Status - Ramblings

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.

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!

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.

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!

If Linux is the future, what exactly is it the future of?

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:11:11 -0700

For whatever reason, the release of Windows version 7 seems to have provoked a spate of blog entries about Linux, of all things, the sometimes competing, always free, operating system that has served as an on and off protagonist in the Microsoft saga for the last decade or so. For much of that time, Linux proponents have proclaimed it as the future of computing, all computing... desktops, handhelds, servers, you name it, Linux runs on everything and it's seen as the best thing to run on most things by its champions.

But after nearly twenty years of this, years in which Linux has spread with varying degrees of slowness in every market except the server space, it's getting a little hard to credit such claims. And I say this as a regular user of Linux both on the desktop and on servers. It has many excellent features to recommend it and I'm sure it will continue to be the operating system of choice for technical people in need of free, flexible software on which to build their vision. But if it were going to explode into the world of the average user, it missed its chance... maybe.

Keith Curtis, a former Microsoft employee turned Linux advocate, thinks the operating system's best years are yet to come. The secret? The vast library of also free and easily installed software available to Linux users.

I couldn't disagree more strongly with the basis or relevance of that argument. For one thing, it really isn't easy; it never has been, and still isn't. There are many versions and gotchas and a rapidly mutating code base that even I sometime have difficulty navigating, and certainly isn't the sort of thing my mother would ever be able to do. Which is why she has an Apple. And with respect to ease of use and what users really want, the argument I discussed in my last post, regarding Apple simply producing the best tool for the job, may have some weight (even though I argued against that perspective, as well). The idea that you get what you pay for is not entirely without merit, although it is excessively simplistic and filled with caveats. When it comes to Linux, however, that's very broadly true. The value of the basic operation of most types of software is pretty close to nothing, the FOSS movement has established. That last five percent, the polish, is the part you are actually paying for. Enough successful commercial products have been built on the back of FOSS projects to demonstrate that principle quite well.

The broader reason the argument falls flat, though, is that it ignores the meta-trends shaping the PC market. The shift to web-based applications for almost every common use of the home computer will render free and easily installed software completely moot. What you'll need in the future is a barebones system that boots up and connects you to the Internet, where all your real work will be done, and which perhaps caches some applications and data (a la Google Gears) in case you can't connect for some reason in our increasingly connected world. Nitpickers may point out that the cheap computing appliances that you will use for this purpose will likely be built around Linux, but that just reinforces my first point; you're going to be paying for that last five percent or so built on top of the system, and never see anything of the wealth of other available applications for it.

A more intriguing possibility that could keep Linux alive and on the desktop is posited by Paul Murphy. Murph thinks Microsoft may be the movement's salvation and triumph, as the Redmond giant continues to find frustration in the stability and extensibility of the Windows code base (a problem that Curtis also points out). Looking at alternatives, Linux may prove the most attractive compared to building a completely new base from scratch or going hat-in-hand to Apple to license the phenomenal OS X instead. Murph works this in to the strategic decisions surrounding the industry shift toward cloud computing, and I have no idea if he is correct but I find it at least somewhat plausible. Still, it would be a Pyrrhic victory for Linux advocates, representing essentially the same sort of branding and repurposing the OS is likely to face from other adopters who are building cloud-access appliances anyway.

That time of year again

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 09:20:03 -0700

Summer = Vacation

So I'll be posting only intermittently for the next month or so; I may be napping, I may be sailing, I may be reading, but I'll be doing my level best not to be thinking about work no matter what else I am up to. See you in August!

Death Star

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:08:21 -0700

Did anyone else think "Southern California Geosynclinical Law Enforcement Satellite" from Virtual Light
when they saw this story on Slashdot?

AIG bonus thoughts

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:47:12 -0700

While most of the United States has been busy decrying the sizeable bonuses paid out to various executives at AIG, I've been watching the flacks at CNBC, and listening to AIG and other Wall Street executives themselves, react with self-righteous outrage of their own, claiming that those who are receiving the money are not, in fact, those who caused the problems, that they continue to perform a valuable and necessary service, and that the money is well-deserved for their skills and efforts.

I've commented elsewhere on what it says about an organization that it found itself in a position where it was necessary to rely on bribing a few key individuals to sort through the mess and wrap things up rather than being able to rely on solid documentation and processes to accomplish the same thing with any reasonably competent individual, but let's talk about the individuals as well. How massively brilliant and dedicated must they be to be so in demand (in an industry that is shedding jobs left and right) to deserve all this money! But is their brilliance and effort the only question? Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends doesn't think so, pointing out that "In capitalism, executives do not get rewarded for failure."

This is an excellent point that the talking heads somehow seem to miss. Regardless of the individual, if your company is failing, how can you possibly justify such outlandish compensation? Where are the results? Whether it is your fault or not, business is a team effort, and if the team failed, you lose. I may deserve a two-million dollar bonus, but if the business is operating in the negative already, how does "deserve" even come into it? Have we so inculcated our population with a grade-school "everybody wins" mentality that the reality of profit and loss is unrecognized even in that supposed bastion of capitalism, Wall Street? I'd love to hear the conservative commentators on CNBC try to square their whining with that, but as with so many bully pulpits, challenges are not sought out there.

This puts me somewhat in mind of the travails the NHL went through in 2004. In an effort to keep up with other professional sports, teams began paying players salaries (inflating the overall market for players) far out of line with what actual team revenues could sustain. Irrespective of the skill or value of any individual player, this was clearly unsustainable, and it resulted in a player lockout for an entire season and some very hard choices for both players and owners. You could also look at the dot-com boom and bust as another example of an industry that over-inflated the value of its talent pool; you could hardly walk around in Pioneer Square in '98-'99 without getting a job offer from some startup or other, regardless of your talent or background. And you could make good money, even if you spent most of your day huddled in an office playing Half-Life (I should know). But as with the NHL, the market was unsustainable, and a lot of "web developers" who didn't know what they were doing ended up going back to their original professions. Salary restructuring was mandated by the market.

AIG and the American finance industry may be in the same place, but due to government largesse, may never be forced to confront it. The rising salaries in that industry have not been borne out by the financial performance of the businesses. And yet those businesses, and less surprisingly their over-paid employees, continue to insist that somehow it's not only worth it, but necessary.

What are they smoking?

Research firm researches self

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 12:12:08 -0700

The Yankee Group produces regular research products on technologies and applications, and as with other such ilk I enjoy commenting on and picking apart many of their recommendations. They suffer from a sort of journalistic malady, which is that in the event there is nothing really new or interesting to say about a concept or technology, they have to justify their existence and drum up business by coming up with something to say anyway. This can lead to some pretty laughable conclusions at times. (of course, the same could be said of bloggers on a slow day... today, perhaps?)

The Yankee Group's latest foray, however, has them studying themselves... as a small business, they consider their own progression to centralized phone contracts and cloud-based messaging and decide that since it has served them so well, it would be a fine cost-saving move for any similar-size organization. "...50 to 80 percent on costs related to corporate wireless, e-mail and messaging by moving to an Anywhere IT environment" is the specific analysis, with "Anywhere IT" apparently being a Yankee Group coinage which you, too, can read about for the low, low price of $1500.

Let me save you the dough; they aren't talking about anything that isn't being talked about here and elsewhere in the blogosphere on a regular basis regarding moving operations to SaaS providers and extending externalized support models into internal operations.

The real question, though, is whether or not they are even describing a reproducible phenomena?

Now, leaving aside the fact for a moment that I largely agree with their approach, is it really good research practice to study a single organization, particularly your own organization, as a basis for making such broad recommendations? I've seen some great savings achieved using similar models (if anything, I think they tend to be more aggressive than those detailed in the precis) but nothing approaching 80%. I don't doubt their number, but I wonder how broadly applicable it is? Certainly there are savings to be had; but part of what determines savings is existing efficiency. In other words, they may have just been badly overpaying for their infrastructure beforehand. This is the sort of problem you can run into when you are only looking at a single source for your numbers.

Now, not having ponied up the $1500 either, I can't completely judge their methodology. But I can safely caution against making knee-jerk changes in your own company based on it. Run the numbers yourself, consider more options than what they outline. It's rare for these efforts to succeed in a vacuum.

If anything, I think the report is conservative in what you should consider. Think about everything that might need to happen to realize such benefits, and consider what more you could do beyond what they suggest. Centralized phone plans can save money; on the other hand, I've seen scenarios where no plan can save more; leveraging existing user cell service (who wants two numbers and two phones to keep track of?) and offering a flat-rate compensation based on fair market estimates can cost even less, and reduce soft-costs associated with support and plan maintenance even further. And e-mail and messaging are not the only things that can be outsourced; in fact, depending on your utilization, you might find it is more difficult to only outsource messaging without incorporating other integrated features such as calendaring and collaboration at the same time.

Surrounded by incompetence

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 16:16:12 -0700

I read a salient and insightful blog entry a couple years ago by someone whose name I can't recall, and which I can't seem to find again, but which popped to mind repeatedly yesterday, which was a bad day all around.

To start with, I'll tell you why yesterday was bad. First, I was expecting an important UPS shipment, which was supposed to have been overnighted on Friday, but had been delayed on Saturday by "Adverse Weather." I'm not sure what weather that was, exactly; it's snowing here in Seattle today but on Saturday we just had a little rain, which is not historically something that we out here get terribly exercised about. Anyway, the package ended up in Portland instead of here, although I was, obviously, hoping to have it before Monday. Still, things would have been fine if I got it Monday morning, and I arranged to be close to the door most of the day instead of other places where I might have been more productive.

Next, an expected maintenance period by my ISP which was supposed to end by 4AM somehow slopped over and extended through the day, putting Internet service on a hit or miss basis. I was gratified early on to see that the UPS tracking system put the package on the truck as of 0552; after that, I had trouble getting through to see where it might be. And I couldn't get much of anything else done, without reliable Internet, yet chained to my front door.

This put me in mind of the blog entry which I first referred to because it was about the futility of complaint in the modern age. The gist of it was, there is no one left to yell at anymore; everything is someone else's fault. Everything is outsourced, or handled by another department, or is someone else's responsibility. I could call UPS and yell at some poor call-taker (I'm sure that happens to them all day long anyway) but it's not their fault and there is really nothing they can do--it's all on the driver after it gets put on the truck. The ISP? Their phone was busy all day, but had I been able to reach them, I am sure I would have heard it was all because of some upstream provider or some jerk at the data center where they rent space, and they are sorry, but they can't do anything about it.

Around 1900 the package finally shows up, and then of course Internet service comes back on because I don't need it anymore.

This ties in somehow to some of the things I have been talking about on the CIO Weblog lately about complexity, and the necessity of controlling certain important aspects of the customer experience entirely in-house. All of these companies which can't help but answer "It's someone else's fault" may be technically correct, but they are also missing the point. I'm not paying someone else to deliver service; I'm paying them. And if I'm upset or disappointed in the service, I'm not going to fire their sub-contractor, outsourcing company, driver, or whatever... I'm going to find a new primary provider. They're losing out, even though it's not their fault.

Another reason, then, to be sure you aren't making your core services so complex you can't manage them internally.

IT and taxes

nospam@example.com (Scott Wilson) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:34:00 -0700

As I read this morning that yet another of President Obama's cabinet nominees is haunted by the spectre of tax problems, I suspiciously eye the stack of paperwork sitting on my desk which represents my own impending bout with the Tax Man and feel a pang of kinship and sympathy with the embattled Messrss Geithner, Daschle, and Ms. Killefer. I know that the popular conception of these folks is as lazy fat cats who have been using their superior intellect and financial resources to dodge the system for years and have had it finally catch up to them, while the honest, hard-work Joe Plumber types have been faithfully plugging away and doing their best to shoulder the unpaid load left by the tax-dodging wealthy, but I am having trouble buying into that model. Perhaps it is because I see taxes and Information Technology being so similar in some ways, and I know enough not to think ill of those having problems with their technology.

The basic similarity is that both systems have become wickedly complex. With respect to taxes, I find it difficult to believe that most taxpayers, if audited so deeply as the cabinet nominees, would not have similar breaches in the discharge of their obligations to the State. The tax code has become so famously complicated and so fabulously poorly defined and documented, that the traditional American springtime exercise of doing one's own taxes cannot help but result in some oversight and misallocation. I just helped a friend with the Washington State and City of Seattle Excise tax forms last week, models of clarity and simplicity compared to the federal documents, and even within those there was tremendous ambiguity and misdirection. After three hours of research and concentration, I still couldn't swear to you they got filled out right. And there are no answers, no help, in making that determination. There are so many special cases, so many cut-outs and add-ins, that it seems almost impossible that even the massive bureaucracy which powers these collection efforts could produce satisfactory instructions, even had they the inclination to do so (if you have ever called any of them for assistance, state or federal, then you probably have a good sense of the exact degree of customer service inclination they possess, which is somewhere on the scale between slim and none).

This is a similar state to the technology industry. In fact, if you take a quick look at your 1040 form and then go read, say, Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 EULA, you will be pardoned for sharing my suspicion that Microsoft went right out and snapped up those IRS lawyers after they were done penning the tax forms so they could go to work 24/7 cranking out licensing agreements and product documentation. Starbucks may be falling on hard times overall, but they have a ready-made marketplace out here keeping software industry lawyers fueled up and ready to go.

It's not simply licensing, of course, but day to day operations that are afflicted with this complexity. You read that a system will do this and do that, but the devil is always in the details. "Maybe it will work, and maybe it won't" is more descriptive of the average technology project initiative in an industry where failure rates are still approaching 50%. Security is much the same, with the constant but poorly disclosed announcements of holes riddling the most common software and systems. Who can possibly keep up with it all?

This state of affairs has become its own sort of inequity, where though all are afflicted, only those unlucky enough to be examined will be persecuted for their failings. It's why we, at IMS, stress simplicity so forcefully... complexity is its own punishment. Unlike the tax code, however, in IT it is a ground state which has been reached only with the complicity of those affected... who have been willing, historically, to add a little something extra every time a special case came up. Systems built that way have become a house of cards, difficult and expensive to maintain in balance, a self-perpetuating bramble of patches and work-arounds that necessitate constant IT department attention... at commensurate cost.

We can't do anything about your taxes, but I would be willing to bet we can help you fix (and understand!) your overly complicated IT systems.