in the library, requiring a small amount of transportation of their textbooks anyway. And finally, many digital textbooks are nontransferable. This means that students will not be able to sell their books to other students when the course is over, thus overriding any money that might be saved through purchasing digitally. It is for these reasons that I find it hard to see digital textbooks becoming the new norm.

As for increased technology use in the classrooms, many students are wary. As it is, fiddling with overhead projectors and sound systems have the tendency to consume large portions of class time. While technology no doubt has its place in the education sphere, and as it has helped to add to its efficiency and thoroughness, as seen through PowerPoint and more effect communication via through email between professors and students, as with everything, there is a balance. University of Wisconsin Milwaukee English professor, Jeremiah Webster (and iPad fanatic) views the use of the iPad for education as being doubled sided. On one hand, Webster said, “It has fundamentally altered how I teach, lesson plan, and introduce materials (texts, video, articles, presentations) in the classroom.” However, at the same time, the iPad is technology, and on the flip side Webster said, “All technology is a “Faustian Bargain.” It takes away as much as it provides…Sure, we could all have iPads, but what is it being used for? Does it assist thinking? Reflection? Or is it merely another diversion? I use the iPad, but am vey much a disciple of Neil Postman. While Webster, as a professor with an iPad, is currently a minority, the concern of the iPad being more distracting than it is helpful is a sentiment among professors and students alike.

As a college student and MacBook and iPad user myself, I see the two products as somewhat redundant. For the average college student, money is tight and having both of these devices is a luxury that cannot be afforded. When it comes to having to choose either a laptop or an iPad due to budget constraints, the majority of students will purchase a laptop. Apple has created a product (MacBook) that is lightweight, user friendly, and dependable that they have marketed well to college-aged students. As it stands now, it is hard to imagine students who are loyal to the technology of laptops or of MacBooks specifically, making the drastic change to an iPad. I think Apple is going to have to do a lot of convincing (beyond their current two platforms) before students will readily, if ever, make the change entirely. Granted, I know this currently isn’t a popular stance to take — especially with the relatively recent announcement coupled with Jobs’ vision for textbooks. And for change makers, this might seem like regressive thinking. But as a student in the classroom, this is what I am witnessing and experiencing.

I definitely think the iPad is a neat tool with promise for higher education, and from my perspective, other college students think likewise. But as far as being the most practical and necessary device, I think it will be beat out by textbooks and laptops in higher education in the near future.

A PC is a Truck and Sometimes You Need a Truck

Steve Jobs said of the PC as he was developing his post PC theme, “PCs are going to be like trucks; less people will need them. And this is going to make some people uneasy.” Well he was right, if not accurate. A whole lot of trucks are sold. In just the US in February 2012 612, 145 cars were sold, and 537, 251 light duty trucks were sold, plus an additional 225,621 Cross-over trucks. So more trucks sold than cars, and even if you add SUVs (97,825) to the cars, there were still more trucks sold in the US, and that’s not counting the bigger ones that chew up your streets and bring stuff to your shopping center or gas station.

No doubt about it tablets and smartphones are popular and selling well. What most folks seem to miss (or want to miss) is we do have cars and trucks, and motorcycles, and we will continue to have smartphones (motorcycles), tablets (cars?), and PCs (trucks?) Because Tablets are popular doesn’t lead to the conclusion that PCs suddenly aren’t. But if all you’ve got to sell is a tablet, well then the world looks a little different. And even if you have a truck to sell, if it’s getting hammered by the competition, but your car or motorcycle is showing a better margin and/or shipment level, well your interest and emphasis is pretty predictable isn’t it?

So Apple wants to promote the “Post PC” concept as a way of casting the PC in a no longer important, been there done that, obsolete technology. And because they are Apple, the only company capable of original thought or charisma, and the role model for all other computer, electronics, and phone companies, the term “Post PC” will be adopted, and heralded as the coming, the new era, the I’ll follow Apple into hell slogan of all the wantabees—which is everyone from Microsoft to the smallest Chinese cloner.

Actually, Apple makes life so much simpler for the rest of us. We don’t have to invest time and money in clever ideas, or marketing, we just have to wait for Apple to tell us what’s cool now and then copy it as best we can.

The PC/Tablet/Phone industry reminds me of a bunch of teenage girls, watching the cool girls in order to find out what is in and what’s out. Nobody wants to get caught with something that’s out and not cool, that’s worse than a zits breakout on prom night. And it’s a caution to the buyers of all this non-Apple, Apple defined cool stuff. If the company you’re considering buying something from is an Apple follower you should think twice about buying anything from them. It’s unlikely they are going to be a faithful supporter of that currently cool copycat thingie—you’d be better off buying the real deal from Apple.

But it’s tough not being Apple when it’s so big, so rich, and so trend setting. Right now the only company that seems to have a chance at standing up to Apple is HP. All the rest are still in the beige/black box PC world where this year’s machine looks just like last year’s machine and the year before it. Where this year’s big breakout product is an Ultrabook that looks like every other Ultrabook which in turn is trying to look like Apple’s Air. It’s pathetic.

So if the PC industry turns into the unexciting truck industry, regardless of shipment numbers, it’s its own fault for being lazy and scared – get some backbone PC makers, take a chance—do something original. You might find you actually like it.

Why Tech Should Care About the Fate of Obamacare

You probably haven’t heard of Section 10330 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. It takes up just one of the law’s 2,700 pages, buried deep in a list of miscellaneous provisions.

But Section 10330, one of the many provisions far removed from controversies over individual mandates that could be lost if the Supreme Court rules the entire law unconstitutional, is important to the future of both health care and effective use of information technology by government. The substance of the section is so brief that it is worth reading in its entirety:

SEC. 10330. MODERNIZING COMPUTER AND DATA SYSTEMS OF THE CENTERS FOR MEDICARE & MEDICAID SERVICES TO SUPPORT IMPROVEMENTS IN CARE DELIVERY.

(a) IN GENERAL.—The Secretary of Health and Human Services
(in this section referred to as the ‘‘Secretary’’) shall develop a
plan (and detailed budget for the resources needed to implement
such plan) to modernize the computer and data systems of the
Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (in this section referred
to as ‘‘CMS’’).
(b) CONSIDERATIONS.—In developing the plan, the Secretary
shall consider how such modernized computer system could—
(1) in accordance with the regulations promulgated under
section 264(c) of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996,
make available data in a reliable and timely manner to providers of services
and suppliers to support their efforts to better manage and coordinate care
furnished to beneficiaries of CMS programs; and

(2) support consistent evaluations of payment and delivery
system reforms under CMS programs.

The problem is simple. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, like many government agencies, is sitting on a treasure trove of data. Applying modern data analytics to this “big data” information could yield tremendous benefits to the public, from detecting fraud in medical payments to understanding regional disparities in pricing of services to–most important of all–learning which treatments provide the best outcomes for patients.

CMS, which administers Medicare, Medicaid, and the State Childrens’ Health Insurance Program (sCHIP) would be an analytics paradise if only it could figure out how to use its data. But the system described in the white paper “Modernizing CMS Computer and Data Systems to Support Improvements in Care Delivery,” Medicare payment information is stored in “in at least 25 different databases used for different program purposes.” These systems mostly have no way to communicate with each other. States maintain their Medicate data in 50 separate state databases, generally without even common data definitions.

Similar problems plague information systems throughout the federal government. The big difference is that in health care, Congress has at least tried to do something about it. The Health Improvement Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH–they obviously come up with the acronyms first) Act, part of the 2009 stimulus bill, created incentives for a switch to electronic medical records and started the process of CMS tech modernization. But the Affordable Care Act takes on the heavy lifting, authorizing a top-to-bottom overhaul of a technology infrastructure that, among other things, still depends on mainframes communicating over IBM’s 1970s-vintage Systems Network Architecture.

It’s tempting to argue that the overdue and uncontroversial IT modernization mandated by Section 10330 would survive even if the Affordable Care Act as a whole is struck down. It’s also almost certainly wrong. In today’s Washington, nothing is uncontroversial and almost nothing gets done. What is more likely instead is that any attempt to sweep up and resurrect the many technical provisions of ACA would instead end up being held hostage to the broader health care, economic, and political agenda of one side or the other.

I have no illusions that I can influence the Supreme Court, especially at this late date. But I would hope that in the general interest of progress, if the justices decide that the individual mandate is unconstitutional they would at least let the rest of the law go forward.

Google Created the Mess and Now Must Fix Android Tablets

Android for phones by any measure has been a success, while Android for “premium” tablets by every measure has been a disaster. According to IDC, the iPad held 55% market share of all tablets in Q4 2011. When you remove lower end tablets like the Fire and Nook and leave "premium" tablets at $399+, best case Android has approximately 13% market share, leaving Apple with 87% share. This incorporates sales from some very nice Android tablets from Samsung and ASUS. This is beginning to appear like the iPod market where Apple is squeezing every ounce of life out of the premium competition. So who is to blame for the fiasco and who needs to fix it? The responsibility lies squarely on the back of Google who in turn needs to fix the problem.

I was very excited about Android the first day I learned about it in 2005. The market needed another strong choice for client operating systems to ensure the highest growth as Linux just wasn’t making headway. I bought the T-Mobile G1 Android phone in October 2008, the Google Nexus One in January 2010 and many more Android phones including the HTC EVO 4G, the Motorola Atrix, and more after that. The phone apps were there, more importantly the popular ones. While the experience wasn’t as fluid as the iPhone, I and many others appreciated the openness, notifications, and live screens. While the market was very excited about Android phones, it was a completely different story for tablets.

The first looks at Android for tablets, aka "Honeycomb" were amazing. Honeycomb, on paper and in demos, did almost everything better than the iPad. The interface was incredible and looked three dimensional and “Tron”-like. Multitasking, notifications, Flash video support, SD storage and Live Screens looked great. The Motorola XOOM at CES 2011 won many awards including CES’s "Best of Show Award." The anticipation mounted and the ecosystem was excited…. until it actually shipped.

As I explored here, I show that the XOOM was slow, buggy, without many apps, without Flash, without SD card support, and sold at a $300 premium to the iPad at $799. New models and prices were introduced starting at $379 seven months later. Needless to say, it was a complete disaster. This was followed by Samsung with the Galaxy Tab 10.1 in June 2011 starting at $499. This tablet experienced a similar fate as the XOOM but not as pronounced because it more quickly moved to Android 3.2. The best premium Android tablet out there was and still is the ASUS Transformer Prime with its optional keyboard, but it also struggled because of Google’s operating system. Google then released Android 4.0, aka "Ice Cream Sandwich" which didn’t add meaningful features for tablets, but instead aligned the application development environment between phone, tablet, and TV. Android 4.0 tablets missed the holiday selling season and didn’t sell many at all compared to the iPad.

In summary, the following are the characteristics of what Google allowed to be introduced into the premium Android tablet market place:

buggy with crashes
slow interface
few tablet optimized applications
few services at launch for music, books, and movies
unfinished features
price points on top or higher than market leader Apple with lesser experience
missing key consumer retail time frames

So why do I place this primarily upon the shoulders of Google and not the brands, retailers, or component suppliers? It’s about leadership. If Google had fully understood what they were walking into, they should have:

waited to release Android 3.0 until it was feature complete.
waited to release Android 3.0 until there were at least 100 optimized, popular applications.
waited to release Android 3.0 until it had full support for movie, music and book services
waited to release Android 3.0 until there were greater levels of application compatibility issues that resulted in crashes.
instituted some tighter marketing management of hero SKUs to assure their experience was flawless

The result of Google allowing Android tablets out the door before it was fully baked is that the operating system is now viewed by most as a liability as opposed to an asset. Every major tablet maker that I’ve talked to loses money on premium Android tablets in a big way. Also, anyone’s brand associated with the Android tablets has been marked as well. Motorola and Samsung both had premiere brands but I believe has been sullied by their association with Android for tablets.

Google’s reaction to all of this was to buy a hardware company (Motorola) versus working even more closely with their partners like ASUS and Samsung. Additionally, it’s rumored that Google will introduce their own Google branded tablet which will alienate Google all that much more. Does the Google brand lend a cachet’ to the equation? Absolutely not.

All of these issues and confusion benefits Microsoft right now. What was previously considered a free ride from Google with its "free" operating system now has turned OEMs directly into the arms of Microsoft and Windows 8 for tablet. What a turn of events over the last 18 months. The pandemonium isn’t over yet. With undoubtedly more information coming out at this year’s Google I/O, Google is planning Android 5.0 which I am sure will be positioned as the savior of Android for tablets.

The problem is that there’s no savior in sight for Android on premium tablets. We all know Android sells at $199 without much or any hardware profit, but how about $499 where the entire ecosystem can make money? Google needs to seriously reconsider everything they are doing with for tablets starting now because nothing else is working. The new plan needs to fully account for the needs of the silicon partners, ODMs, OEMs, channel partners, application developers and most importantly, the end user. It needs to find an entirely new name, too, because the Android name has been thoroughly destroyed in the high end tablet market.

It’s time to stop treating Android for tablets like a hobby and start treating it more like a business.

Happy Birthday, OS/2

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the launch of IBM’s OS/2 operating system. At Time Techland, Harry McCracken has an excellent account of how OS/2 failed to head off Windows, but ended up as a strange zombie operating system. But the birthday brought to mind my own encounters with OS/2.

I first ran into it in its least known form, the original command-line version that was a joint venture with Microsoft. We had been running a proprietary 3Com LAN at the Washington office of BusinessWeek and 3Com decided to stop development of the software and migrate customers of Microsoft LAN Manager, which ran on OS/2. LAN Manager is one of those products about which the less said the better. The software was awful and the support non-existent. Before long, we switched over to the then-dominant LAN software, Novell Netware (which we stayed with for way too long, but that’s another story.) A couple years later, Microsoft released Windows NT Server and put LAN Manager out of its misery.

By the time OS/2 3.0 Warp, the alleged consumer version, shipping in 1994, I had switched jobs from editorial bureaucrat to tech pundit, so of course I had to try it. I scrounged up a PC–I didn’t have a large collection yet–and tried to install it. And tried. I eventually got it running but could not get it to recognize an NEC CD drive, at the time the most widely used optical disk reader. I eventually got IBM tech support to explain how to find the device drivers and install them manually, a process that convinced me that the only consumers who would ever use Warp had day jobs in IT.

By that time, Windows 3.11 at least worked pretty reliably and even the early betas of “Chicago,” which became Windows 95, convinced me that whatever its architectural flaws, it had OS/2 beat by a mile on usability. I think that when Windows 95 shipped, I installed it on my OS/2 system, and that was that.

How RIM Changed My Life

During the summer of 1997, I was contacted by the folks at RIM and asked if I would like to be a beta tester of their first Blackberry pager/email device. Up to then, pagers were the darlings of the mobile world but their key function was to send a phone number to the user if needed and then the user would have to find a phone to call them back. Although cellular phones were already on the market, they were still pretty pricey back then and most people who got paged had to find a land line to make any call backs.

However, there was one technology that had already gained a major foothold in business by then and that was email. But the only way people could get their email was to go to their desktop or laptop and log on to see what messages they had. And while consumers were also discovering email via AOL, Compuserve, MCI and a few other consumer services, email had started to become the lingua franca of business. In fact, as an analyst working strictly within the tech industry, all of our clients were heavy email users and by then we were doing most of our communications via email instead of the plain old telephone system. (POTS)

However, for a lot of business professionals, email was a two edged sword. While it was a very productive tool if people were at their desktops or laptops and plugged into the corporate network or connected to their email via dial-up services, it was worthless to any one that was away from their offices or homes. And even if they had their laptops with them on the road, back then we were not assured that we could get a connection to our email from our hotel phones given the sorry state of hotel phone systems then. In fact, I carried with me an acoustic coupler that had alligator clips on them and in more then one hotel around the world I would have to take the cap off the telephone’s wall connection and use the alligator clips to tie into the hotel phones systems to get a dial tone to make a connection since most phones did not have an RJ 11 phone plug on their phones in those days.

So when RIM showed me their first Blackberry and told me that I could have a wireless connection to my email, I jumped at the chance to be a very early tester of their services. And from that day on, my personal world of communications took a major leap forward and to be very honest, my life changed significantly. No longer was I tied to my desktop or laptop to get or respond to email and this was a very liberating experience. More importantly to me was the fact that email had become the lifeline to my clients and it now meant that I could get their messages to me anytime and respond to them in real time very quickly. And from an economic standpoint, this one thing helped my business increase as I became known for my personalized service to the clients and the fact that I was extremely responsive to their needs.

Opening up the world to mobile email was what put RIM on the map and their forethought and innovative thinking has had a dramatic impact on our business world. They pioneered wireless email for broad commercial use and it literally became one of the most important tools any business professional had in their bag of tricks. And because their back-end servers were so secure, it became the standard wireless mobile email device for most government agencies and those in the financial markets and as a result, the fortunes of RIM skyrocketed. Apple and any of the smartphone players today should be very grateful to RIM for this major contribution they made in blazing the trail for what is now smartphones and the many advanced services that have many of their roots in things that RIM did with their original Blackberry.

But it is these roots that should have been their guide when trying to drive the company and the Blackberry devices forward. While they owned the corporate market, their decision to try and make the Blackberry all-things-to-all- people is what really has caused them to be in a most difficult position today. That, and not keeping up with the technology consumers really wanted in a smartphone. By branching out and trying to bring the same features to consumers in the basic form factor that business users loved, they missed the major move to touch based smartphones. Instead they are now playing catch up with the more consumer-focused vendors like Apple and Samsung who understand consumer mentality and designed their products with this as their primary goal.

Even worse for RIM is the fact that while expanding their consumer range of products and putting so much emphasis on marketing to this user segment, they took their eyes off the corporate market they owned. And as a result, thanks to the major bring-your-own-device (BYOD) programs being implemented by their corporate customers, consumer centric smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and Samsung’s Android smartphones have encroached dramatically on their business territory and in the end, RIM is now losing in both market segments.

RIM’s new CEO pretty much admitted this mistake when he announced last week that they would shift their focus from the consumer market and concentrate on their corporate business. Of course, this is the right thing to do, but it should have been done years ago and at this point in time, I am not really sure this will bring the company back to health. And it is real shame to sit and watch what has been such an important company decline and struggle to even stay afloat given the competitive landscape today.

But for me, RIM will always be one of the most important companies in my own personal technology history. For over a decade, my Blackberry and I were attached at the hip, so-to-speak, and it was my lifeline to my family, friends and clients. And I did not give it up easily. It took a radical new design and approach to make me give up my Blackberry and had not the iPhone come along and completely revolutionized the smartphone market, it would probably still be my sidekick today.

I am not sure what will happen to RIM in the long run, but for many of us techies, RIM will always represent innovation and foresight and the one that introduced us to a new age of mobile and wireless technology. And for that, everyone working in the mobile and wireless world owes them a great deal of gratitude.