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.

As it is now, iPhone OS does a whole lot of things OS X does not–platform-wide UI support for multi-touch is just the beginning of the list. Still, it seems Apple has gone to great lengths not to cannibalize desktop PC sales, if not overtly saying so. No, iPad is not a desktop replacement, yet.  For starters, it synchronizes with iTunes, meaning that it doesn’t actually run iTunes, so its calendaring and music apps are still very mobile in nature. I also wonder if the lack of a user-facing camera was a design scheme to keep the iPad out of the desktop space, as opposed to a financial consideration to keep down manufacturing costs.

But the brushes app seems like an impressive utility with the potential to offset some productivity that’s normally reserved for the desktop.  And as I type this on a Macbook Pro, I realize that the iPad will never be suitable for video production, or for audio mixing. Even still, I can imagine great uses for multitouch in these kinds of apps.

Without the UI goodies, OS X shimmers less, and I believe it’s only a matter of time before touch-enabled desktop gear starts shipping from Cupertino.

All iPads are unlocked and use GSM micro SIMs, so you can use a carrier right away if you have data. No contract: you activate the service directly from the iPad and can cancel any time you want without an ETF. iPad has built-in 3G. Data plans normally cost $60 a month for a laptop. 250MB of data per month is $15 (less than the usual $35). $30 for unlimited — a much better deal. AT&T is providing the service.

Come on AT&T, I still can’t tether my iPhone according to your terms of service!  Brutal.

Among Blackberry, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, Microsoft was the earliest player in mobile computing and smart phones, so why have they failed in this area?

With Windows Mobile 7 waiting in the wings, it occurred to me that I just don’t see people using Windows Mobile devices that much any more. In fact, at work, we’ve seen a shift from WinMo to Blackberry and iPhone, with the exodus split about 60/40 in favor of Blackberry. The market share shift has been swift and decisive.

Now I know this isn’t exactly news, but I was trying to figure out why.  Microsoft correctly foresaw the mobile market as being the next big thing for them and the software industry, and they had very early foresight that mobile was going to sweep our eyes away from our desktops in a major way. They had the timing right, but their solution is, and has been, inadequate.

The Value of Ecosystems

One key difference between Microsoft and Apple is that, while they both offer end-to-end ecosystems (Microsoft with XBox, Apple with iTunes/iPhone/AppleTV), they seem to use their ecosystems to different ends.  I believe Apple’s tightly-integrated iTunes ecosystem was primarily driven by the “digital paranoia” of the record industry in the early 2000’s, and it may not have been Apple’s idea to provide such a closed environment. But, in the end, consumers seem to prefer the “just works” ecosystem over the “bring your own interface” approach. For this reason, Microsoft can be seen to have failed at establishing a clear content-to-consumer delivery model based on Windows Mobile.

What’s worse, the Zune, which could have been a great launchpad for a simplified, stylus-free version of Windows Mobile four years ago, exists on yet another Microsoft island, limiting its value to the consumer. Rectifying this problem by bringing the ill-fated Zune line into the limelight of the Windows ecosystem would go a long way towards making Windows Mobile relevant again. Think iPod.

Failure to Recognize Consumer Patterns of Behavior

It was only a matter of time before the average consumer was using personal devices to manage nearly every aspect of his life. Yet Microsoft took the wait and see approach, preferring to believe that the corporate world would drive personal device adoption, where, in reality, we can see that personal, entertainment-oriented device use has driven the entire mobile industry for the last several years.  Two parts gear lust, and one part nerdification of the general populous, this movement is the exact opposite of the strategy Microsoft used for Windows Mobile.

Most People Lose Their Stylus

The user interface options available on Windows Mobile devices, until recently, have been based on resistive touch screen technology, generally used with a small, inkless pen called a stylus.  Blackberry, by contrast, has always offered its trademark “scroll wheel”, and Apple developed a slew of UI technologies, including groundbreaking iPod controls, that culminated in a stylus-free touch-screen control environment for the iPhone. Windows Mobile never employed either approach, so solving this problem (and Microsoft is solving it) will help.

Give Developers a Reason to Develop

The real trick isn’t coming up with the idea. The real trick isn’t coding the program.  The real trick IS getting people to notice.  Apple has more than solved this problem, for better or worse, with the Appstore.  You bring the code, we bring the customers.  While some web sites have served as communities of developers and consumers of WinMo apps, they exist outside the ecosystem and don’t provide turnkey delivery of content.

When Microsoft finally did show up on the scene with an official WinMo store, they stubbed their toe by naming it “Windows Marketplace for Mobile”.  Srsly?

Stop Trying to Look Like Windows

Windows Mobile shouldn’t look like Windows and shouldn’t even be called “Windows”, since a windowing environment on a 3″ screen is a useless idea anyway. Yet when we look back at the releases of Windows Mobile (and its mobile predecessors), we get the idea that Microsoft has always wanted WinMo to look as much like desktop Windows as possible. Only with Windows Mobile 7 has this pattern been broken. (See above screen grab.)

Blackberry never had this problem, as their main objective was to develop a good mobile UI, and they had no ties to an existing desktop environment.  Apple, who does have Mac OS X, decided not to bother bringing the X look and feel to their mobile device. This was a great decision, of course.

When I first read about it, it sounded great.  When I read that it was developed by ex-Diablo engineers, it was a must-download.  While there was some meager novelty in “owning” the local community college, the shimmer quickly faded, because nothing at all interesting occurred as a result.

Sadly, 48 hours later, I think I’m going to remove it.  It’s boring, and it plays just like one of those Zynga social games where you have to check in as often as possible in order to “level up”.  I just don’t have time for that.

Friend Mike at Chronic Dawgs put up a post last week about how Joshua Cribbs, the best football kick returner of all time, is feeling under-appreciated by his team, the Cleveland Browns.  To put it in perspective, Josh had four return touchdowns and nearly broke the all-time pro football record for all-purpose yards this season.  No small accomplishment.

So the guy’s a big deal.  Anyway, he makes about a million a year and was insulted by a contract modification offer the Browns made for 1.4 million a year.  (As an aside, I’d be pretty happy making half that if my job was to play a game and stay in top physical shape using the best gyms and trainers in the world, but I digress.)

The din around Cleveland surrounding Josh’s contract has been constant and obnoxious the last few weeks. It all started when the new team president Mike Holmgren came in and started hiring coaches.  Fans feel that management has turned their back on Cribbs and are ignoring his request for a contract (never mind he has three years left on his current one) while they build up the white-collar staff in preparation for next season.

It’s amazing how much Twitter action I’ve seen on this subject. People are tweeting, from as far away as Kuwait, using the #payjoshcribbs hash tag. There are Facebook fan pages called “Pay Josh”, and I myself have received 7 to 10 separate invitations to support Josh’s cause.  Of all the causes to worry about.

Yet public opinion doesn’t influence an NFL owner’s bank account. Just ask the Browns, who just put the finishing touches on their ninth losing season since returning as an expansion franchise.

Why, if Google were so afraid of wasteful business practices that they would pull out of their biggest growth market for content products, would they be involved in similarly valueless gambits?  Take things like GoogleVoice, Google Wave, the cloud, Android, and projects like that.  These aren’t profitable ventures for Google, but may indeed become so at some point, especially Android and Voice.  The point is, Google spends all kinds of money on things that make folks scratch their head because they believe there’s money to be made.

China is no different, except that something clear scared the balls off of Google in the process. Be it the communist secret police or a blackmail offer that would’ve been even more embarrassing to Google than the Chinese government-backed breach of Gmail they just revealed, SOMETHING scared Google away from the biggest treasure trove of the next decade.  And that something was big. Yet to believe TechCrunch’s assessment, you’d have to assume the move was purely profit-driven and not really borne of any moralistic decision.  Again, I tend to disagree.  Profit decision or not, at the end of the day, Google DID THE RIGHT THING.  Why is it so hard for all these young pay-per-post bloggers to understand we’re talking about brutal social communism?

So TechCrunch’s echoing of the silly notion that China is a bad market for Google because it’s just too hard for them—ahh, that’s justy a goofy idea.  Have you ever known Google to back down from a market fight? Me neither.  If you answer no, then TechCrunch advises you to “sit the hell down and shut the hell up”.  They should rename their web site BlowHard.

Somebody call Mike Arrington and hook his writers up with Critical Thinking 101 at the local community college.

…advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.

What Google won’t say here, and I don’t know why, is this. Who besides the Chinese government has an unhealthy interest in the e-mail communications of Chinese human rights activists?  Those “third parties” Google mentioned were probably the Guoanbu and the MSS, two Chinese agencies that, if you’re a human rights activist (or a salvation-believing Christian), you do NOT want to mess with.

But Google is on the right track. Responding to China, saying they’re willing to shut down operations in China if the archaic Chinese governing class aren’t willing to cave on the issue of censorship, is a good move.  But why wait until now?  I was heartbroken when Google capitulated to China’s censorship demands in the name of the Almighty Buck.  I even chided Google as un-American.

So putting teeth behind this fiasco–great move.   I would advise the Obama Administration to take a cue from Google’s chief counsel, who wrote their official response, and grow some teeth of their own as Google has done.  Hillary Clinton’s response from the Department of State was neither as informed nor as smart.  In fact, I’d call it useless.

James Fallows adds that, at the end of the day, this decision doesn’t really hurt anybody except Google.  It doesn’t deal a real blow to China, in his opinion, because Chinese Internet consumers are, generally speaking, not going to work too hard to get around the government’s censorship.  As one Tweeter put it, it’s not Google withdrawing from China.  It’s China withdrawing from the world. To me, that means Google is finally, thankfully, just doing the right thing.

More access to friendly development tools = more iPhone apps = a more mature and varied iPhone marketplace.  Everybody wins, right?  TechCrunch even headlined their post about this, “the year Flash’s 2 million developers come to the iPhone.”

Maybe not.  Sorry TechCrunch.

When Adobe announced that it will include an iPhone “packager”, that is a program that will package Adobe Flash programs as iPhone apps, my initial reaction was, “Great, now I can do that time entry app I’ve been envisioning for my company’s web-based trouble ticketing system.”

But I quickly realized that this packager is only going to produce iPhone-runnable Flash apps, and the full set of iPhone APIs will likely be out of reach to Flash developers.  The telephony APIs and other niceties XCode jocks get to use will probably still be off limits, to say nothing of distribution of the apps.  It will be very easy for Apple to spot a Flash app on its way through the App Store submission process, and disapprove it.  In fact, the rejection of the packaged Flash apps could be automated such that there’s not even any oversight–and on similar grounds Apple used to reject the Commodore 64 emulator last year.

Not to mention that fact that other apps that could benefit from Flash’s presence (like Safari, to say the least) still won’t be able to run custom-made Flash client programs.

So maybe Apple will come around–but in the mean time, I don’t think this announcement is nearly as significant as it sounds.

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.

After I got fired from my job as a construction I.T. manager some years ago, I got a publishing contract with O’Reilly, who published two of my books.  This catapulted me into a position I’d never been before: that of a pundit.  Suddenly, my opinion mattered.  It was something I ran with, and for some time, did so profitably.  But it is indeed very difficult to stay ahead of the curve and remain a relavent pundit, especially when you have other concerns–like growing a quote-unquote real business.

That’s not to say I don’t keep up on the musings of thought leader like Andy Abramson, Alec Saunders, Rich Tehrani, Jeff Pulver, Ken Camp, Luca Filigheddu, Dameon Welch-Abernathy, and a slew of other thought leaders who are apparently much better at time management than am I.

Just get me away from my laptop screen, you know?   I mean I love sharing my opinion–that is, I really do like being a pundit–but can I please have a little me time at the end of the workday?  During the first half of the year, writing on subjects about which I care increasingly less (VoIP, for example) subsided because I just had to get something off my plate.

Jacob and Madelyn are in junior high school now, too. I do so much more with them than I used to.  They’re both great musicians and as they grow older, our mutual interests have widened.  We spend a lot more time together.  And Katie’s such an integral part of the family, too.  For better or worse, all of these things take time.

The same is true of Best Technology, which grew in 2009 to three full-time employees and now has clients from Sandusky to Hudson, a swath of northeast Ohio a hundred miles long and encompassing a fleet of over two thousand PCs.  This didn’t just happen.  It also took away from my enjoyable-but-time-consuming pastime of writing. I also joined the Rotary Club of Elyria in 2009, a service organization that has a very rigorous schedule and demands quite a bit.

At the end of the day, there’s very little time left for blogging, thought leadership, or punditry–whatever you’d like to call it. And I’m a little let down when I visit my own blog and don’t see anything fresh.

So–better time management–that’s my New Year’s Resolution. See you after the first.

1 – The Nintendo Wii should be menu version 4.2u. Newer versions may work but watch those automatic system updates from Nintendo as they can break the software pre-reqs used by the Amiga emulator.

2 – Obtain a 2 GB SD card.  This card must be a non-SDHC card and the 2 GB size limit is the real deal. The Nintendo Wii will not work with a larger card without some hacking.  So save yourself the trouble (and coin) and just get a 2 GB card. This card will be used to load the Amiga emulation and floppy images later on.

3 – Download and install the Homebrew channel for Wii.  This is a piece of software required to launch the Amiga emulator and other hacker projects.  Note that by installing the Homebrew channel, you’re essentially voiding your Wii’s warranty.   These easiest way to obtain Homebrew is the Hackmii installer, available here. Here are the instructions for this step:

4 – Once Homebrew is running (it will show up as a Channel on the Wii Menu), take your SD card back to your computer and delete everything on it.

5 – Download Simon Kagstrom’s UAE port for Wii and extract the zip file to the root of the SD card. There should be two folders — one called uae and one called apps.  You won’t need to do anything with the folder called apps, but the uae folder is where you’ll place your Amiga ROM files and floppy disk images.

6 – Obtain Amiga ROMs.  The easiest (and legal) way to do this is do purchase Cloanto’s Amiga-licensed (yes, the Amiga license holders are real people with real lawyers who actually exist) emulation product for PC and Mac, called Amiga Forever.   Copy the ROM files from the Amiga Forever CD-ROM into the /uae/roms folder on the SD card.  They should be called “kick13.rom”,  ”kick20.rom”, and so forth depending on the version of the Amiga you plan to boot.

7 – Obtain Amiga floppy images (games).  A great site is thegamearchives.com.  Save these ADF files into the /uae/floppies folder on the SD card.

8 – Re-insert the SD card into the Wii and launch the Homebrew channel.  You should now have a working Amiga.  Use the Wiimote to control the Amiga (keyboard support is extremely limited at this point but workable for most programs).

9 – Enjoy!

Now I can’t blame that on Gizmo.  Much of it has to do with the SwitchVox system and iPhone I adopted for business use–those two have been transformational to the way I communicate daily.  But now that Google has lapped up the Project, I’m interested in seeing if the Mac version has lost its self-destructive tendencies. But presto the download links are gone.  Boo.

Mike Arrogantington has comented that RSS is “definitely dead” because Feedburner’s CEO is going to Twitter.  Perhaps this has less to do with the health of RSS and more to do with the fact that Feedburner just isn’t fashionable any more, while Twitter is considered sexy and curvy.  Sam Diaz, too, is going to get a nice paycheck.  Hey, if Twitter was throwing money at me, I’d probably say RSS was dead, too.

Yet Twitter’s greatest promise remains not as the solution for those seeking a chat application, a social networking tool, an authentication scheme, and certainly not as a content syndication standard, but rather as a platform for accomplishing all of the above.  My point is this:  RSS is for more than just update pinging (which is basically ALL Twitter brings to the table for a content publisher).

RSS also accomplishes the following:

1. RSS generally enforces accurate datelines. (Twitter is subject to whenever the tweet occured.)
2. RSS offers a basis in XML, making it an extensible transport for specialized content payloads. (Twitter relies on third-party interop for such, like Twitpic, say.)
3. RSS offers a more than 140 character limit per post.  (Twitter — well, this one should be self-explanatory.)
4. RSS has no features which increase the need for spam control techniques.  (Twitter — spend your days blocking followers who want to lead you back to porn sites and borrow your credit card number.)
5. With RSS, real syndication with content duplication is possible and there are many situations where this is necessary and beneficial. (With Twitter, you’re always parsing a linkback in order to find and syndicate content.)
6. RSS is an open, community-based standard that solves a well-defined problem. (Twitter is a private concern with no apparent motive other than audience building.)
7. RSS can be used on any server in the world capable of answering a get request. (Twitter only runs on Twitter’s servers.)
8. RSS doesn’t intrinsically encourage the posting of the silly, arbitrary, private details of one’s life; ie. it’s a publishing platform. (Twitter is a social platform.)
9. RSS is entirely anonymous. (Twitter client requests are identity-based.)
10. RSS is compatible with any authentication scheme the publisher desires.  (Twitter only authenticates Twitter users.)

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.

Well doy, Apple realizes that consumer-empowering voice technology is a competitive advantage.  We VoIP folks have been preaching that gospel for the last ten years.  Comrade Ken Camp wrote with visionary accuracy about the merits of VoIP in his book IP Telephony Demystified, one of the really early books on the subject.  I agreed with him when I wrote Switching to VoIP that VoIP is a leveler of the playing field, a true equalizer and a legitimately revolutionary technology item.

I’ve also viewed carriers like AT&T, at least for the last four or five years, as access providers, not “phone line providers” offering dialtone.  Apple, it seems, has arrived at the same conclusion.

Second, let’s ask the real question: Since we know the decision to allow Google Voice is ultimately up to Apple, and not AT&T, what could Apple’s motivation for this rejection possibly be?  Are we ignoring the simple answer?  Enhancements to the iChat ecosystems, perhaps? The most obvious answer may not satisfy the conspiracy theorists.  But something as easy as Apple is getting ready to release their own Voice-killer makes the most since to me, to heck with AT&T’s bandwidth.

Finally, I’ve almost concluded that AT&T’s days as the exclusive distributor of iPhones in North America are numbered. Apple would have to score a pretty low IQ to permanently marry their network support to a single carrier, with the rise of new wide-area wireless networking standards and mass WiFi addiction marching on with no favoritism towards Bell.  This would seem to indicate, at least out here in the “sensible” midwest, that Apple is not beholden to AT&T, a company short on both sexy intellectual property and an applications-oriented revenue model, for a short-term political favor that screws its relationship with Google, a company who is enriched of both.

The answer to this mystery, I believe, is in Cupertino.