PlexNex

BOLD's Timid Path-Dependency

One question lurking in the subconscious of the gadget cognoscenti is what will Nokia's and RIM's answers to iPhone be like? What will Nokia's & RIM's best efforts at the touchscreen produce?

If last year's HTC Touch being marketed by Sprint -- a telco in freefall -- is any example of iPhone-inspiration, then we are in for some funny-ass cellie punditry.

As Apple rolls out telco partnerships in Europe, iPhone's awesomeness is by now a matter of universal agreement and enters lore as a notch on the tech-timeline. Don't ask me. Edward Tufte, information design guru, characterized the iPhone's humane integration of hard- and soft-ware as a design leap. He called out the iPhone interface as newly, uniquely, devoid of "administrative debris".

Bold looks an attractive package. It's an iPhone with a Hasselblad-like leatherette back that will surely add a luxury feel and make the device easier to grasp.

Bold is an iPhone with a keyboard. This is odd, if hardly surprising. RIM figures Blackberry users must have that keyboard. After all, they are used to that keyboard. The Blackberry interface has been defined by that keyboard.

Ready for irony? That keyboard defeats the purpose of the touchscreen. That keyboard is nothing if not what Tufte called administrative debris. It is all administrative debris. Nothing but administrative debris.

That keyboard crowds out screen real estate to the extent that Bold must be wider and larger than the iPhone to achieve a touchscreen with some, any, utility. This makes Bold something of a hybrid: part touch experience with icons and part text-maniac's-best-friend. Which is to say, something that will not take anything away from the suits but which adds some of the sexy iPhone mojo that the suits would like to have along with the Microsoft Exchange Server access.

Enough mojo, perhaps, to keep the suits from migrating to iPhone. And that's the point: this is a defensive, stop-the-bleeding design strategy manifest as a clock-stopping hot pocket rocket. 

It's all about the Individual v Enterprise market segmentation that is the landscape of the Blackberry v Apple Device War. Apple & iPhone own the house, and RIM & Blackberry own the glass-house. Tension will mount over the next few chapters as to who will penetrate the other's ... house.

RIM have that word 'innovation' on the Bold website, which is unfortunate. I'm reminded of the (excellent & entertaining) DirecTV commercials featuring the guy, a parody of a cable TV exec, in the marketing strategy board room who pretends to have an MBA, some pompous panaceae for killing DirecTV's market penetration and a few slick Kung Fu moves. Cameo by Ed Begley, Jr ...

"Jim! Whip Up Some Numbers"

"Make it Louder"

We'll need to demo Bold to find out if its hybridity is ridiculously contrived or makes some sense for users already accustomed to Blackberry and, more importantly for RIM, for individual users who are native to the iPhone wheel-house.

Kingtone's Got Gigs ...

... if you're in the Bay Area, go see this person!

Lucio Menegon -- a.k.a. "Kingtone" -- is to be heard.

[e-mail from Lucio] Greetings,

I'm glad to say I'm excited about music again. Last we convened, that wasn't necessarily the case. However, my tinnitus is being cared for, the warm sunshine and several recent events - calling the cues for the Crucible's, 'Firebird' fire ballet (which allowed me to dig into Stravinsky) and attending the Coachella music festival last weekend (which reignited the music fan in me) - have raised me spirits.

Did I mention that I am excited about music?! Yes. for starters, I've got some East Bay shows and a short West Coast tour with two extremely talented NYC based players, Rob Price and David Grollman. Every time we've performed our brand of NY improv/noise it has really clicked. There are two future collaborations in the works - a sexy rocknroll band with Mark Growden and Seth Ford-Young and a Bollywood/surf band with my friend Chris Cummings. And the amazing score to The Overdub Club's 'Nightsoil' film is nearing completion...damn, i can't TYPE fast enough...

IMPORTANT DETAIL #1: The KINGTONE WEBSITE has been totally overhauled and I am really happy and excited about it. There's lots of new music, pics and a blog. There's even an exclusive Mp3 Vault that only people subscribed to this list can access. Go check it out - here's the code: bollocks

IMPORTANT DETAIL #2: ALL OF MY RELEASED MUSIC is now available as high quality mp3s via the Kingtone website for the price of $25. That's right, everything. What a deal. You can pick and choose or download all of it. Plus, that will get you access to a treasure trove of archived and unreleased material that I'll be posting for the rest of the year.

IMPORTANT DETAIL #3: SHOWS:

Sat May 10 - 2.30-5.30pm (FREE)
Lanesplitter Pub Anniversary Party
San Pablo & University, Berkeley, CA
I'm playing guitar in Joe Rut's band and then with Val Esway's & el Mirage.

Mon May 12 - 8.30p
Ivy Room
San Pablo @ Solano, Albany, CA
Strangelet (Suki O'Kane and I) will make experimental noise with a groove (or not). This oughta be interesting considering the decor and vibe of the new 'Kingman's Ivy Room.' I suggest you all come to see if we get kicked out.

Fri May 16 - 8pm
Totally Intense Fractal Mindgaze Hut
671 24th St, Oakland, CA
The Cinepimps (Keith Arnold, Al Alvarez, Suki O'Kane, et al) will unleash a barrage of film and music.

West Coast Tour

Tues May 27 - 8pm
21 Grand
416 25th St., Oakland, CA
Price, Grollman, Menegon
also w/ Suishou no Fune (Japan)

Wed May 28 - 8pm
JavaLounge, Sacramento, CA
Price, Grollman, Menegon
also w/ Ross Hammond, Panic Opera (Reno)

Thurs May 29 - 9pm
Red Rock Bar, Reno NV
Price, Grollman, Menegon
w/ Schitzopolitans

Fri May 30 8pm
Boise Experimental Music Festival
El Korah Shrine Center, Boise, ID
Price, Grollman, Menegon

Sat May 31- 1.30p
Boise Experimental Music Festival
El Korah Shrine Center, Boise, ID
Strangelet (LM solo)

Okay - that was a long one. Thanks for hanging in there. Please - come to a show, go to my site, have some fun, subscribe. If you like what you see and hear - TELL SOMEBODY.

love,

Lucio

Interview with Tom Wolfe

Surfing around I found an interesting series of interview video clips of Tom Wolfe by Peter Robinson (Hoover Institution, sponsored by the National Review online).

Here, the author talks about his work and his interest in neuroscience.

There's chat of Wolfe's widely-discussed piece that ran in Forbes in the mid-1990's called, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died," about which he admits to making the mistake of "conflating neuroscience with genetic theory ... they are very different things".

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Discussed here is the work of Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, E.O. Wilson, Charles Darwin, all in the context of this interesting quest for understanding of the human condition.

GE Earnings Miss Highlights What?

General Electric's embarrassing earnings miss highlights what? Jeff Immelt's propensity to shift blame?

Digest ...

Francesco Guerrera & Justin Baer | "Shocking GE result ..." | Financial Times | 11 April 2008

The Lex Column | "Electric shock" | Financial Times | 11 April 2008

Francesco Guerrera & Justin Baer |"Embarrassed Immelt faces up..." | Financial Times | 11 April 2008

Yes, there's a weakness for shifting blame. But there's another, special American sickness -- the industry of Managed Earnings. Dialing in a penny or two above the "analyst guidance" is a habit which always comes back to haunt companies. It reduces volatility in the stock but projects a certitude of management control of the business that's an illusion, a lie; particularly in something as complex as an industrial conglomerate.

Note that Jeff Immelt pinpointed GE's inability to close asset sales between the Bear Stearns meltdown and the end of 1Q.

Fielding hostile questions from analysts, Mr Immelt said the collapse of Bear Stearns days after the webcast and subsequent market turmoil prevented GE selling real estate.

Although there were other writedowns attributable to bad financial assets, the remark suggests GE habitually relies on Extraordinary Items (a euphemistic accounting term of art), including asset sales, to hit the "whisper number".

This should be another wake-up call the investor class that NO ONE IS DRIVING THE BUS.

Jeff Immelt gets paid the big bucks to pretend. And this is pandemic across American business. This is so because investors crave the illusion.

ECONOMY: Retail Bankruptcies, Closings

I recently reviewed my electricity & heating bills through this past winter -- noting the imponderable increases (doublings in some periods versus past experience). The fleeting thought occurred that these costs are the same for every household in the North & Northeast. Not only that, energy price increases are percolating throughout the cost structures of the world economies. Prices will not be going down.

For me, heating & electricity bills have crowded out other expenditures -- clothing, food and particularly discretionary items like entertainment. How am I special?

Add to the impact on household consumption the tightening of personal & corporate credit and we have, dare I say, the perfect storm that is only just starting to bash retail as we knew it to bits.

Since last fall, eight mostly midsize chains — as diverse as the furniture store Levitz and the electronics seller Sharper Image — have filed for bankruptcy protection as they staggered under mounting debt and declining sales.

Michael Barbaro | "Retail Chains Caught..." | The New York Times | 15 April 2008

Other chains, including FootLocker, are closing stores. The news highlights how intensely dependent upon credit are the store chains.

The impact is bound to hurt even the Internet retail segment (Amazon, et al.). But who do you think has the cost structure to weather this Depression? That's right, not bricks & mortar. Goodbye malls -- thank Goodness!

It will be a healthy, if painful, cleansing in which the landscape as well as household spending habits and house prices will normalize. They are being forced to normalize ... which is good. The trouble is the rapidity with which these behavioral changes are coming about ... which is difficult & debilitating.

What should a house cost? Three to seven times salary? Eight to twelve in special places, perhaps?

The crap that's still selling for $1 million shocks the sensibilities inchoate: balsa-wood door jams, vibrating floor joists & amateurish drywall installation. All the real estate agents I regularly speak with -- all of them -- remain in denial. In my area, they have been touting the reduced prices and reporting a flurry of new purchasing activity.

Hope be dashed. Gravity plays no favorites.

Save Up for the D2H

Just got one of these ...

... it's vintage digital by now. So nothing to brag about. At 2-something megapixels, it's like getting an early 16bit sampling drum machine for that "crunchy" sound of a bad Digital-to-Analog converter -- which, itself, is as nostalgic as laying the sound of vinyl pops & clicks onto a digital recording.

Picture quality not even as good as my y2k-era Fuji S1 (based on the ridiculous Nikon F60 body) but the workflow of a professional body which brackets, cranks frames-per-sec and busses the data lickety-split is a real treat when you're upgrading from precambrian digital.

I happen to like the Nikon feel & interface; got used to it shooting an F100 for a few years ... back in the day. And I will be rewarded because the D3 is out and it's pretty awesome, being the first Nikon sensor to go full-frame.

The D3 is way better than the D2 series and this means many clean D2's will be available on Ebay for less than a grand. I'm going to spend on glass and eventually pounce on a D2H when I can and use the D1H for backup. Then, of course ...

Prepare for Bad Earnings

Alcoa -- the third largest aluminum producer in die Welt -- is the first S&P 500 company reporting earnings, and it's bad news. First-quarter profits there are down 54 percent on high energy costs and week pricing from lower prices for commodity metals and the low dollar.

What will be most shocking in the weeks ahead is not just other corporate earnings releases but the more-realistic economic estimates that begin to factor the impact of higher current energy costs. The prices of oil and of rice and of wheat we pay today are largely based on old prices of goods in inventory. Costs of replacement goods have gone up since.

If you fathom what it costs farmers to keep large John Deere and Caterpillar machines running through a harvest and you factor current prices, the realization is scary -- food prices on the shelves up 10 ... 20 ... 30 percent from "normal". We will start to see higher food prices this summer and they will escalate through next Fall.

Save up, America. It's going to be bad.

collaborate | propagate

How's your document interoperability between MS Office, Google Docs, OpenOffice.org, KOffice, Zoho & Buzzword?

Not so good? Okay for simple documents, but not good enough to migrate the work group?

What would you do if I told you that your documents can work the same with all the major office suite applications?

... if I told you that colleagues can concurrently author, edit & publish the same document at the same time from different types, vintages and brands of office suite applications from different OS platforms?

... if I told you you can have interoperability while keeping the office suite you've already invested in?

... if I told you that your documents would behave the same no matter what interface you were using, at home with Google Docs, at work with MS Office 2003, and on the plane, with OpenOffice.org?

... if I told you that your large government agency could now publish its editable document files from within Microsoft Office to an open W3C standards-compliant Web-ready format based on XHTML and CSS (as well as to PDF)?

What would you do?

"Irregularities" at the Circle-K

Even after the fat lady sings, Microsoft will be explaining the OOXML pass at ISO. Particularly to the EU.

Glyn Moody has a short & readable narrative of the irregularities that explain Microsoft's amazing "success".

Interpreting Microsoft's Apache POI Move

The following is Gary Edwards' response to the Microsoft Apache POI news. Verbose, but nonetheless interesting.

*************************************************************************** Rather than providing a generic application-neutral format for MSOffice documents and business process information workflows, Microsoft is providing a universal reader for their application specific format. 

They need to own the interoperability factor.  And if it means distributing the reader to other platforms and the web app services developers working those platforms, so be it.  They key is in owning the interop.

I continue to believe that the only way anyone can understand what Microsoft is doing is to imagine that the choice for Microsoft is that of provisioning MSOffice with W3C compliant XHTML-CSS  capabilities OR, following the ODF path and creating a standardized format out of an application specific XML encoding of MSOffice in-memory-binary-representation. 

Clearly they chose the later. 

At this point, the most important thing for Microsoft is to get ISO approval of OOXML without having to comply with ISO Interoperability Requirements.  For this, they need to keep ISO on the ODF path!  The beauty of a non compliant but approved format is that MS can exert tremendous application-marketshare-interop influence on a continuing basis by simply taking advantage of the fact that they can infinitely eXtend OOXML and not have to ever document these features.  The most that is required of them is to document the legacy XML encoded "extensions". And for that they pretty much got away with the minimal amount of semantic documentation. 

The key is that going forward, they won't have to document or define eXtensions that connect MSOffice information to MS Server Stack business processes.  With ISO approval, MSOffice becomes a standards compliant "editor" for the MS Cloud and ecosystem of web application - web services developers.  Expanding this ecosystem to capture the Apache developer community, so that they too are bound into the MSOffice editor - MS Server Stack, is probably the fruit of their surprising support for Apache POI.

Let's go back to 1998, when the order was given.  Play the tape. In fact, we have this statement from Chairman Bill himself in a December 1998 a memo to the Office product group, Bob Muglia, Jon DeVaan, Steven Sinofsky, cc Paul Maritz [Comes v Microsoft EXHIBIT 2991] ...

"One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities."

Anything else is suicide for our platform. This is a case where Office has to avoid doing something to destroy Windows.

I would be glad to explain at greater length.

Likewise, this love of DAV in Office/Exchange is a huge problem. I would also like to make sure people understand this as well."

 

Okay.  Let's build a list of achievement points needed to fulfill this directive:

• Do not support XHTML - CSS.   This includes MSOffice, IE, and the MS Server Stack.

• Replace XHTML with a MSOffice-IE-MS Stack web ready format.

• W3C XML allows for application specific XML languages.  XML encode the binaries, submit the syntax to a vendor friendly standards consortia, drag feet on semantic documentation, make certain there is no interop framework - especially one with a compliance clause insisting that all eXtensions be fully documented.

• Standardize an MSOffice specific format, but control the conversion points:
  • Conversion of legacy binary documents <> OOXML
  • Conversion of OOXML <> XAML (fixed/flow)

• Standardize the innovation layer (otherwise known as the vendor rights clause)
  
  • limit the interop layer and allow for unlimited vendor specific innovation
  • This is critical because Web business process management systems are based on portable documents that will often include data and media bindings. These accelerator channels must be kept proprietary, with access only through vendor controlled API's.

• Keep the Web ready versions of the billions of MSOffice business process bound documents proprietary.
  • ISO approval of OOXML protects the proprietary nature of XAML, Silverlight, Smart Tags and other WPF technologies.  (Winforms, XPS)
    
  • This replaces W3C XHTML-CSS, CDF, SVG, XForms and RDF!

• Find a useful cover strategy that will mask the illegal anti trust aspects of this great transition leveraging the desktop monopoly into the fifth wave. 
  • Thank you ODF!  Thank you IBM!
  • XML and the success of OpenOffice ODF will allow Microsoft to break the Web
  • IE-8 demonstrates support for limited "browser bound" documents based on HTML-5 bits, and CSS 2.1.  Notably missing is support for the W3C CDF family of XHTML-2, CSS-3, SVG, XForms and RDF; all of which are needed for web ready "complex" portable documents.  The kind produced by MSOffice businenss processes.  This will break the web between consumer services (Google), and, Web business processes (Microsoft)
    
  • The acquisition of Yahoo! provides Microsoft with a consumer layer that will buffer the business process management monopoly.  Think of it as creating a consumer-business cloud where every user is a aggregate of consumer and business oriented interests and information flows.
  • The acquisition of Yahoo! provides cover for the embarrassing situation that Windows can't do Cloud Computing!  It will take time to get Viridian hyper-V "high volume" applications running on a Solaris grid.

• The Fifth Wave:
  • In 1998 the Economist Magazine published a graphic chart called "The Fourth Wave".  It featured the four great waves of computing: Mainframe, PC, Network and Internet Consumer.  The waves were measured in volume of users and time.  The interesting part was where they intersected, with the decline of the previous wave as the rise of the next wave took precedence.
  • The Fifth Wave is that of Internet Business Process Management; The Business Wave.
    • Google owns the consumer wave, but it is noticeably a HTML 2.0  - HTTP dominant phenom.
    • The Business Wave will be owned by Microsoft if they can control the transition of existing client/server business processes to a new model; client/WEB-Stack/server.
    • Establishing MSOffice as the dominant "editor" on the client side of this equation is beyond important. Of course, this would be meaningless unless and until Microsoft had their Web-Stack ready. Now is the time! The pieces are in place to make a controlled transition, effectively leveraging an existing monopoly into an emerging new market.
      
    • MS needs to keep Google trapped inside the browser.  IE-8 demonstrates exactly how they intend on pulling this off.  ISO approval of OOXML enables MS to compete against the hapless browser bound - business process barred Google. A web ready MSOffice will crush Google Docs wherever the issue is that of business documents and the transition of business processes to client/WEB-Stack/server business process management systems.
    • Apache POI establishes a MSOffice OOXML<>XAML divide of the previously HTML-XHTML-CSS specific Apache Community. Nicely done if you ask me.
    • The fifth wave will be huge.  Establishing MSOffice as the "editor" of the MS Cloud is the key.  We'll know next week whether they pulled off the first challenge; ISO approval of MSOffice!

Hope this helps.

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