2008 June | Signal to Noise

The single biggest MS blunder: product activation

Engadget nails it when they say:

Depending on who you talk to, Windows Product Activation is a serious privacy violation, a headache, minimal protection against piracy, or all of the above. Lucky for us, Microsoft is finally seeing (some of) the folly of its overbearing ways, and has gone with a more permissive nagware method with Vista SP1. This as opposed to the regular method of routinely locking users out of their systems, which, wouldn’t you know it, tended to hurt legitimate users more than pirates.

This is the understatement of the century. Almost any emmigration from the Office/Windows empire can be attributed directly to Microsoft’s pigheadedness, and WPA is the most visible expression of it. Software activation is something that came out of the realm of shareware, and Bill Gates attitude about shareware and freeware (especially in the nineties) is well-document and decidedly sour.

Yet product activation takes shareware’s secret weapon and puts it in Bill’s products: “Pay for a code and activate me or I will stop working.” I’m glad my car doesn’t treat me like that.

Old School Media Blows a Little Hot Air

In a post at Business Week, Peter Burrows talks about the spat that occured last week when the AP went all USSR Ministry of Deception on bloggers, demanding they remove exclusive content purportedly owned and copyrighted by the AP. This got me thinking–does this mean bloggers who work for newspapers (who own the AP) aren’t allowed to use AP material? I have a client with several blog products that IS a newspaper. So what does this mean for them?

Check out what Burrows writes:

In a demonstration for BusinessWeek earlier this year, Attributor executives showed how many times scenes from The Sopranos had appeared on 20 leading video sites since they first aired on TV. In all, 1,500 scenes from 52 episodes had been viewed 32 million times. For Time Warner’s HBO, those viewings might have brought in more than $1 million, said Attributor Chief Executive Officer Jim Brock.

ERRNTT. Wrong. Those viewings would not have happened if they weren’t free. Setting a price for this otherwise freely-viewable content would be the same as telling people not to view it at all. See, it’s the value perception of old media that’s in question in the consumer’s mind. Empower the consumer and he sees more value. When the thing he wants is free (the Sopranos episode, say), then the consumer is empowered. Now–go monetize that concept. Empower the consumer and you make money–just not by charging him for something there are 5 other ways to obtain for little to nothing (BitTorrent, the public library, Blockbuster Video, NetFlix, etc.).

When is old media going to realize that the world of charging $$ for proprietary content isn’t the only model that works any more? Traditional pubs and especially the recording industry need to stop fighting the notion that there are other ways to monetize content than to charge for it. The basic precept of the copyright is at odds with content monetization anyway. So the struggle between licensing of content and free exchange of information is only made worse when NOBODY is allowed to use content without PAYING for it.

If I had 32 million video views on MY web site, I would find a way to make money, and I would never once charge somebody to view the videos. MPAA, HBO, you guys basically want to do what porn sites do when you should, instead, find a way to work in the framework of consumer demands–things like democratization and social networking. There’s a way to make money there, but you’ve got to take off the blinders in order to see it.

Head-to-head: Jazinga vs. Asterisk Appliance, Part 2

(Here’s part one in case you missed it.)

Yesterday I had a great talk on the phone with Randy Busch, CEO of Jazinga, the Toronto-based technology company behind the Jazinga VoIP PBX system. I learned several positive things during this conversation:

Jazinga isn’t required to be a NAT firewall in order to support IAX trunks, as it is in order to support SIP trunks.
Jazinga is based on Asterisk and Freeswitch.
Its web user interface is mainly Flash-driven.
It has an onboard hard disk and is basically a single-board PC type appliance.

Autoprovisioning: Here’s How it Works

One of the things I really like about the Jazinga is autoprovisioning. If you enter a phone’s MAC address into the admin interface and then boot the phone up from a factory state, it obtains all it needs configuration-wise directly from the DHCP and TFTP servers onboard the Jazinga unit. So, very easy for non-technical folks trying to get set up. Right now, Jazinga supports automatic provisioning of Polycom, Linksys, Aastra, and SNOM phones. Randy tells me that Cisco 79XX support is in the works.

Having this simple endpoint setup is awesome, and the reduction in steps required handily downs many Asterisk solutions, becuase all the phone provisioning components (DHCP, TFTP, generation of firmware configs, etc.) are already done for you.

Softphone and Hold Music: No Sweat

Running Bria with the Jazinga was as easy as it was with the Asterisk Appliance. I uploaded an MP3 of Runaround by Blues Traveler to test the hold music feature, and it worked great.

Groups and Call Distribution

Ring groups are a snap, though the only option for ring patterns is simultaneous. Given the size of customer Jazinga is going for here, I don’t think that’s a drawback. Note that Asterisk Appliance allows different ring-around patterns, but only if you know the Asterisk keywords necessary to make them work. The keyword with call distribution on Jazinga is “simple”, which I believe appeals to the SOHO customer.

Jazinga SIP Trunk Service

The Cleveland-local number the Jazinga folks set up for me worked like a champ, though I did have to reboot the Jazinga unit in order to get incoming calls to work. There seem to be no options for tweaking caller ID on the Jazinga-operated PRI, but I’ve got to assume that it’s coming. Sound quality was acceptible. I called my mother, who was camping in central Ohio at the time.

So what’s the verdict? We’ll discuss it in a few days after I’ve run Jazinga through its paces with a few auto-provisioned IP phones. Stay tuned.

Where does Symbian move leave Android and iPhone?

In an article today at the Register, Andrew Orlowski posts (my comments interspersed):

The smartphone wars once devoured a great deal of attention and energy, particularly during the long PR war that took place in the first four barren years – from the birth of the venture exactly ten years ago, to the first mass market consumer handset appearing in 2002. Today, apart from a few gadget fans, nobody really cares any more.

(In my best Luke Skywalker voice: “I care”.) Seriously, anybody in business today is using a smartphone. And people who aren’t in business don’t use them, almost without deviation. The reason the first four years sucked was because smartphones sucked during the first four years. Today, we’ve got better ones (though doing personal info management on a 2-inch screen still blows).

[...]

Even five years ago, it was apparent this was a war in which there would be no winner.

The winner is clearly Apple, as Andrew later points out. Nokia’s lack of consistency and scattershot approach to applications and platforms is what kills Symbian devices. Microsoft is better about this with Windows Mobile, and Blackerry and Apple are better than both Nokia and Microsoft. Plus, where Blackberry has ‘quiet librarian’ excited, Apple has sex appeal and sheen. So I think, for now, it’s pretty obvious who the winner of this war is.

How did “smart” phones lose their luster? While they were bigger, slower and harder to use than phones based on older closed platforms, they didn’t offer the value that persuaded most people to put up with the pain and use the extra “smartness”. For example, Google Maps runs on any midrange phone today very capably – and like Google itself, it does the job well enough.

Disagree. Who do you know that actually runs Google maps on a non-smartphone? Right, I didn’t think so. Just because a device CAN do a thing does not mean a device SHOULD do that thing.

But even then it’s doubtful that Nokia and Symbian executives would have opted for Exile in Freetard Street, had it not been for two competitive factors. One is the diminishing cost of smartphone OS licenses, which reflects their market value. Google is giving away its smartphone OS, Android. As Bill Ray correctly pointed out today, that makes Android utterly pointless.

Disagreed. Google is trying to carve out a platform ecosystem by becoming a technology provider as opposed to an application provider. It’s the next logical step for any serious software company to become a tech licensor instead of an appmaker, which is what they’ve traditionally always been. Android gives Google a vehicle to accelerate its control into areas where the competition is either stagnant or too wet to know what hit it: like the wireless industry.

Lack of 2.0-style innovation and consumer accessibility has pissed on the explosive growth we all want in this sector, and Android seeks to address this. Really, aren’t consumers sick and tired of being nickeled and dimed by Bell for every little feature they want to use? No wonder people don’t adopt new stuff. The cost and claustrophobia of the licensing experience shun people from adopting. So, it’s not pointless to Google to give away seat licenses for free (it may’ve been for old school Symbian). It eliminates one barrier to access: cost, while working on the solution to the other barrier: outdated telco business models. Increased demand for the open platform, Android, puts pressure on the network operators to stop banging consumers over the head with micro-fees and contract hoops.

There’s another factor, too. Symbian’s founding CEO, Colly Myers, the father of the OS formerly known as Epoc, used to talk of the “enchantment” factor. Tech wizardry wasn’t enough, he said, but the devices had to charm.

It’s largely Nokia that must be blamed for failing to make Symbian phones remotely “enchanting”. Nokia’s UI is cumbersome (Symbian doesn’t do UIs); the hardware was for years underclocked, making it slow. And Nokia’s legendary marketing has appealed to nerds, outcasts and social freaks – and been guaranteed to confuse everyone.

Today it’s the iPhone which has the enchantment factor. How could it not – it comes straight from the Dream Factory. And Apple must now see a clear road ahead for world dominance.

Symbian has done everything its original designers asked of it – a twenty year lifespan is not bad at all. But it’s now Apple’s business to lose

Absolutely agreed. Apple is driving now. The problem is, they’ve got to get out of the creepy deal they have with AT&T. That’s their #1 barrier to entry for business adoption in the United States. Solve that problem, and I think Apple may just run away with the business Android was designed to capture.

Bill Gates’ secret frustrations picked apart by yours truly

TOO TOO good. I LOVE it. Here’s an “epic” e-mail Bill Gates sent to some of his top people a couple of years ago, complaining about the decrepitude of Windows. No surprise there. We’ve all been fighting with Windows for years, and yet it seems that Uncle Bill had only just realized his flagship product is Crap 7.0 as late as 2003. Take a look (comments interspersed), and while you do–imagine this e-mail was sent just yesterday. Not much has changed since Bill sent this email.

—- Original Message —-

From: Bill Gates
Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 10:05 AM
To: Jim Allchin
Cc: Chris Jones (WINDOWS); Bharat Shah (NT); Joe Peterson; Will Poole; Brian Valentine; Anoop Gupta (RESEARCH)
Subject: Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame

I am quite disappointed at how Windows Usability has been going backwards and the program management groups don’t drive usability issues.

Let me give you my experience from yesterday.

I decided to download (Moviemaker) and buy the Digital Plus pack … so I went to Microsoft.com. They have a download place so I went there.

The first 5 times I used the site it timed out while trying to bring up the download page. Then after an 8 second delay I got it to come up.

This site is so slow it is unusable.

It wasn’t in the top 5 so I expanded the other 45.

These 45 names are totally confusing. These names make stuff like: C:\Documents and Settings\billg\My Documents\My Pictures seem clear.

They are not filtered by the system … and so many of the things are strange.

I tried scoping to Media stuff. Still no moviemaker. I typed in movie. Nothing. I typed in movie maker. Nothing.

Dude, Bill, this is why Google creamed you in the search war. Seriously, ever searched Live for something and then searched Google for it? The FIRST thing I do when installing a fresh Windows load is to change the default search provider in IE7 to Google.

In fact, I often find links to Microsoft downloads and patches FASTER USING GOOGLE than using Microsoft.com.

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying – where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated. [...]

Sorry, that just sounds like Bill Clinton. Is Amir his distant cousin?

In fact it is more like a puzzle that you get to solve. It told me to go to Windows Update and do a bunch of incantations.

This struck me as completely odd. Why should I have to go somewhere else and do a scan to download moviemaker?

Agreed. Take your cues from Apple, Billy Boy. Smooth, easy, and QA’d like crazy.

This is after I was told we were doing delta patches to things but instead just to get 6 things that are labeled in the SCARIEST possible way I had to download 17meg.

Two words: Trustworthy Computing. ‘member that?

So I did the download. That part was fast. Then it wanted to do an install. This took 6 minutes and the machine was so slow I couldn’t use it for anything else during this time.

What the heck is going on during those 6 minutes? That is crazy. This is after the download was finished.

Then it told me to reboot my machine. Why should I do that? I reboot every night — why should I reboot at that time?

Bill Gates reboots his computer every night. LAWL. Sorry to sound like such a Mac fanboy, but I seriously CAN’T REMEMBER the last time I rebooted my Powerbook. (I do reboot Parallels almost daily, though.)

So I did the reboot because it INSISTED on it. Of course that meant completely getting rid of all my Outlook state.

So I got back up and running and went to Windows Updale again. I forgot why I was in Windows Update at all since all I wanted was to get Moviemaker.

So I went back to Microsoft.com and looked at the instructions. I have to click on a folder called WindowsXP. Why should I do that? Windows Update knows I am on Windows XP.

Oof, Bill, you’re the man. I mean you are the MICROSOFT MAN! Why aren’t you running Vista yet, you bad boy you? (I said pretend the email was from yesterday, calm down people.)

[...]

But that is just the start of the crap. Later I have listed things like Windows XP Hotfix see Q329048 for more information. What is Q329048? Why are these series of patches listed here? Some of the patches just things like Q810655 instead of saying see Q329048 for more information.

What an absolute mess.

Welcome to my world. Microsoft has made many consultants like myself a lot of money because we know how to decode all those KB cross-references. Bill–maybe you should start an I.T. consulting firm like I did! Figure out how to find the “right patch” and you might just make a good employee here at Best Technology Strategy. OK, enough cocky. Back to the email.

[...]I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

He sounds like one of my (elderly) clients with a bad case of discount web shopping-site spyware. Bill, what sites have you been visiting that have been taking advantage of your client-side script host? Come on, hang in there buddy.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind. I thought we had reached a low with Windows Network places or the messages I get when I try to use 802.11. (don’t you just love that root certificate message?)

Yeah, Microsoft.com is a terrible web site. So is Live Search. So was MSN. It’s a pattern. For two examples of search done right, see Google and (ahem) Spotlight. To see what Microsoft should’ve done with Sharepoint, see Wordpress. To see what Microsoft should’ve done with Office Communications Server, see Trixbox. To see what Microsoft should’ve done with Windows Mobile, check out the iPhone. To see what Microsoft should’ve done with Vista, see Leopard. Oh and not to mention Movie Maker versus iMovie. The list goes on.

Yes, Bill, I’m glad you realize that usability matters. Let’s hope your successors share your attitude.

Calliflower: conference calls redefined

Alec and the gang at Iotum have cooked up a fascinating new conferencing service called Calliflower. What an eye-popping name. But what will really impress you is how the thing works.

The conferencing technology underlying Iotum’s recent Squawkbox talks is behind Calliflower, but they’ve added a ton more: Lecture Mode, where participants can raise hands and ask questions; support for Truphone, Skype, and PSTN dial-in connections, avatars with caller status, and a superclean “2.0″ web interface with no proprietary garbage attached (read: it works outside the shrinking kingdom of Internet Explorer).

They’re also doing some celebrity chats that are open to the public, a trick pulled from the old AOL hat. Remember how AOL used to have text chats with actors and authors? Good stuff, guys, keep it up.

Nokia sees Google as bigger threat than Apple

In the industrial ecosystem of mobile, Nokia views Google as bigger threat to its international dominance than Apple. Perhaps this is because Google’s vision of the wireless apps industry is one of open access and “nothing hidden”, while Apple’s is one of backroom handshakes and lopsided, scroogy contract deals. It’s no wonder Nokia is opening the door on the Symbian Foundation, an organization which will unify and promote the use of Symbian mobile OS technology in the future.

Head-to-head: Jazinga vs. Asterisk Appliance, Part 1

Jazinga is a Canadian VoIP software startup that offers a small business telephone solution, among other VoIP technology procurements. The solution works with SIP phones and consists of a shiny grey appliance that certainly conjures thoughts of its contemporary, the Asterisk Appliance, another VoIP telephone system from Digium. When I first looked at the Asterisk Appliance, I was mostly impressed–there were a few key things missing, though, and if Jazinga can seize on Digium’s shortcomings with their product, I’ll give ‘em a high-five.

First off, know that the Jazinga product is not yet available to the general public, however the software and hardware I looked at was in a very functional state. So it’s fair to compare with the Digium device, since it too was in a pre-release state when I looked at it.

Let’s talk about the Asterisk Appliance for a minute. It looks great, offers support for up to four analog phone lines, and has a “pretty good” GUI web interface–nothing as slick as Switchvox or Fonality, but functional.

The Asterisk Appliance MUST be directly connected to the Internet in order to act as a VoIP trunk gateway, and this is hugely bad. For one, the Linux under the hood of the Asterisk box isn’t all that easy to keep up-to-date security patch wise, and for two, the underlying routing, NAT, and access functions necessary to the Appliance’s functioning as a router aren’t available via its web interface. That’s why I haven’t actually used an Asterisk appliance in the field yet.

Small businesses don’t have a block of IP addresses to work with, and typically don’t have a DMZ segment to sit their phone system on, so I haven’t been able to recommend it as a production PBX.

Let’s hope Jazinga has solved some of these problems.

The first thing I noticed about the Jazinga box was its inclusion of an antenna, ostensibly making it a wireless access point as well as a PBX. A quick glance at the back panel of the main unit, and I realized it’s also an Ethernet switch and a broadband router, just like the Digium unit. The Jazinga offers 4 LAN ports, one WAN port, two analog phone connections, and one analog phone line connection.

According to the quick-start card Jazinga includes, the Jazinga must act as the Internet gateway, which is somewhat problematic. Like the Digium unit, which frustrates me that it has to be the Internet gateway router, the Jazinga insists on being “directly” connected to the Internet–ie. there cannot be a NAT point in front of the Jazinga as it communicates with hosts on the Internet. This is unfortunately, if excusable. VoIP signaling protocols still haven’t totally bridged the NAT gap, but the Jazinga innovates its way out of that mess by allowing you to disable routing altogether, and by providing support for IAX trunks–which are immune to NAT problems normally imposed on VoIP protocols.

Initial setup was easy. I only had two snags. The documentation I received said to use a URL with a host of jazinga.local, but the DNS obtained from the Jazinga through DHCP didn’t resolve that name. Fortunately a quick ifconfig told me what IP address the Jazinga was on and it was mostly smooth sailing from there. The second issue I ran into was a difficulty with the DHCP client on the WAN side. In this case, I was using the Jazinga with a cable modem, which, after a reboot, got the Time Warner DHCP server back on track. So, pretty easy.

Jazinga is going to offer a branded VoIP trunk service especially for this device. At this point I don’t know where their PRIs sit, but I expect you’ll be able to get a local number anywhere in N. America. So, not wanting to be held up, I got to work connecting the Jazinga to my Gizmo account, with which I have a Gizmo CallIn number.

I’ll post the results of that experiment and the rest of my Jazinga evaluation in a day or two. Stay tuned.

Signal to Noise

This is Ted Wallingford’s Blog

The single biggest MS blunder: product activation

Old School Media Blows a Little Hot Air

Head-to-head: Jazinga vs. Asterisk Appliance, Part 2

Where does Symbian move leave Android and iPhone?

Bill Gates’ secret frustrations picked apart by yours truly

Calliflower: conference calls redefined

Nokia sees Google as bigger threat than Apple

Head-to-head: Jazinga vs. Asterisk Appliance, Part 1

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