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.

Chandler Suspense

Keep an eye on Chandler.  This has potential.

Kapor understands personal information management better than most.  To date, no personal information mangement tool has had the sophistication, elegance, and simplicity of the remarkable product, Lotus Agenda.  All other contenders either exhibit rigid database-like thinking or attempt to wax philosophical about the way we think.  Agenda was an insightful work of genius and remains so.

Chandler has more ambitious goals, but is born of the same need: to consolidate, share, organize, and re-organize the information we touch.  Right now, it's really a technical toy.  They're building the API, and even though it looks like it's moving slowly, they're meeting milestones as predicted, so I see some solid dedication and project management.  Building something so complex should take a while, it should require APIs and basic building blocks.  So, I'm certain they're on the right track.  My only fear is that it will, like Agenda, remain inaccessible to most people because it may be too abstract, or too elegant.  But, I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Thomas Vander Wal has an interesting investigation going called Tools to Manage Information on Your Personal Hard Drive.  He says it's part of what's needed to manage "The Personal Info Cloud".  I'm not sure about what cloud he's on, but he seems sensible.  However, his list of tools highlights the current undifferentiated mess that typifies the collection of personal information and knowledge management tools.

When Chandler is closer to release, give it a try.  Help them out.  Seems like a great step in the right direction.

Web Services Bullshit

I just read a Red Herring article about the "Top 10 Trends for 2005" and feel sorry for people who are forming opinions based upon inaccurate techspeak as is found in Don't Blink - Web Services Just Became Real.

This little gem defines "Web Services" with such broad brushstrokes that virtually every thing I can think of that is mediated between two computers on the web becomes a "Web Service" whether it's based upon new technologies or hacked and poorly crafted legacy technologies.  If you define them so broadly, then I think web services have been a "hot trend" since at least 1993.  I can think of several decade-old examples of one machine publishing useful automated information to another using web protocols.

Add to the soup a few buzzwords like RSS and XML and it gives the article a ring of authority.

"Web Services" are more complex.  For web services, in the truest sense, to become real and truly revolutionize machine-mediated interaction:

1. The protocols must be based upon a common standard specifically targeted at secure, authenticatable, machine-to-machine interaction.
2. There must be a few dominant, popular, and readily-supported protocols.
3. There must be a means to publish services in directories to create a producer-consumer model, with requisite authority broken down by domains of control, subscription, and licensing.
4. These protocols must be adopted widely and in preference to proprietary solutions.

Ad-hoc B2B machine-to-machine protocols don't count.  HTTP or FTP don't count.  Custom built proprietary solutions by a set of self-interested vendors don't count. 

Maybe RSS feeds count.  But the promise of the "web services world" as a beautiful commerce-enabled infospace hyper-connecting businesses throughout the world?  RSS is hardly worth pointing to if that's your aim!  And I believe those are the juicy predictions the pundits are prognosticating about.

Prognosis: Don't expect a web services revolution too soon.  Get the bulk of your ROI from mature technologies that can at least be identified rather than living "somewhere out there in the minds of journalists".