Status - Commentary

Office 2010 Released

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Wed, 12 May 2010 12:15:12 -0700

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.

The Full Protection of the Law

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 06:58:38 -0700

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.

Hope you like the iPhone

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:17:56 -0700

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.

Microsoft discontinues Essential Business Server

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 09:34:02 -0700

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.

Olympic Overload

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 22:47:56 -0700

Vancouver 2010 store: Planned maintenance

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:

Vancouver 2010 store during closing ceremonies

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!

The Buzz

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 16:48:18 -0700

So most people have probably at least heard of Twitter, the micro-blogging site that started the trend of putting out short, quick updates on where you are or what you are doing or thinking about at any particular time. But unless you are a geeky sort of person, you probably haven't yet heard about Google's recently released answer to Twitter, Buzz.

Buzz is actually a part of Gmail, the company's free e-mail service, so if you have a Gmail account, you already are automatically in Buzz. It shows up as an icon on the left menu panel near the inbox. It works pretty much exactly like Twitter; you just have a box, where you type in whatever you want (although Buzz doesn't have the sometimes annoying 140 character limit that Twitter is either saddled with or blessed by, depending on who you ask) and click post and it puts it out there. You can also make posts public or private, restricting it to just your allowed Gmail contacts, or showing them to everyone.

Why does anyone need another micro-blogging service? Well, you might not. But Buzz has snared me in a way that Twitter never managed to. A lot of features that Twitter either should have or could benefit from are already in Buzz. With Twitter, you can get those things, but either only through third-party services, through some geeky hacking, or by waiting a long time for Twitter itself to slowly add them, frequently messing them up in the process. Buzz gets a lot of this stuff out of the box because it is so tightly tied with other products and services Google already offers.

You can comment on or "like" posts from others, which provides a more complete conversational tool than Twitter's homegrown @ or # adaptations. It's similar to Google Reader in that way, and in fact broadcasts items you share from Reader when you share them. You can go back and edit posts, or choose to e-mail them to others who don't have or use Buzz.

One of the neat things is that public posts can be viewed by location. So, I can choose to see updates from my contacts most of the time, but other times, such as when we are up here at a big event like the Olympics, I can switch to see what people nearby are buzzing about... and find out what fun stuff is happening nearby. A killer part of this feature is that it also integrates with Google Maps; so I can pull up a map that shows me exactly where people were when they made those posts. If I want, I can have it give me directions (by car, public transit, or on foot) right to that location.

You can also embed a picture in a Buzz post, or, Google's Picasa photo-sharing service automatically adds your recently posted pictures to the service.

Or, if you like, you can also set it up to add your activities from other popular sites like Flickr, Youtube, or Blogger (where this blog lives) automatically. Another site you can add to automatically update Buzz: Twitter.

I've always thought that is a great way to eat another company's lunch, and what it means is that it's easy for Tweeters to make the transition. With all the other features available, the personalization seems to me to be much more amenable to the sorts of friendly conversations that this sort of social networking tool should be about. In some ways, it's more like a Facebook feed in that way, but even more flexible.

But I don't actually believe the two services are in competition. Twitter has evolved, at least in terms of utility, into more of a marketing and informational site. It's public and web-based nature is a great way for companies to disseminate information and gain adherents to their message and products. Mechanisms the company has put in place to confirm identities and monetize the information stream are well-suited to corporate use. Genuinely useful social networking features make little difference to that sort of use.

Buzz, on the other hand, provides most of those features, and does so in a thoughtful, understated way that simply pulls people further into the Google Universe. I'm sure that many Twitter devotees will refuse to make the move, but it's worth noting that in terms of penetration, Twitter still has very little reach and the market for this sort of tool is wide open (although it's also worth pointing out that Gmail itself still has relatively small mass compared to other web-based mail services). I expect to see companies continue to adopt and use Twitter as part of their marketing and customer service strategy, but I think Buzz may be the place people end up if they are genuinely interested in keeping up with friends and associates and even just people nearby.

Business technology outpaces state tax law once again

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:29:51 -0700

I ran across Chuck Blakeman's "Why Small Business is Fed Up with Government" at an apt time, as I am helping my wife with her state B&O taxes for her small business. IMS reports quarterly and has a rather less complicated business model; my wife sells quite a bit of electronic stuff online in addition to her local activities, and this throws the tax form preparation process into a bit of a tar pit, particularly with the 2004 Washington state decision to treat electronic media as "tangible personal property" for tax purposes.

The state's concern is real; as more and more media becomes electronic and shifts away from physical goods such as books and DVDs, a considerable portion of the major tax base here, which is derived from a state sales tax, is at risk. Particularly with retail giant Amazon based in Seattle, the state stood to lose a significant chunk of the tax base it relies on to serve infrastructure and other local service needs.

The approach they decided to take is less laudable. Rather than sitting down and looking at the implications and reality of the shift toward electronic goods, they simply made a few punctuation changes in their definition of tangible property, making a mockery of the term, and throwing the whole process of tax preparation for the small electronic media business into disarray. It sounds like an easy change to make, but many of the assumptions which hold true for physical goods don't hold up for electronic goods, and make the laws governing the process utterly assinine and impossible to follow sensibly.

Continue reading "Business technology outpaces state tax law once again"

Clearwire now just "Clear"

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:38:00 -0700

So I saw a commercial on TV the other day for a high speed wireless Internet service covering the Puget Sound region. They called themselves "Clear" and I thought, "Wow, Clearwire is going to have a conniption, that's the same thing they do!"

Then, of course, the penny dropped.

I suppose it finally occurred to someone over there that the "wire" in the name brought up exactly the wrong connotation for a wireless service. So now they are just "Clear" although their terms and service plans are anything but (prominent on the front page of the Clear website is their bold offer "$30 a month 4G wireless service" while in the fine print you see it's only $30 for the first six months of a mandatory two year term, with hefty fees for early termination). So, same-old, same-old. I remain unimpressed, and it appears the rest of their market does as well. With high-speed wireless adoption coming now more from the bottom up, through cell-phones and their carriers, Clear may have missed the boat, "4G" service or not.

Google Docs becomes your online hard drive

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 07:17:00 -0700

It's long been possible to use various Google products, Gmail particularly, with their copious amounts of free storage space, as free online hard drive space with the use of third party utilities (primarily the Gmail Drive Shell Extension).

It's also long been speculated that Google would introduce a formal service designed to provide this functionality, popularly nicknamed "GDrive" (in the same way that the long-rumored cell phone offering, recently revealed as the "Nexus1" was called the "Google Phone" in speculation so often that many people are simply calling the Nexus1 the "Google Phone") in competition with various other providers of free online drive space that have popped up in recent years. The much-discussed GDrive service has not emerged as such, but in a backward (but potentially even more useful) sort of way, Google has finally provided such as service as part of its online document and spreadsheet offering, Google Docs.

Now, any Google Docs account can hold not just the various types of Google documents, but also any file that users choose to upload. The files are limited to 250MB in size, and count against the global Docs storage limit (currently 1GB, although Google is known to play around with those numbers as its internal capacity grows, and you can purchase more a la carte), but apart from that, you can now upload, and share, any sort of files you like.

It's not GDrive, but it may be better. By incorporating this functionality into Docs, it's putting it in the place where most serious Google business users spend the greater part of their time anyway, and it incorporates a sharing mechanism and paradigm that is already broadly used.

Simplicity: The cure to increasing IT failure rates

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:34:00 -0700

A controversial whitepaper from Roger Sessions has been making the rounds and engendering debate among IT architects and managers recently. In it, Sessions argues that increasing complexity is resulting in increasing IT project failure rates, which are costing, globally, $500 billion per month in direct and indirect costs.

While the numbers are probably worthless, the argument itself, and the solutions Sessions represents, may have some merit. It's not clear that IT failure rates are increasing at anywhere near the rate that he posits, but complexity, indeed, seems to have a significant role in the problem, and simplicity, as an antidote, is something I am predisposed toward and have personally seen affect failure rates.

Unfortunately, for most readers here, Sessions paper is in itself probably too complex, but if you are among those with an interest and inclination to read some technical background on what makes systems complex and what approaches can be taken to simplify them, the bulk of the paper is informative and not particularly controversial.

Being a pain to your customers

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:22:36 -0700

I am not one of those people who insist that the customer is always right. Certainly, in consulting at least, the customers would not be coming to us in the first place if they were right; they're looking for advice and assistance to get things right, which frequently implies that in the past, or perhaps currently, they're getting things wrong, and find listening to us to be worth their time and money.

I try to remain cognizant of this when I am a customer myself. Often I am going out to other professionals for their products, advice, or assistance, and if I can't do myself whatever it is that I am willing to pay them to do, then a degree of humility is certainly in order.

That understanding springs only from a particular facet of their expertise, however, and doesn't necessarily extend across the whole of the relationship. I may not be able to bore out my own cylinders, for instance, but if the mechanic's shop is rude, doesn't take checks, and has lousy coffee, I am perfectly comfortable with denouncing them despite their alleged expertise and taking my business across the road.

There are certain business owners who don't appear capable of making this distinction, and those running the print media industry today are clearly among them.

This comes to me during a time where there is much debate over what will happen with the industry and whether or not it will successfully making the transition to digital distribution and the new revenue models that entails. The big papers, the Wall Street Journal amongst them, have been vociferously threatening to put their information behind a "pay wall" which will require readers to subscribe for a fee in order to read it. Further, they have claimed that this is necessary because Google (in the guise of Google News, particularly) is "giving away" their product and profiting from it without due compensation to the publisher. Google, of course, claims they are simply indexing and providing links to information that is publicly available, in the same way a phone directory publishes numbers or a map shows the way to your house. Moreover, Google does pay those big publishers a nominal fee for indexing their sites; a courtesy not extended to small guys like me even though my other blog turns up in News results with moderate frequency (while I would appreciate the cash, I am happy enough to have the traffic; if you can't monetize that, you shouldn't be publishing in the first place).

At any rate, that is the context of the discussion as it stands today, and it was in my mind as I was going through the various news sites I was browsing this morning. I happened across an article in the Wall Street Journal which had a link to another article in the Journal, both of which I found interesting and informative. Thinking that perhaps I ought to give their website a try on its own merits, without going through Google as usual, I went right to the front page, and picked the headline article.

What came up was about a paragraph of the story followed by an ellipsis. I hit refresh, thinking perhaps there was a browser problem. There wasn't; that paragraph was the tease. Apparently, if you use the WSJ website, you gotta pay. But it wasn't clear at all how to immediately do that. There was nothing to click on to help me scratch my itch, no way for me to easily give them money to finish reading what I was already hooked on. Going to the Wall Street Journal site instead of going through Google had done nothing other than cause pain and inconvenience to me. This is how you win customers?

On a hunch, I went back to Google and simply searched the headline of the story. It came up at the top of the results; I clicked, and although it went to the WSJ site again, this time, it showed the whole story.

Publishers are trying to make a big deal out of the fact that they are the original owners of their content, and that it's such great stuff that huge volumes of people are driven to it via Google or other aggregators, but if you have complete control over such great stuff to start of with, and yet some third-party comes along and at the drop of a hat manages to provide a much superlative customer experience with it, who is really to blame for your troubles? If I am going to pay for such stuff, I want to pay for a better, easier, more informative experience than the free one. Why would I give you money to be a pain in my ass?

This seems to be the position of the publishers, who have accompanied it with a threat to take their ball and go home. That sort of threat is almost only ever made in the expectation that people love to play so much they'll chase the ball-carrier home and beg to continue playing in his or her yard, with many concessions. But publishers don't have the only ball, and it only takes one to break ranks to throw the rest under the bus. News is a commodity and it will go for the lowest price the market is willing to put on it.

Google Goggles

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 15:35:08 -0700

I like to toot my own horn as much as the next guy, so I was tickled when I ran across Google's Goggle's project. Still in Labs (sort of a pre-beta beta compared with Google's normal "beta" product releases), Goggles provides a visual search interface. This doesn't mean that you put in a search term and they show you a bunch of images that may be related (a la Google Image Search); instead, you show Google a picture, and they'll tell you what it is. In their front-page example, you take a cell-phone snapshot of the Golden Gate Bridge, and up pops the results you might expect to get if you had typed "golden gate bridge" in as a search term: the Wikipedia article, other images, a live webcam shot.

Cool, but how does this reflect particularly well on me, you ask? Well, as it happens, way back in 2006 when Google Video first launched and began soliciting massive, unlimited length videos from users to be posted to and hosted on the site, Nicholas Carr asked "Can somebody tell me, with a straight face, the economic, social or cultural justification for 'wanting all the world's video'?" The answer seemed obvious to me, and it may not have been as sexy as the more popular "Google must feed the secret artificial intelligence they are growing in the basement at Mountain View" but it looks like it might have had the virtue of simply being right: Google wanted a vast volume of images to work with to perfect a method to search video.

Now, Goggles doesn't do that, but it's the next logical step; as I pointed out in comments, audio search was already being developed at the time, and it makes sense that still image search would precede actual video search by some span. Still, I imagine that's still in the cards. Today, you can take a picture of the Golden Gate bridge and Goggles will tell you what you're looking at; tomorrow, catch it, and a hundred other things in a video, and I bet Google will have something to tell you about all of them. Scary? You bet! Kinda neat? Definitely.

Happy holidays!

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 14:31:24 -0700

"Happy Holidays" is, of course, code for "I'm out busily stuffing myself with pie and ham and won't be blogging much until I recover some time after New Years."

But I do honestly wish the rest of you the best in your own holiday excesses, such as they are. I'll be back sometime in the New Year, or a bit sooner if I get bored of the whole family thing.

Cheers!

It's for your own good!

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 07:49:09 -0700

Ed Bott, who recently posted an excellent precis of Microsoft's Windows 7 licensing policies (something all the high-priced legal guns over in Redmond couldn't seem to come up with between themselves with years and years of lead time), today tackles the forbidden mysteries of the company's OEM licensing. OEM licenses for software are traditionally less expensive licenses aimed at system builders, who can then install and resell them with a new PC without taking a loss on the software component of the sale. Traditionally, the license has also been available to individuals building their own systems.

With the most recent version of Windows, though, the license agreement has changed; you are now required to resell the system you install the software on in order to remain in compliance.

Not only has this changed, but Microsoft apparently forgot to inform its own staff of the fact. According to Bott, questions as to the legality of installing and using an OEM version as an individual on one's own computer posed to Microsoft staff are answered inconsistently at best, and frequently incorrectly (this is nothing new; I've had fun tripping up Microsoft staffers on their own licensing terms for years now, none of them know what you can or can't legally do with their software).

"Is that pathetic, or what?" Ed asks.

No, no, Ed. Get with the program! This isn't pathetic, it's intentional and it's for your own good! Steve Ballmer says so!

Clearwire sounding increasingly shrill

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:59:51 -0700

Defying the latest apparent indicator of low confidence in the company and their product, Clearwire's CEO William Morrow declared that despite the evidence, "Google believes in us." This after Google failed to participate in the most recent round of funding for the company, after providing it with previous financial backing, apparently engaging in the time tested strategy of refusing to reinforce failure.

It makes all the sense in the world that Google would invest in the deployment of high-speed, 4G wireless networking technology; the greater the reach of the Internet, the more Google stands to profit. A successful Clearwire would be a boon to Google, providing hundreds of thousands of potential customers with access in places where they might not otherwise have broadband access. Although mobile devices are competing to fill this niche, mobile providers have had their own provisioning issues (witness AT&T's difficulty providing enough bandwidth over its network to keep up with iPhone users) and the race is still an open field.

As I have said before, I had high hopes for Clearwire. Morrow says that despite the current issues, the company is positioned to become a powerhouse in the sector, but I submit that that was true from day one at the company. It hasn't acted like a powerhouse, and it hasn't taken the steps it needs to in order to become one. Their draconian terms and poor customer service seems to have made them as many enemies as gained them customers. It may now be too late. The 4G network that the company is building out will surely be a boon.... to someone. But at the rate ClearWire is acquiring customers, it's going to be whoever buys them out or leases their network, instead.

It is those third parties who are reselling the service over that network in which Clearwire places most of its faith at this point. But those parties are, largely, cable companies; other entities which have learned their poor customer service habits growing in a monopoly environment. The rate at which their pie is being eaten by satellite and Internet delivery of TV service gives you some idea what their capabilities are in markets where they actually have to compete for customers. Wireless broadband is another of those markets, and I don't foresee them doing any better there.

The best thing for most consumers to hope for in this area, then, is that Clearwire continues to build out its network, and then as its revenues fall and it becomes an increasingly attractive takeover target, someone else buys that network who knows how to deliver. Is that what Google is waiting on the sidelines for? Probably not, considering other monopoly concerns and their apparently doused ambitions(so far only rolled out in one metropolitan area with no others announced) to provide free municipal wifi service (while searching for that, I ran across a gem that I apparently missed this past April Fools day: Google TiSP). But I imagine they wouldn't mind funding or co-owning whatever company that does eventually turn out to be.