Commentary

Microsoft has released the next version of the venerable Office suite, Office 2010, and companion products Sharepoint 2010 and Visio 2010 (is Sharepoint really an Office companion product? I'll explain that in a minute) today to business customers worldwide.

It's getting harder and harder for Microsoft to make Office launches into a big deal. Office 2010 is basically Office 2007, which was basically Office 2003, each iteration dressed up with a few whiz-bang features that do little or nothing for (and sometimes work directly against) the core functionality that people look for in the package: typing documents and making spreadsheets. While the new features are not universally worthless, they are increasingly disproportionate to the value of the package as a whole.

The whiz-bang this time is Office Web Apps, a free online version of the most popular Office applications: Word, Excel, and Powerpoint.

While I like the strategy the company has adopted for dealing with the advent of cloud computing, I'm not sure I like the results. I think the Software+Service mantra they have chosen to tie existing cash-cow products to various online solutions is a good way to go from their perspective, in that it provides a leash on revenues while giving customers enough taste of the flexibility and power of utility computing to keep them from jumping ship. They are not, however, helping anyone realize any of the significant cost savings that should be possible in the utility computing model, which considering the girth of the company in the marketplace, may simply serve to give the model a bad name. I doubt that anyone in Redmond would shed any tears if that were to happen.

While integration and compatibility are good things, of late Microsoft has been using those desirable elements to create an undesirable one, dependency. This is where Sharepoint as an Office component comes in. Sharepoint has always had strong ties ties to Office, but originally, it was positioned as a sort of easy-to-use, shake-and-bake corporate intranet product. It's pretty effective in that role, and flexible enough to meet most business needs out of the box. But needing a quick response to Google's suddenly popular Apps online-office package ("need" is too strong a word; nonetheless, the company apparently felt a threat from that direction and responded accordingly), Sharepoint was pressed into service as the de facto "cloud" document store for the various online versions of Office. This, again, is not a bad move for Microsoft to make, but again, it fails to showcase the potential flexibility of utility computing.

Office Web Apps are similarly constrained. While they are free, you don't get the full functionality unless you are also using them with Office 2010 on the desktop... with all the attendant costs and constraints that brings to the table. At this point, it's silly to use them otherwise; if you own the full version, you may as well use it instead (if you need access from anywhere, just store them in Sharepoint!) and if you don't, you are better off picking another product which doesn't have the explicit goal of maneuvering you into buying the full package.

Microsoft has intelligently structured the Office game in recent years to effectively prevent customers from considering these factors and to keep adoption rates high. A recent Forrester survey, cited in the link at the top of this post, names some astounding ROI numbers for the Office package, numbers that I would not dispute; compare Office to your average Smith-Corona and see what wins. But the same survey helps illustrate how exactly the game is rigged. The comparison is made in a vacuum, one of Microsoft's own creation. It's not being made against other alternatives... and the Forrester data suggests why that is. More than half of respondents planning to upgrade to 2010 are not doing so because it's better, or because they've evaluated it in any meaningful way against alternatives; they're doing so simply because their licensing terms allow it. It's a human impulse, after all. "Hey, I can get this for free!" It's not free, of course; you paid for it once and will do so again, but the adoption is severed from the payment by terms of contract, which makes it intentionally difficult to associate the two events, and particularly difficult to get out of the cycle. It's the same reason any sort of recurring billing is a hit revenue model. The customer pays before he realizes it, then decides since the product is already paid for to go ahead and use it.

Those familiar with the "business as conflict" school of thought will recognize that this scenario puts the company inside your OODA loop, a bad place to allow an adversary. You may question whether or not Microsoft is an adversary, but putting all the feel-good partnership language aside, when someone is trying to take money out of your pocket without being entirely up front about the exchange, that puts them on the other team in my book.

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.

Because pretty soon, it's going to be the only smartphone!

I've been one of the few people that have bothered to defend Apple in their recent patent infringement lawsuit against Google-heavy handset maker HTC, but their legitimate right to defend whatever efforts were required to create such an innovative product is starting to get stretched a little thin in light of recent information. It's been clear that the HTC suit was aimed more broadly than at just HTC, but while many observers have interpreted the goal as being the eventual establishment of various cross-licensing agreements, the reactions detailed in the various posts on Techmeme from other handset makers reveal panic and frenzied efforts to remove disputed features from their own products. It doesn't sound as though licensing has been put on the table as a viable option.

Critics of software patent law and practice have been having a field day with the Apple suit and the chilling effect that those patents have had on the smartphone field in general. It's an old and accepted argument that patents can stifle evolutionary innovation, and the system has made that trade-off to encourage revolutionary innovation, ensuring that individuals and businesses can invest in research and development to bring new ideas to market without being immediately copied and squashed by others with more resources. It's accepted that in the long term the benefit to society is greater even with the limited grant of monopoly to the original innovator.

Software patents and the greater pace of advance in the industry have called that assumption into question, and Apple is apparently going to great lengths to demonstrate just how bad for consumers this state of affairs might be.

It's an oddity that I often find unintentionally related threads of stories on the front page of Techmeme and other tech news sites, and today has been no exception. Together with the news of Apple's strong-arm techniques against other handset makers, today finds an analysis of the invasive and restrictive license agreement required to develop applications for the iPhone (which, unlike competitors, tightly governs all applications that can run on the device). So not only will Apple be your only phone, but Apple will also okay your only Apps, and you better not want porn or bikinis or anything else that might offend Apple or AT&T.

And as if to point out the idiocy of the original patents that all this restriction is based on, another article points out a new patent application from the company, one that covers the use of the phone as an electronic key. So, pretty soon all you Prius owners are going to have to report back in to have your cars retrofitted to use old-school physical keys instead of fobs, I guess.

It's strange and a little sad that a genuinely innovative company like Apple, not one of the leech-like patent trolls that accumulate and sue as their primary business function, but a company that has created truly new and interesting technology, might be the company to finally push the system hard enough to make it obvious to everyone that so much power for so long a span is absolutely a detriment to consumers. Because when you combine the suppression of competing platforms with vice-like control over the content on your own platform, you are unquestionably hurting consumers. It may not be long before the issue inflames passions as much as abortion or gun rights. You can have our Android handsets when you pry them from our cold, dead fingers.

I guess it proved, as I predicted, to be not so essential after all.

Microsoft attributes the discontinuation to "new IT trends" but the product is less than two years old and the trends were taking shape long before that. In fact, in the post linked above, I discuss those trends at some length... more virtualization, less hardware reliance (where EBS required more physical servers than preceding products), less costly hosted alternatives. Those things were obvious enough to potential customers that, by some estimates, less than 100 bought the thing... this despite the predictable excitement of such a money-maker for the Microsoft specialists who form the core of the sales team for the company among SMBs.

So, while I was in Vancouver for the Olympics last week, I didn't pick up too many souvenirs... I noticed that stuff wasn't exactly flying off the shelves, and figured I might wait a week and get much better deals. Surplus stocks of hats, t-shirts, and maple syrup are no doubt going to be hitting the market at much reduced prices after the hordes of tourists leave town. Anyway, this being my plan, I thought idly as I watched the Closing Ceremonies tonight that I would drop by the official store and see if the discounting had yet begun. Instead, I saw the message at left, and thought, "Wow, that was some tremendously poor timing."

But then I checked back a while later and saw this instead:


Server meltdown! Apparently, I wasn't the only one with that bright idea. Looks like the market may show a greater demand after the Games are over than while they were ongoing. The bad timing was mine!