Status

If you hadn't heard about Google's announcement this morning of their newly developed open-source web browser, Chrome, you must have been away from the Internet.

I haven't been able to download it yet, the site was too jammed up this morning. On the whole, I'm fairly excited about it. I imagine it will take a few versions to become stable and useful, but the real implication of the news is that for Microsoft to remain relevant in the browser market, they'll have to start delivering many of the same capabilities that Chrome promises. They just put out their beta of IE 8, which is almost exactly the opposite direction: big and bloated. They've already lost much of their market to Firefox on account of those issues, and with a powerhouse like Google behind it, Chrome could gobble up much of the rest.

More importantly, if Chrome succeeds in making web-based applications faster, easier-to-use, and more stable than they are currently, it will pull more and more people away from Microsoft's desktop applications in the direction of cheaper, faster, and more flexible web-based products (like Google Apps, which is currently encumbered by browser performance limitations).

We'll have to see if Google can deliver, however. They sometimes, and for odd reasons, seem to just abandon products on the vine; only time will tell if they follow through on this, although it seems in their best interests to do so.

For more pontification, see my other blog entry on the topic.

It's that time again! Penny Arcade Expo 2008 is kicking off in Seattle this weekend. No, it's got nothing to do with consulting or business management or strategy. But it's fun. Get out of the office early, go get your gamer on.

We've talked about the potential for using Apple's iPhone as a primary corporate mobility device before, covering both the good and the bad. Lately, particularly with the unveiling of Apple's AppStore, allowing third-party developers to officially build and release software for the phone, the general background level of discussion over whether or not the device is suitable for enterprise communication has risen as well. A number of recent, high-profile stories have called into question the suitability of the phone for the enterprise (although this is a different question than that of its suitability in the SMB market) and speculated that Apple may be reaching beyond its capabilities with the phone, and indeed with many of its recent efforts overall. In particular, with the recent release of the supposedly faster 3G network based iPhone, reports of crashes, dropped calls, and slow service have increased substantially.

But this morning there are two new items to factor into the equation, both of which suggest that Apple, other than demonstrating poor judgement in choosing its channel partner(s), may not be culpable after all.

Wired Magazine has conducted a survey of 3G iPhone users, administered with automated Web-based bandwidth tests, which appears to show that many of the issues are correlated to location... apparently signifying problems with AT&T's (the only vendor currently allowed to provide service for iPhones, under an exclusive deal with Apple) regional 3G cellular networks, rather than with the phones themselves. And the same day, the findings were reinforced with the publication of tests conducted by two Swedes with access to a wireless device test chamber, which claim to find no particular flaws with the device's internal antennae themselves.

This has little meaning for the average SMB bent on deciding whether or not to move to or standardize on the iPhone, but it does mean that, perhaps, Apple itself is not caving on quality standards even with the great demand, and that there may be some hope for increased speed and utility should a reliable means ever be found to move the iPhone to another provider's network or should Apple manage to get out of its exclusive arrangement with AT&T and release the phones with another, more reliable provider.

Another e-mail in the inbox from Jott this morning (oh, and the site is back online). Apparently, it wasn't the influx of traffic yesterday at all that did them in, but rather a more pedestrian failure of simply forgetting to take the site out of maintenance mode the night before the big launch.

I am sure there are very, very few of us who have worked in tech startups, particularly web-based tech startups, who have not had similar moments at critical junctures in the development of the business... I know the whole episode has re-awakened some particularly icy nightmares of my own from the dot-com heyday. But ultimately those moments aren't what make or break your business. This morning's mea culpa rings with that knowledge.

Still, in many ways it would have been better if the problem had been traffic related. A sudden influx of users is a good thing, and indicates the introduction of additional cash to deal with scaling situations. A staff screw-up isn't what you want to hear about at the same time you're being asked to pony up... the staff can make mistakes either way. So, when I finally got on to the site this morning, I clicked the "Continue Free Jott" button... just in case. We'll see how it looks in six months.

It has to suck that the day you take your shiny, widely acclaimed, eminently useful Web 2.0 service out of a long and successful free beta and start offering it as a paid service, the thing crashes on you.

Such is the fate of Jott, an excellent e-mail/web/cell phone integrated note-taking and messaging solution which I have been using happily for the past year or so.

This morning I got an e-mail from them, proudly announcing that after two years of hard work, testing, and revision, founder John Pollard was ready to take the service out of beta and begin offering both free and for-pay service plans. The newsletter invited me to visit the site and pick my plan, which I promptly did, only to find the dreaded "Service Unavailable" message awaiting me.

One hopes that the surge in traffic resulting from the announcement is the cause of this unhappiness, but of course it certainly isn't improving the odds that anyone will be willing to start forking over cash for the service... one of the things you pay for on the web these days is reliability. You can get free, with intermittent failures, anywhere; you pay for what you want to stay up, for scale and service. Hopefully, Jott is on the way to that happy place, but they are clearly not there yet. Back to beta!

EDIT: Clarifications in the first paragraph, 08/21/08 0714 PDT