The answer, of course, is solar power. Clean, silent, low-maintenance, and emissions-free.  Well, sort-of.  But Wired tells us today that solar farms aren’t efficient. Based on their figures, I decided to extrapolate a few solar farm scenarios.

Facebook’s data center is a 100-megawatt consumer, and its solar array, which spans acres and acres in the Oregon outback, puts out a mere .05 megawatts at an average energy conversion efficiency of about 14%. Apple’s planned N.C. solar farm will cost 180 acres of God’s green earth and will put out just 3.5 megawatts at typical efficiency (Apple will require at least 70 MW at their N.C. data center). Using those ratios, and keeping in mind that these are the best, most efficient solar generators on the planet, we could estimate that:

• A typical .3 kw household would require 0.154 acre of this top-of-the-line solar technology. That would fill a typical suburban lot, and leave no room for the house. Underground housing, anybody?
  .
• A typical 3.5 acre city block, containing 16 households, would require 2.5 acres of solar array. Yep–two and a half football fields. (BTW, forget about trees in that neighborhood.)
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• New York City, some 325 square miles in size, if it were filled only with these houses, would require a solar array the size of Chicago, which weighs in at about 250 square miles.
• The United States would require about three states the size of Texas filled only with solar farms and nothing else to fulfill its electricity needs. The distribution system for this electricity (power lines, AC turbines, etc.) would require a further two states the size of Colorado.

My conclusions:

• Mass-market electrical consumption cannot be serviced by solar generation without regulated rationing. Most Americans would not be in love with this idea.
• The obsession with solar energy has as much to do with politics as it does with shrinking the fossil fuel industries.
• Data centers should concentrate, if they believe fossil and nuclear power generation are harmful to humanity, on reducing their consumption of electricity.

On the day Apple became the #1 vendor of cell phones in the U.S. with 26%, All Things Digital put out the headline: “Android Surges… Apple Flat”.  Now when you’ve just eaten up a quarter of the market, it’s very hard to call you flat, but I’ll digress.  They are looking at OS shipments rather than product shipments.  From Apple’s point of view, the two are the same, and since Android isn’t a first-party OS, Apple gets the last laugh as the market leader. Still, it’s funny that the editor can call Apple “flat” on such a monumental day, especially when Android marketers are a half-dozen deep and Apple is just one company, with just one (or two) handset.   One thing ATD did get right is the fact that Blackberry is dying on the vine.

Another example is in the marching orders of the press corps towards treatment of the Android “family” of products (from a half-dozen different vendors) being treated as a single, monolithic anti-iphone. This depsite the fact that there are OEM features and major platform functionality differences on every handset.   Just compare an HTC to any phone with MotoBlur.  They really feel like entirely different products, but none in such a way that you can say yep this one is the “iPhone of Android devices”.

So I wonder if these journalistic tendencies are driven out of the desire to see Apple take a few bruisings now that they aren’t clawing at Microsoft from the bottom of the 32-bit barrel.

Ie, would programmers be less likely to write highly productive code if less productive, less sophisticated code would yield the same result, given the availability of tons of hardware? And what would this mean in terms of energy conservation, and more importantly, the advancement of human thought?

Put another way, there are many ways to perform a certain computational algorithm, all yielding an accurate result, but all requiring various levels of computational intensity.  I’ll give an example.  First, the bubble sort.  This is a very simple, iterative method of sorting data into ordered lists–a method taught in basic computer programming classes. I first learned the bubble sort while taking Pascal at Cass Tech high school in Detroit.  I thought the bubble sort was awesome, although I later learned that there were other sorting schemes that were far faster and less computationally intense, ie. more economical.

So the hypothesis is this: innovation in more effective programming is lessened by the availability of horsepower.

Once upon a time, iTunes had the opportunity to become “indyTunes“, and totally missed the boat.  Right now, MySpace is the MP3.com of the 2.0 era, offering indies more than Apple does in terms of self-service distribution and exposure.  With this rebooted MySpace, a very immersive, very commercialized, very polished experience is in order.  Same idea as iTunes, except that iTunes isn’t nearly as immersive as it could be. Problem one is DRM, which has stimied iTunes’ ability to become totally web-based.  Problem two is Steve, who wants so much control over the ecosystem that he’s not likely, in my opinion, to expand Ping to the wild wild web.

That said, I still think MySpace’s new look rock concert skin is just the veil for the real goods: an audience for Ping.  If Apple wants in on that action, they’re going to have to pick sides, and if Facebook is as snot-nosed as I’ve read regarding Steve, then MySpace might be ripe for the picking.

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.

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.

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.

Apple is nearly past that point in their new platform’s life cycle.  If it’s an app platform–let it be.  Palm and Blackberry are still waiting in the wings, and Windows Mobile will be the centerpiece of Microsoft’s revenue strategy in the next ten years.  And, like it or not, whatever else Microsoft did that was crummy and evil, they never told a developer he couldn’t distribute an app.

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.

To hook an iPhone up to a PBX.  Come on Apple.  The jig is up with AT&T; let’s see some SIP!