Status

This is a bit of a digression (which is filed under "Ramblings") but then, I'm prone to those, and why go into business for yourself if you don't want to digress every now and then, eh?

The clamor on the web over the discovery, and subsequent purchase, of a prototype next generation Apple iPhone by tech rumor/news site Gizmodo has been dwarfed by the furor unleashed when it was revealed that California police later raided the home office of Jason Chen, the editor responsible for the story generated by the original incident. Because these are mostly bloggers reacting to the search and seizure of another blogger's technological assets, the stories are running ten to one against the cops, with the few supporting exceptions largely coming from die-hard Apple fans who felt the company was wronged and are hoping for a comeuppance for Gizmodo.

The police are playing it pretty close to the vest with their investigation so far, which has made it easy to attribute a sort of Big-Brother-like malicious intimidation to the act, but I think that's premature. If it's true that police are often overly secretive, it's also true that exposing too much information too early in an investigation can queer the pitch and result in the perpetration of injustice, and I think a little patience (certainly more than has been exhibited so far) is in order. The time and place for a judgement of their actions is in a courtroom when all the facts are on the table. It's way too early for that to happen.

The speculation so far revolves around two possibilities: one, that they are investigating the original discoverer of the lost phone for theft (according to most interpretations I have seen so far, California law is a little fuzzy on this point but a prosecutor could certainly argue the original finder did not make the required "good faith" effort to return the device that is required to keep the act from becoming a theft), or two, that they are investigating Gizmodo for receiving stolen goods. The five thousand dollars the company paid for the device seems to indicate they knew there was something less-than-kosher about the deal.

It's entirely possible the police are investigating both and don't have a firm idea what happened. That's why investigations occur. You don't always know what the charges are going to be until you unearth the evidence, and this is a beneficial feature of our system in my opinion. If that's a fishing trip, as some people are saying, then so is every criminal investigation. While the crime is pretty clearly overblown, it nonetheless appears to have occurred. If you're not going to allow the police to get to the bottom of such things, cut them a severance check and send 'em home... there's little other use for law enforcement agency.

The primary argument against the search and seizure warrant has been that Chen is protected under both California and federal journalist shield laws, provisions made to protect First Amendment free speech rights. If anything, this portion of the debate has been even less clear than that dealing with the police investigation. Bloggers are simply throwing "shield law" out there as if it protects against all evils, without much substantiation. Few have bothered to actually read the text in question, or apply it to the situation at hand. Instead, much is being made of a single, unsupported statement in this Wired post, which says, "The government cannot seize material from the journalist even if it’s investigating whether the person who possesses the material committed a crime."

This is supposedly a provision of the federal Privacy Protection Act, but from my reading of the law (IANAL, of course) the Wired statement, if not entirely incorrect, is at least incomplete. There are at least two exceptions under which material can be seized even from a journalist, and at least one of them seems to apply, albeit rather narrowly. Indeed, it would be very strange if the government were as restricted as Wired claims; almost any crime committed by a journalist could not be investigated fully. Subpeonas can be used rather than warrants, but the potential and temptation for destruction of incriminating evidence by the guilty party would seem to militate against them.

People have gone back and forth over whether Chen even is a journalist and so worthy of such protections anyway, but most seem to agree that California law is reasonably clear on that point, and in any event I would argue that bloggers fill a much more important role than the traditional media does in fulfilling the promise of a free press in a democratic society. On the other hand, I get paid for blogging (not on for this blog), and wouldn't consider myself a journalist. There is certainly room for reasonable people to disagree on that point, but I think the important factor is that the sunshine we think is healthy in our society is increasingly being let in by bloggers, whether paid or not, and so the protections we feel should be reasonably extended to those actors in our system should apply to them as well.

On the other hand, who then is not a blogger for these purposes? Everyone uses Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Buzz, or a hundred other blogging or micro-blogging platforms. Is it time to extend protections to everyone against turning over evidence of criminal activity? Because that argument could certainly be made by enterprising lawyers looking to bog down the prosecution in whole hosts of different cases. "Your Honor, my client downloaded and stored those MP3 files as part of an ongoing story about how vile the record companies are, their seizure and the use of meta-tag information to identify the sources and dissemination was a clear violation of the PPA and we move they be excluded from evidence."

Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? But it may not sound so great when it is a file full of your credit card numbers and the same motion is made.

So, Chen's case may be more clear-cut than some (despite one of the principals of Gizmodo denying, not long ago, that the company was any sort of journalistic endeavor), but most of the knee-jerk reaction so far fails to look at the implications of their arguments on technology law enforcement as a whole. If they're right, there would seem to be very little that any "blogger" would have to fear (at least in California) of committing most technology-related crimes.

As we move later in the day today, some more informed and well-reasoned analysis is coming out, and it looks as if the police may have more solid ground to stand on than some would hope. I imagine that the most likely conclusion to all this will be some hasty apologies and agreements not to sue and that the whole issue will never see in the inside of a courtroom, but once again it seems that technology has far outstripped the comprehension of legislators.

There are a lot of advantages to the cloud, or utility, computing model, but it can be difficult for small businesses to see exactly how those apply to their situations. If you are in that group, consider attending a free webinar tomorrow by Ventureneer titled "How, Why, and When Small Businesses and Nonprofits should use cloud computing." Unlike most such presentations, this one isn't being put on by one of the big providers and so looks to be about as unbiased an initial presentation as you will find on the subject.

I run across these stories all the time, sometimes from the client's perspective, sometimes from the prospective of the consultant (almost always, actually, the former consultant), so this recent entry from MIT's Tech from an alum who worked for Boston Consulting Group isn't exactly a shocker. It is, though, one of the clearest and best written articles I have found in the leitmotif, so if you were still wondering why choosing a big consulting company is usually a mistake, it's worth a read.

Although some see these recurring themes in consulting engagements as a curse against consultants everywhere, in fact it is more an indictment of employees who didn't realize the game they were getting into and clients that didn't do their homework about the businesses they chose to rely on for vital business advice and guidance. Good advice is out there, and it's got great value; don't expect you're going to get it just because you are asking a firm with a lot of people on the payroll.

So, I read this morning that new startups are starting up with fewer and fewer staff over time. Apart from the implications that this might have for job growth in our already shaky economy, it also suggests that, just perhaps, the much-vaunted efficiency of technology in business operations is finally being realized.

The advantages of technology were posited long ago, in the sixties and seventies as big business began to invest in information technology with the goal of making their operations more efficient. It didn't. Throughout the eighties and nineties, studies of the relationship between technology investment and productivity failed to show any significant improvements in efficiency associated with technology. Only in the late nineties and the early part of this century have researchers began to uncover subtle gains in efficiencies coming from IT investment.

With those early failures to improve efficiency came a sort of solace to those who had worried that new, hyper-efficient computers would result in massive unemployment, as us poor, pokey old human beings couldn't keep up and would necessarily be kicked out on the streets by our heartless corporate masters. Computers were everywhere, but job growth still boomed, fueled in no small part by the failures of the computers themselves... the support burden of keeping IT systems up and running was no small factor in its failure to introduce real productivity improvements.

But, as it does, technology has evolved, and IT systems today are faster, more stable, and easier to use than ever. As they start to fulfill their original promise, it looks like the original threat, that jobs would disappear, may also be starting to emerge.

This isn't great for the national economy or job-seekers, of course, but for the small business owner or IT manager, it has another set of threats. It means that your competitors are figuring out how to use IT to run a more lean operation, and if you want to stay in the game, you are going to have to do so as well. Years of cruising along with the blanket understanding that IT was difficult, expensive, and ultimately dysfunctional have led to a sort of complacency with the status quo that may now be fatal to small businesses. Technology that breaks, costs inordinate amounts, or does not actually improve your business processes in the ways that it should, can no longer be tolerated. The excuses are disappearing... it's time to make technology, make good.

Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite has made available the bundled products of Exchange, Sharepoint, and Live Meeting, hosted by Microsoft itself, for more than a year now. The $120 per year, per user fee has seemed a little steep, though, considering those same solutions have been available from third parties who have much more experience and for much less money than Microsoft itself. The target market of BPOS, and most of its uptake, has been with larger organizations (many of which were probably able to negotiate much better deals in private, anyway).

The market most open to the hosted services offering, though, and representing the larger total number of seats, is the SMB market. Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley reports that Redmond is finally getting around to rolling out the SMB version of BPOS, due sometime in the second half of 2010.

Pricing isn't available yet, nor is a better long-term perspective on where Microsoft is going with the whole concept. Despite Steve Ballmer's assertion that the company is "all in" on cloud computing, it's not clear that Microsoft really realizes this may be where their bread is buttered for the foreseeable future... and if they don't, then despite their apparently privileged position as the designer of the software in question, you may still be better off buying the same services from smaller third-party hosting companies who have enough skin in the Software as a Service game to encourage stability and reliability.