What makes Sonicwall an enigma is their choice of Dell as acquisition suitor. (Dell is acquiring Sonicwall.) There are so many mismatches I don’t even know where to start.  While they both fit the economy pricing model, that’s about the only similarity. For starters, Dell has tried and failed on many occasions in the networking space, and persists by rebranding the Netgear form factor in switches and managed switches–which very few people buy because of their poor dependability. Sonicwall, on the other hand, dominates the low-end firewall market.

This would seem to do nothing for Dell’s two weakest product areas: enterprise networking and the high-end firewall.  Still, this seeming round-hole-square-peg situation gives us a clue as to what Dell is doing: adding revenue $200 million/year at a time.   (Dell’s revenue is somewhat higher that that…)

The other big mismatch is in support.  Dell’s foreign-based call-in engineering support is, most would agree, awful, slow, and tedious.  Requisitions for replacement parts are delivered by unreliable third parties, and this frustrating protocol for on-site service is the teeth behind Dell’s famous three-year manufacturer warranty on PCs.  Sonicwall’s support on the other hand, is reputable, quick, and stateside. So for us Americans, we see the writing on the wall. If you’re an end-user, you might not care, but as a systems engineer who has to deal with the stuff every week, sitting on hold with Pakistan gets tiresome in a hurry. Maybe Dell will learn from Sonicwall instead of forcing them to confirm with Dell’s charming, linguistically-difficult support program.

Perhaps the most difficult integration concern with this acquisition is the two companies’ attitudes towards the reseller channel. Namely, Sonicwall loves the channel and Dell just gives it lip service.  Sonicwall uses real distributors, while Dell insists on inconsistently pricing every single deal through at least three different business units who are all vying for the reseller business: PartnerDirect (horrible name, their discounts are the same as the public Dell.com store); Medium/Large business (better discounts, slow quote turnaround), and the nefariously-named, oft-referenced but mysteriously incognito “Dell Reseller Division”, whose state of existence seems to reverse from one quarter to the next.

Dell could learn a thing or two from Sonicwall by standardizing system configurations and offering them into wholesale at a price that actually compels resellers to go out and sell Dell instead of HP, whose competing products are more expensive and less serviceable, but whose products also earn more for the reseller channel.

My company is partners with all three companies I mentioned, and while dealing withDell is a huge pain, the serviceability of their equipment is unmatched by anybody on the market today. Let’s hope that they can take the positives from Sonicwall–good support, a real reseller channel, and a quality value-oriented product–and integrate them into their daily business.

2. My business took off. 6 employees now. Microsoft partner. Digium partner. The list goes on.  Time commitment issues again.

3. My tweeners became teenagers.  More driving around, more emotional guidance, more interaction with them daily.  They have become awesome musicians!

4. I started a band in Cleveland called pOUT (pronounced “pout”), which has, in the span of about one year, become one of the top 10 club bands in the rock capital.  Time commitment.

5. I realized that, despite my preoccupation with converged business communication, the bulk of my real earning potential was in general I.T. consulting and networking, because I live in Cleveland and not San Jose or Boston.

6. Still getting plenty of VoIP press despite having been relatively disengaged from the VoIP crowd for nearly two years now.  I was the coverboy for ChannelPro SMB last month for their VoIP feature.

7. My vocational obsessions only last a few years, it seems.

Best Technology, my general I.T. consulting firm, now has six employees, and has grown like a weed since late 2008.  In fact, I’m heading down to Miami tomorrow to consider a new business opportunity that represents a strategic significance to Best Technology–virtualization infrastructure and private cloud computing.

I look forward to giving you another update soon, and miss everybody in the blogosphere with whom I’ve lost touch over the last 18 months.

This passing really has me thinking about life and its pursuits, and the varying degrees to which we pursue meaning in life. What is our life’s purpose?  And how do we achieve it, personally, professionally, and spiritually? How do we define purpose, and how can we work humbly and thankfully like my associate?

Before I wrote my books and began working as a technology consultant for small businesses, I went through a very difficult period of unemployment and financial insecurity.  It was during this time that I realized that I must rely upon myself–not my family, or my friends, or the government–for success.  To me, part of success in life is independence from the graces of other people, or the ability to avoid subjugation.  To some degree, I have achieved this.

The other thing I figured out is that you’ve got to have fun.  You’ve got to enjoy what you’re doing, whether it’s work, play, or chores.  And if you don’t automatically enjoy these things, you’ve got to have a good attitude–to try to get something out of them even if they’re mundane or difficult tasks.  Maybe that’s why I joined a dance band.  Do I like dance music?  No.  Do I like dancing?  No.   But I love when people dance ot the music I play.  See how that interplay works?

Finally, I decided to stop separating my spiritual life from my social life.  If the people in the church have a problem because I drink beer when I play in my (gasp) secular dance band, then they can be consoled by my non-church friends who think Christians are a-holes (many are, sadly).  In good company (me), both groups can get along, and maybe even understand each other.

I’m thankful for this learning experience.  I’m thankful that I’ve taken some lumps when it comes to being humbled. The biggest single thing I’ve learned is that I’m not happy in my work unless I’m helping other people succeed. .. and it was a failure to others succeed that got me unemployed in the first place.

Android

MaxMobile Android is supported on the T-Mobile G1 and MyTouch phones; additional models and carriers will be supported in the future. The latest MaxMobile Android version is 6.5.1.401. It’s compatible with all MAXCS servers running 6.0 Update 2 (6.0.2.412) or higher.


iPhone

MaxMobile iPhone is supported on all iPhone models. The latest MaxMobile iPhone version is 6.5.1.404. It’s compatible only with MAXCS servers running 6.5 Update 1 (6.5.1.403) or higher.

Need help integrating this?  Give us a call.

But the reason for my take on Android’s ascension has nothing to do with the wireless industry or the competitive dynamics of each particular platform.  Instead, it has to do with an observation I’ve recently made of my own industry and the local market for my company’s I.T. services.

Our firm shares a total market space of around $10 million with 9 other firms.  We’re larger than 7 of those firms (mostly one-man shops), and smaller than 2 (one of whom has 9 employees to our three).   When we started our company, we were an Android, not a Windows Mobile.  We wanted to advance to a rank in the local market where we felt competitive pressure on things like pricing from beneath us and not above.

Well, we’re at that point now.  Pricing pressure always comes from the guy below you.  So now I’m watching as some lateral moves occur beneath my firm.  The top three players can either go out and win business bid-by-bid or by looking for ways to consolidate the smaller competitors by acquiring books of business or merging.  Insofar as Palm and Windows Mobile are those smaller competitors toward the end of 2011, I see them dying on the vine or getting eaten up.  Because the momentum has shifted and because the smaller players are unable to effectively pressure based on quality, they’re going to disappear or die trying to woo low-end customers (a la Vonage).

This patent, and several like it, weren’t necessarily held by inventors, as I learned a years back, is not at all uncommon.  Patent investors, who are typically intellectual property attorneys, underwrite the investments in patents like the C2 one, and then derive income from their ownership over the patent certificate, either by licensing technology, by selling the patent, or by suing for damages on infringement of the patent inclusive of the intellectual property.

I know this particular patent and the family of about two dozen dangerously similar patents because I was retained by a San Francisco law firm for about six months trying to help them sort the patents out and translate them into plain-English for some white-haired, Harvard-educated attorney (or judge) to understand.  I still have a copy of the patent sitting in my drawer.

The real problem with this family of patents, which’ve been issued to everybody from C2 to Verizon to Joe Six Pack, is that they all overlap significantly in terms of the processes or inventions they describe.  What’s worse, they all describe the same essential process of packetizing audible information and transmitting over a non-circuit-switched network.  Indeed, these patents aren’t just similar. When you boil them down to their essentials, they’re largely identical.

And this is one problem the Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting.  If the Patent and Trademark Office is Issuing patents that cover the same process or technology theory to different parties at roughly the same time (all of these patents were either pending or granted from 1988 until roughly 2003), it really makes you wonder if the patent review teams at PTO are operating in independent vacuums, or if the processes described really are too technical for the PTO to comprehend.

The EFF would probably say that the PTO hasn’t been particularly effective since The Flying Nun was popular.  And, to the degree I find it practical, I agree with the EFF.  But I disagree with their operating theory that patent law is more flawed than effective because it stifles innovation.  The GNU/Open Source movement is the shrill cry of software populism, and I appreciate that deeply, even if I don’t believe software “wants to be free”. Haha.

And for all its heroism, Open Source is also the linchpin of poor quality assurance, the opposite thinking of service level agreements, and the lasting symbol of a sort of techno-hippyism that has lost its way while the corporate world, where all this technology is utilized, took GNU’s good ideas and left its mission behind.   That is, for every stifled innovation credited to the PTO, I can name two that occurred because of ownership of intellectual property by motivate, equipped organizations like Microsoft and IBM.   The EFF and the Open Source community are less equipped and less motivated to innovate because their feet aren’t being held to the bottom line fire.

The PTO just needs to get better at understanding inventions.  My idea, put them in the hands of motivated companies that can do something with them, and get the attorneys out of the patent investment business.  If they want to profit from innovation, let them buy stock like the rest of us.

But the exact measurements of each ingredient–that’s where the experts start shrugging. And if the experts are shrugging at this late stage, then what SMB owner is going to pay the trend much mind, to say nothing of spending their hard-earned, highly-taxed dollars on the cloud?

“Well, these cookies look really good, but we’re not sure what’s in them exactly, and we’ve no idea how they taste.”  I wouldn’t buy one of these, and neither would you.

My definition of cloud computing is this: an unstandardized way to add computing power for situational, often experimental, applications over which the constituent has very little strategic interest or risk exposure.

That’s because cloud computing isn’t a well-defined, best-practice, productized, rigid thing. Indeed, from one cloud vendor to the next, the cloud is described differently.  One thing is certain, the biggest web service data centers in the world, like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, got so big that, one day, an executive walked into the board room and said, “gee, there are times of day during which our infrastructure is hardly being used at all. How can we sell our excess capacity?”

The whole thing kind of reminds me of the waste gas utility market, the highly abstract idea that places a currency value on “carbon credits”, units of carbon dioxide that are “spent” during the process of, well, existing.  That is, if you’re a company and you exist, you’re “spending” carbon credits. In the process of your spending, your purchase is a “carbon footprint”, a virtual shadow of all the carbon you’ve put out during your pursuits. Never mind that carbon is already being produced, or that the majority of its production is something over which nobody has any control.

Oddly, though, the paradigm of spending doesn’t even apply to carbon, because what you’re doing with these credits, in effect, is depositing them (not spending them) into a debt account. This is how nations handle it, anyway. This debt account follows you everywhere you go reminding you just how inefficient your firm (or nation) is at using energy (well, if your definition of efficiency has to do with co2, rather than producing something valuable for people, but I digress).  And then, to make the strange even stranger, credit traders can bargain with you for your carbon credits.  If your account is empty, they can sell you some of their nasty baggage because there account is chock full of the stuff.  How exciting!

No?

Is there one thing that this system does to actually appeal to the rank and file business owner? To somebody like me or you?  Or do we just look at it and say, who thought of this and what does it accomplish at the end of the day?

So we come back to cloud computing, whose definition is a moving target and whose role in servicing the needs of a small business is, well, unknown at this point.  Like the carbon footprint system that some have envisioned as a way of combatting global destruction, the cloud computing model asks us to agree that a problem exists–even if we can’t see the problem.

Right, you say, Ted’s just a small business owner in Cleveland. He’s taking a very short view of the matter. Those who wonder what about the ‘real’ motivations of the Kyoto Protocol and Cloud Computing must be hillbillies, right?

The cloud exists because supercorporations have excess computing capacity. The cloud is touted as a solution because those supercorporations want to make money. Those are two indisputable truths, and nothing deplorable about them. But the notion I hear repeated–that the cloud has specific benefits for SMBs–is not verifiably true at this early stage.  Heck, it’s kind of fun to read various definitions of cloud computing penned by the pundits.  Some of this stuff reminds me of teenagers getting caught red-handed pulling a horrible prank, but trying to explain it to their parents, to whom the explanation just doesn’t add up. What is the solution?

If you’re General Dynamics or Lockheed Martin, cloud time may be of interest and value.  But if you’re an SMB calling the line of business app you run remotely via Citrix a use of the cloud, think again.  This really isn’t anything new. Hosted apps and remote computing are far different in scale and scope from what Google and Amazon are shooting for with the cloud.

Google’s strategy, at least as evidenced by the proliferation of web-smart devices and software, from ChromeOS to Android to Google Apps, seems to be to create reliance on a sort of federalized computing utility. Had Microsoft been so obvious about their desire to accomplish this precise goal back in the nineties when the DOJ was heckling them for bundling Internet Explorer, they’d have never survived antitrust. Indeed, if Microsoft had been open about their plan for computing singularity back then, they wouldn’t be around today for us to feel sorry for them over how far they’ve fallen from the top.

Of course, by federalized, I don’t mean it in the governmental sense, but in the participatory sense. The strategy of driving all private computing to one or two meganetworks controlled by a few scrappy startups from the nineties a la Amazon (hey man, we just want to sell books on the Internet, you want in?) may have value to those who need the power of 2,000 processing cores simultaeously, like Lockheed, just as a secondary market in carbon credits may have value to people hoping to profit from eco-energy concerns, like GE.

But to me and you, the small to medium business owner?  Well, we’re still not convinced.

A fantastic example of this dynamic came to light today when it was announced that the next version of Microsoft Office for Mac will replace Redmond’s clunky Entourage e-mail app with an actual Mac OS X version of Outlook, the predominant e-mail application used in medium and large enterprises.  My company alone supports somewhere in the neighborhood of twelve-hundred Outlook nodes at about fifteen different firms.  So a Mac version of Outlook, as the t-shirt saying goes, is “kind of a big deal.”

But what’s an even bigger deal is that Outlook once ran natively on the Mac–on Mac OS 9 anyway–and shared a great deal in common with its Windows cousin.  And, suffice it to say, it was a better product than its redheaded stepchild, Entourage.  It makes me wonder why they ever canned Outlook on the Mac to begin with.

Now I’m beginning to understand that Microsoft is on an all-hands mission to get as many enterprises, large and small, as entrenched as possible before Google and other market players really step to the plate with something that competes with Microsoft, and in particular Outlook and Office.  (Anybody who suggests that Google Apps currently beats Microsoft Office is smoking some pretty harsh crack, sorry guys.)

Entrenchment is the key to damage control: keep the customer believing that it will cost them more in dollars and difficulty to move away from Microsoft, no matter how compelling the alternative, and they’ll stick with Microsoft.  This was how they (soundly) destroyed Lotus Notes, and Redmond’s incredible staying power may allow it to stave off Google Apps for quite a few years to come.

OK, does this name strike anybody else as particularly dumb?  On the syllable count alone, the marketing folks at Microsoft should’ve shot this one down before it had a chance to get into the wild.  Now, it seems, it’s going to have to stick.

Compared to Apple’s “Appstore” (2 syllables) or Nokia’s “Ovi” (barely 2 syllables) or even Blackberry’s “App World” (seeing a pattern?), Microsoft’s elephant-sized name for it’s application store clocks in at a whopping 8 syllables. Imagine the water cooler discussions that will never happen as a result:

“Hey man, where’d you get that sweet pinball game?”

“Well, I got it from Windows Marketplace for Mobile!”

Riiiight.  Who seriously is going to call it that?  Microsoft’s history of self-defeating brand names hasn’t been on display this starkly since “Microsoft Windows Server Base Operating Systems Management Pack for Microsoft Operations Manager 2005“.  Srsly, who uses this wordy terminology?

With Apple having already coined the de facto term “Appstore”, why doesn’t Redmond take advantage of the growing strength of the Zune brand and call their wordy app store something like “Zune Store” or “Zune Place” or even just “Mobile World”?  Even HandMarket, a third-party app store for Windows Mobile, beats Microsoft to the punch in succinctness.

An old friend, Fleecy Moss, who was among the architects of the independent takeover of Amiga in the early 2000′s, once gave a talk at a tradeshow in the nineties–and his espousal of the content designation to software was, at the time, a revolutionary concept.  As with many ideas that bubbled up from the ill-fated Amiga wellspring, this concept proved true, and was ahead of its time.  It would be another ten years before the idea was accepted by the greater community.

The app store paradigm has brought this idea to the forefront of the way we think about distributing content.  Yet there’s something holding up the adoption of online app stores to distribute software, and I can’t quite thumb it.  Shareware authors have been distributing license credentials through e-commerce sites for a decade already, yet Apple and Microsoft still don’t sell their developers’ software through their flagship web sites.

Perhaps even more silly is the fact that consumers, vis-a-vis bloggers, don’t already demand such a solution.  If I can buy and download a DRM’d episode of Lost, why can’t I download a credentialed, licensed copy of Squeeze, or Microsoft Office for Mac, or my favorite blogging application, Ecto?   Yet nobody complains.  Indeed, it seems that the idea of a desktop app store is some kind of new idea. Technologizer, the “smarter take on tech”, just ran a piece about it today.   Yet I was talking about it a year ago, and longer.

I have a healthy amount of respect for Nokia.  Before the iPhone they were the only devicemaker offering half of what Apple now offers with the 3GS.  Indeed, I toted a Nokia N95 for a while, and an N81 8GB for a while.  Both were excellent phones, but I’m convinced now that Apple’s iPhone, even as it arrives as a better all-around phone than Nokia’s current flagship (the obviously Blackberry-inspired N97), is more appealing to American consumers because it is made by an American company.

That’s right.  Nokia’s brand is obscurely perceived in North America, particularly the U.S., as an upscale European oddity not unlike Fiat or Porsche, to use an automotive analogy.  So while it may be the number one brand globally, Nokia has failed to make an impression on American consumers precisely for the reason that they’re a non-American company.

Apple owes a helping of its iPhone success to that fact.  The product is American; the company is American; the marketing is overwhelmingly American, with sitcom-style television commercials, extremely stable revision control (how many models of phone does Apple have on the market compared to Nokia?), and a least-common-denominator hardware engineering approach that appeals to the maximum number of simultaneous consumers instead of offering a specific style or feature set to five or six different niches.  Fewer buttons, more software.

The other American-friendly thing about the iPhone is the nature of its name.  Nokia is some Scandinavian meme as Sony is some Japanese one.  The difference is that Nokia’s name hasn’t been overcome with a mass-market product the way Sony’s cross-cultural name has been with the Playstation, and earlier, the Walkman. Same with Nintendo.  Who didn’t have a Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990?  And for that matter, who doesn’t have a Wii today? Far fewer carry a Nokia product than own a Wii in the United States.

But there’s more to it that the brand name. Say what you like about Nokia’s lack of good carrier support in the United States (Apple still has only one official carrier), or their botched execution of an application store model (Apple a lot to harm themselves on the appstore anyway), the real problem with Nokia’s phones isn’t the name on them.  It’s the way they look and feel.  While the majority of American consumers still haven’t obtained a smartphone, the daunting physique of a Nokia N81, for example, could give a buyer pause.  The lack of fluidity of form in Nokia’s products means that the user is exposed to as many features as possible, whether or not they want to use them, and perception is that there’s a long learning curve.

But then, I believe most iPhone sales occured at Blackberry’s expense, not Nokia’s–and that, of itself, does not bode well for the European giant.

Carlin has an undergraduate degree in physics from CalTech and a PhD in economics from MIT. His Web site lists papers about the environment and public policy dating back to 1964, spanning topics from pollution control to environmentally-responsible energy pricing.

After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. “My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide),” he said. “There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They’re not going up, and if anything they’re going down.”

It’s amazing to hear this stuff starting to come out. I wonder if the people in the trenches are finally beginning to realize that the monumental rush “Everything Eco”, the so-called Green Movement, is a collossal misallocation of fiscal resources at a time of 10% unemployment and a collapsed real estate industry. The federal government gives Tesla a half-billion dollars in what is a considerable R&D gambit, and I’m scratching my saying why isn’t our government keeping that money in order to stop destroying the credit of the American people?

Green I.T. is one of the chief offenders.  Even as we seek to move mobile apps to the cloud, we centralize power consumption in “hot spots”–the very same thing heavy industry did during the twentieth century. Load goes up, demand goes up, carbon is emitted. Manufacturing of mobile devices moves to China, whose plants are half as clean as American ones, and we’re worried about their Kyoto-boggling pollution instead of their murderous, liberty-defiling, anti-human regime.  Is all this the price of this Going Green?

Too rich for my blood.

When are our industry leaders going to get their heads screwed on tight again and get back to the business of innovating to help people instead of helping superstitious, political science?

The same argument is occuring over what the Cloud is and isn’t.  I have my own theory that the symantics will ultimately give way to widespread social adoption (as was the case with Web 2.0) or cultural irrelevance (as is arguably the case with VoIP, thank you very much AT&T/Verizon).   In the end, Cloud computing will either get over the hump because there’s something truly compelling in it, or it will fade away into abscurity along with push web, active desktop, Vonage, and a thousand other nifty concepts that have had their 15 minutes of fame.

So what IS cloud computing?  In my estimation, the cloud is the same thing we used to call web hosting up until about 2006–with one arguable, barely-noticable difference.  Since 2006, the availability and cost-effectiveness of both Blade infrastructure and virtualization technology has increased substantially, meaning that it’s now possible to compartmentalize and virtualize the core pieces of hosting technology that run the server side of the web.

In essence, you can turn networking resources on and off when you need them, serving peak loads and ignoring moments of non-demand.  Indeed, before we had this monicre, “the cloud”, we had other words for the same idea, chief among them “on demand computing”.  Thanks IBM.  The reason we’re using the cloud to describe  this now instead of on deman computing probably has something to do with the Web 2.0 thought evolution.  People view the web in a much more organic way now.  It’s a playground, a garden, and an ecosystem, serving as a center point between instant communities of millions of people and interest.

That degree of just-in-time social organization requires a name that lends itself to mud, muck, cloudiness, and disorganization. Hence, the cloud, not on-demand computing. Not Web 3.0, which itself offers little meaning beyond a chronological sequence.

Yet the cloud is merely a brand, a catch-phrase designed to market the engineering ideas we in the tech community get all hot and bothered about to people whose purse-strings ultimately power the fulfillment of those ideas.  With that goal in mind, the cloud is a very poor brand indeed.

Now I know IBM was selling servers, but maybe they had it right with on-demand.  Guys, the “cloud” doesn’t need to marketed.  Let’s stop trying to hard-sell something that we’ve been using for years already.