Trial By Fire

Bill Gates' Makeover

Imagine that you don't know either of the two individuals in the photo at right.

Now, who is the world's wealthiest man?

Bill doesn't look comfortable.  Check out that tie!  Did Bill just get off the red-eye flight from Seattle?  Sen. Leahy, by contrast, probably adjusted his tie before sitting down.  Nice choice of colors, Senator!

I remember talking to Bill Gates at a party in Las Vegas in 1990.  He had on a Polo shirt, those signature glasses.  He was relaxed, confident, energetic, talking about C++ and how important it was.  I was one of many people who thought: "This is the symbol of the techncial and intelligent entrepreneur".  He embodied what all of us wanted to be, and it was an exciting time.

No more.

I do not want to be Bill Gates.  I know many technically brilliant people who share my belief.  I'm not sure even Bill wants to be Bill anymore.  You can tell if people are comfortable in what they are wearing, and Bill is a dead giveaway these days.  I don't think he goes shopping like he did back then.  He's listening to P-R people instead of being himself.  Where's that confident "dare to be smart" person I met in Las Vegas?

If Microsoft wants to rekindle the kind of admiration and respect they used to enjoy from the technical community, maybe it starts at the top.  Let's see the Polo shirt again, Bill.  Be a bit daring.  I miss it.

(The photo is from today's H1-B visa article on news.com)

[tags: Microsoft]

Motorola iRadio Launch at NAB

Well the first day of NAB is over and I still can't sleep.  Clearly the flight from Australia has done something unusual to me.  Wide awake at 2 am.  Oh well.

My focus is radio, so I confess that there is a lot of exciting multimedia hype that I am just not interested in right now (though I wold have been 10 years ago).  The contrast between the south hall multimedia exhibits, brimming with hoardes of people, and the north hall radio brodcasting ghost-town is sobering.  These are technical weenies, though.  It makes sense.

Aside from meetings, The Motorola iRadio launch party was the biggest thing on my agenda today.  I talked to Dave Ulmer at length and was amazed at how complex their offering is to understand, and what a twisted value proposition they have.  If you can't explain to a consumer the basics of what a product is without four minutes of intro and 10 bullet items of jargon, it simply isn't worth considering.  The first thing I asked him is "so what radio stations do you have?"  I'm not sure he was expecting the question and hesitated.  I immediately knew their product was a technology product, not an entertainment product.

Dave didn't really seem very customer-oriented and really loved talking about the party.  I kept asking him about the demonstration and he told me "just check around inside the house".  The party is at the "NextGen" home of the future exhibit outside the front door of NAB.  I sure wish I was staying there instead of the hotel I'm in.  Very nice.

The party sure was great.  Big outdoor area, intense glitzy high-energy live music.  Great Margaritas, beer, BBQ meatballs and jumbo shrimp.  They may not understand consumer needs,  but they sure know how much people at Las Vegas Conferences love to party!

I looked around the house and found a very energetic Motorola evangelist for the product.  I pressed him on the demo.  He said I could come by any time over the next two days.  They were having "connection difficulties" tonight.  I'm serious!  If I ever have a product launch where I cannot demonstrate the product, I hope somebody gives me a swift kick in the head.

Here's the quick take:

1. It only works with Motorola phones.
2. He described the difference between "low audio quality time-critical content" and "high quality cacheable content" and said that the cacheable content (such as SmoothJazz radio) was downloaded while your phone is charging and then you can listen to it later (SD card stores this, so of course 1GB is the max capacity... comes with 256MB card).  The time-critical content such as news and sports was delivered by "the carrier".  I pressed him on "which carriers" and he kept going back to the technology topics.  So, you can download cached radio while you charge, and listen to news and sport live.
3. It costs $7 per month for 300 radio stations, which tells me something immediately because I know a lot about radio offerings.  It's genre playlists and a few gems.  It will take you three weeks to figure out what to put on your 6 presets.
   
4. But wait!  Then he told me that the "low-quality" news and sports content... that's the carrier's opportunity for revenue.  So, I see, you pay $7 for the service, but you're going to also pay the carrier for live content. So, how much does this really cost?  Who knows?
5. There is a Rube Goldberg inspired configuration you can use in your car.  You get a device which "acts like a CD player" and your car's audio system connects to it.  Your phone communicates with this in-car device so you can hear low and high-quality content over your car stereo.
6. Did I mention how it only works on Motorola phones?

Beware of technology companies trying to pretend that they are content companies.

Somewhere in Motorola, I think somebody has allocated some money to protect the old iRadio tradmark they have had for years.  Some cool people who love the glamor of entertainment more than the drudgery of understanding consumer needs scored some budget and threw together this product.  It's not even good technology.  How much radio can you really keep without more storage?  And if I were their news content partner, I would be a bit put-off by Motorola's insistence on referring to it as "low quality" content.

Best of luck, Motorola.

Good Margaritas though!  Thanks.

NAB 2005 Schedule Matrix

Well, sitting here at the Las Vegas Convention Center today has me clearly realizing that there are idiots everywhere.  From the materials provided for the NAB 2005 (National Association of Broadcaster's) show it's almost impossible to find out what sessions are going on in a particular day and what is interesting and what is not.  It's even worse because there are 4 separate conferences you get a ticket for (great deal by the way).  So, you can see all the individual conferences, but can't really see the whole thing at a glance.

I put together a comprehensive NAB Schedule Matrix by sucking a few web pages and filtering out the data using Perl.  I put it on my Pocket PC and it's the best schedule reference yet for the show.  I don't know how it's possible that NAB hasn't provided something like this.  Even the PDA kiosks at the show download a set of session descriptions listed alphabetically (pretty useless if you want to know what's on at a particular time of day).

Download NAB2005_Session_Matrix.xls (33.5K)

If you want more info on the show go to www.nabshow.com.

Also, if you're into Internet Radio it would be great to meet up.  Leave a message on (415) 367-3435 or send an email using the link on my blog.

Reason 3.0 and Pro Tools

It's been a long, long time since I've become excited about creating music.  But, for the past two weekends, I've spent some time learning Pro Tools LE and Reason 3.0 and have been, to say the least, amazed.  Everyone I talk to who is under 30 seems to know about these products and I'm feeling old!  I've been spending too much time doing boring stuff and missing out on some real excitement!

Everybody is loving GarageBand these days.  Rightly so.  It makes it easy to create multi-track recordings if you really don't know much about music.  Great software, easy to use.

But, if you do know how to play, and if you have a MIDI keyboard, you're making a mistake if you don't RUSH OUT and buy Pro Tools and Reason and hook them together and create something. Pro Tools is the industry-standard audio mixing suite, and it's damned impressive.  If you don't like learning complex software, maybe it's not for you.  But, if you'd like to control everything, and appreciate software that is not only complete but comprehensive, Pro Tools is the one.

Reason 3.0, from PropellerHeads Software, is nothing short of miraculous.  A seemingly limitless array of studio quality synths, effects, mixers, all combined in a simulated rack-mount cabinet that is so convincing I can almost hear the cooling fans whirring.  I didn't think there were software companies doing this kind of high-quality innovation any more and it's renewed my faith in the whole software industry.

Beyond the technical junk, the truth is that this software is musical.  Once you get past the technical lumps, it's fluid, fast, and doesn't stand in the way.

Because I'm going to the USA (NAB/Las Vegas) for the first time in 10 years, I wrote a little "theme song" for my trip.  It's a little rousing march reminiscent of the opening march in "A Few Good Men".  After all, why not be patriotic, eh?  It's lighthearted, and I tried to create a convincing sounding marching band sound, mostly using the amazing array of processing and sample sources Reason 3.0 provides.

Keep in mind that 100% of this is created with Reason 3.0 and Pro Tools and all the parts were played on my Roland MIDI keyboard.  Sounds pretty real to me!  It may be cliche, but at least it's mine!

Give it a try, and get a laugh.  It's only 35 seconds long, but lots of fun.

Download "Going Back" March (349.6K MP3)

Just When I Was Giving Up on MP3 Downloads...

Until 3 years ago, the harbinger of MP3 downloads have been hanging over the heads of our music industry clients.  Even saying the word MP3 was verboten, and it was amazing how unreceptive the execs were to being open-minded about even the slightest mention of digital music.

Then it happened.  It was on the map, and everybody began seeing business models, thanks in no small part to Apple of course.

I resisted getting too involved myself.  For the most part, I was in the musical doldrums for those years.  Things changed.  Now I belong to several subscription services.  I still can't find anything new and interesting and I'm convinced that the big problems lie ahead... this stuff is no where close to mainstream yet.  Especially the business models!

I joined emusic.com a while back.  I was unimpressed.  The selection was crap, and many of the tracks I'd download were clipped before the end of the track due to poor ripping.  Most of it is automated and, lucky me, I just happen to like those songs not many people buy.  (Though I now have a complete Frank Zappa collection, which is nice!)

emusic.com keeps rolling over my 40 downloads.  It's a lot like vacation days.  If you don't take them, you lose them.  Then, on a whim I clicked on Classical and ta-da!  Going back to my roots paid off.  Classical is much better on emusic than the rest of the selection of back catalogue.  I can accept an Alfred Brendel rendition of the Emperor Concerto, and there's a smattering of Steve Reich and others.  I don't mind taking a chance on the Copenhagen Baroque orchestra doing Dvorak.  How bad can it be?  (OK, it can be, but somehow this is more tolerable than downloading an unknown song by an unknown band I never heard of).

The other nice thing about classical is that because download is per track, I can get the entire Emperor concerto (all 40 minutes of it) in 3 downloads.  I think this could be an all time bargain basement way to buy some Wagner operas.

So, maybe I won't cancel right away.

We'll see.

Nice People with Good Intentions

Everyone likes nice people.  And, when you're getting things done, it's great to have nice people on your team!

One thing I pride myself in is learning new things.  I have learned that there are nice people, nice people who get things done, and people who get things done but aren't necessarily nice.  Regrettably when you need to get things done, being nice isn't enough.  Increasingly I'm choosing people who get things done, and merely hoping they're nice people.  It's an attitude adjustment for me.  But it's practical.

I've ordered a book by Duke Robinson called Good Intentions: The Nine Unconscious Mistakes of Nice People.  The "nine mistakes" appear to quite accurately characterize some of the very problems the nice people I know have.  While I won't go overboard, maybe I can help some of the nice people I work with in learning to get things done, and thus become one of the super-people who are nice and get things done too.

I like my team nice.  But, sorry, I must get things done.