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.

It’s that time of year again: tax time.  As we all pay buku to our local CPAs to fill out forms we’re either too incompetent or too uninterested to fill out ourselves, we cringe at the idea of a federal tax audit and dread dealing with IRS agents on the phone: people who won’t give you their first names and only want to be called Mister This or Mizz That.

At the same time, at least in 2009, Microsoft is introducingperpetrating the most ambitious domestic licensing compliance audit in its history, calling any company it suspects may be out of compliance and requiring them to demonstrate that they “own” all the Microsoft software they’re using.  Microsoft’s SAM group is using tersely-worded phone conversations and heavy-handed verbal and written threats about escalation, audits, and legal action in order to ensure compliance. Call it revenue preservation if you want.

I call it lawsuit bait and a huge waste of my clients’ time.  Yet, Microsoft isn’t going to wait until economic conditions have improved to do this. They’re hurting too, and the easiest way to shore up revenue is the horse technique: go back to the same trough and drink some more.  Call existing customers and make sure they’re loaded with all the licenses they could conceivably need.

This technique is a bit of a gamble, as those being audited are mostly volume licensing customers–precisely the type of customers who have been laying employees off the last year or so.  Indeed, these customers’ licensing requirements have in fact gone DOWN, meaning that, for many companies, the amount of Microsoft software that’s actually needed might be less than what the customer has paid for.  Of course, when I asked my SAM agent if Microsoft would compensate me for my time if we were found to be over-licensed, he promptly responded with a proverbial ‘hell naw.’

I then informed him that if he is going to make arbitrary decisions about how my clients’ consulting time is spend (it does take me time to fill out MS’s compliance paperwork properly), he needs to give me or the client more notice.  I can picture lean I.T. staffs whose projects have to be put on hold all because pouty Microsoft is throwing a licensing tantrum. So much for the server upgrade because Ballmer and the gang decided to foist this lofty audit on our I.T. guys. It’s more than a little absurd.

Microsoft, you’re going to piss off a LOT of customers with this behavior.  (Something tells me your biggest customers like NASA and General Motors aren’t getting harassed on the phone by a war-dialing twenty-something with an autographed copy of Introduction to Microsoft Licensing on his book shelf.)

Bottom line, is if you’re going to show up out of the clear blue, and require something of my time, ie. boss me around, you better be either the IRS or my Mom.  Those are the two people for whom I jump through hoops.

Social Media and Newspapers #1 – Newspapers and Social Networking: Bridging the Gap

How do newspapers embrace social media in order to retain and grow their content audience?

Listen now.

1 - Place customers’ needs above everything. Don’t want to take a call for help on a Saturday night? Tough, your customer is in trouble and they need you.  So put on your snow boots and go help them.

2 – Call your customers even when they’re not calling you.  Demonstrate concern even when there’s no money changing hands.  It will come back in the form of more business.

3 – During lean times, no customer is too small, unless they take your attention from a bigger customer.

4 – Use inexpensive labor resources to decrease your customers’ costs–before they do it on their own.  When a lot of good unemployed talent is on the street, you can take advantage of that talents’ recent availability in order to drive your customers costs down.   It’s called outsourcing, or as I prefer to put it, localsourcing.  You provide less expensive labor options for your clients and get a bigger chunk of their pie at the same time.

5 – Spend money on marketing.  Yes, don’t shrink away from the guerrella marketing attitude that got you to your current success plateau just because there are economic clouds raining outside your office window.  In fact, marketing is received more postitively in a tougher economy that it is when things are hot.  When times are tough, your potential clients are more likely to switch vendors, so don’t stop marketing to them, and maybe they’ll switch to you.

6 – Reward business growth more heavily than normal.  Motivate your business development resources by giving them even bigger rewards for growth.  Assuming you’re not already in the red, put your money where your mouth is and remind your employees that “we’re in grow or die” mode.

7 - Retain your best people.  During downturns, good salespeople are going to get recruited while poor ones will get kicked to the curb.  Keep your best people happy, productive, and let them know how much you appreciate them–so you can keep them out of job interviews.

8 – Only take profitable work.  Don’t get caught in bidding wars just to keep your labor resources working. When we come out of this slump, you’ll regret the burden of a bunch unprofitable work that you took on just to keep your people employed.

9 – Outsource, outsource, outsource.   I already suggesting providing outsourcing.  Now practice what you preach and use it, too. Give your specialized internal projects to a local firm. That new in-house trouble-ticketing system?  That server upgrade your I.T. guy has been putting off?   Shop them locally and you’ll be pleased with the results you get by using a specialist.

10 – Invest in competitive advantage.  While your competition “waits it out”, invest in technologies and alliances that will bring you out ahead.  This might mean refitting your computer network or putting that new customer contact management solution in–so it’s ready to rock when the downturn comes to an end.

Despite the difficult economic climate in northern Ohio, and an abundance of well-entrenched competitors, Ted and his business partner knew that Best Technology Strategy was going to be a success. Picking the company’s area of specialty was the first challenge. Networking and helpdesk support seemed to represent the greatest need among Lorain County businesses, so that’s what the firm started with.

Check the rest of it out.

Moreover, any attempts to develop apps that accomplish video recording and storage or media messaging using MMS have been blocked by Apple’s Appstore Nazis.  Why?

Does Apple have something so incredibly cool up their sleeve that they’re forcing would-be competitors to the sidelines while we all waiting in Lemming-like anticipation?  I doubt it.   If Apple had something that slick and revolutionary–having to do with mms–they wouldn’t need to worry about competitors or imitators in the app store, would they?

Seriously, it’s ridicululous that I can download a multimedia Fart catalog from the app store but I still can’t take video or mms on the iPhone.

Freedom to Connect, the annual event organized by David Isenberg, will be held on March 30-31, 2009 in Washington, DC. I am partnering with David to make this event fun and informative. This year is a very important one because President Barack Obama has made wired and wireless broadband – its cost, quality and availability – a major issue for his administration to tackle. Broadband is, in the eyes of the new administration, not just there for its own sake. It is a necessity for improving our lives: from the education of our children to the reduction of social isolation among seniors to efficient management of our energy grid.

There will be a lot of new people in Washington D.C. and as you have seen from the Inauguration ceremonies this week, there’s tremendous energy pushing for change. In the past, many of Freedom to Connect’s attendees have come from the FCC, various federal government agencies, the Congress and the Senate. This year we will see many new faces. We need to have a dialogue with them about the future of broadband and technological innovation in the United States.

The key topics for discussion include:
on-line, network-enabled industry and culture, new jobs and sustainable growth;
Burlington VT, where muni fiber enables business, artistic endeavor, and new telemedicine applications;
how Lafayette, Louisiana’s community came together as it built its muni fiber network;
the twin cities of Cedar Falls and Waterloo, Iowa, where one twin has a muni net, and the other doesn’t;
what municipal CIOs are planning for Seattle, Portland and San Francisco municipal fiber networks;
city nets, wired and wireless, that didn’t work – what went wrong and what we can do better;
what President Obama’s infrastructure and economic recovery plans mean for tomorrow’s network.
Sascha Meinrath (New America Foundation) and I will discuss in great detail what caused the municipal wireless networks in Philadelphia, San Francisco and other cities not to be built. Call it a post-mortem. It’s important for us to know what went wrong so we don’t make the same mistakes. We will also identify the key areas where cities and regions can use Wi-Fi networks not just to deliver public Internet access but to improve municipal and county services.

Among those who have already confirmed attendance to F2C are the CIO of San Francisco, the CTO of Seattle, the Commissioner of Telecommunications of Massachusetts and the Chair of the Vermont Telecommunications Commission, and 20-some other important shapers of the Internet who care about using it to spur economic growth, enhance participatory democracy and make our planet greener.

Get all the details, and sign up at http://freedom-to-connect.net.

Anyway, the iPhone tax is high enough as it is.  You’re in it for $100/month just to own an iPhone. This is why the non-nerdy don’t buy data plans.  But imagine the economy of scale if unlimited 3G was 50% less expensive per subscriber.  Even if AT&T can’t do that, the fact that you can’t tether your iPhone is disappointing to begin with.  Tethering should be an out of the box feature.

After all, you’re saying, when you buy an iPhone, “Hey, AT&T, I know you’re a giant customer-shafting carrier [a totally legit business model in this day and age], but I’m going to go along with your smelly customer-reviling existence because it’s the only way I can get my grubby hands on an iPhone without doing questionable things. Please, please, how about letting me tether?  It’s not like I’m going to use more simultaneous bandwidth on my laptop than I do on the iPhone by itself.”

To which AT&T replies, “No, no, no.  See, we can get $120 more bucks a year from you.”

How appropriate a thing for a big telco to say.  Reminds me of the carriers saying you can’t use a broaband router and multiple PCs on a DSL line a few years back.

With another difficult year behind our region, northeast Ohio is facing a crossroads of challenging business conditions.  Our industrial identity is up in the air, our regional infrastructure is behind much of the country, and our I.T. costs are higher than they ought to be. Yet, there’s never been a better time to trim technology budgets.

The incentive to outsource role-based personnel and I.T. management positions is very high right now.  Here are four reasons why:

1. I.T. employees, some of whom may be “coasting along” during a downturn, often get less work done than consultants, whose ability to earn is based on their work deliverables instead of upon their employment relationship, which is difficult and expensive to sever.  Retaining consulting staff can gain you more value.

2. I.T. employees, especially network administrators and systems support personnel, rarely offer the rich knowledge and expertise of a consulting organization.  When you work with a consultant, you are drawing on the expertise of many.  Moreover, before you ask your I.T. employee to complete a project for your company, consider that a consultant has probably already completed that same project many times before, while this may be your I.T. employee’s first attempt at it.   A consultant can work with your I.T. employees to manage the project through to satisfaction–completing the project, reducing waste, and improving your I.T. employees.

3. Consulting with a third-party reduces your tax liability. As an expense item, I.T. consulting does not incur the same tax burden as an I.T. employee (payroll tax). There’s no sales or use tax associated with I.T. consulting, either.

4. The number of I.T. staff required to support your technology users has shrunk drastically in the last several years, do to improvements in software stability and a more knowledgeable user base.  If you have a single I.T. employee or a small group, which is doing both end-user helpdesk support AND networking support, it is very likely that a consulting organization can reduce your expense and increase the level of service experienced by your users.

As these two pieces have approached it, you’d think the newspaper, and print media in general, have no merit at all when compared to the web.  But this is arguably not true, and a gross simplification of a more complex problem. Sadly, the people who’ve argued the web allows cheaper, faster, more demographically-appealing news coverage are right. But, because they look at consumer trends alone, they’re wrong about the roots of the problem facing papers today.

That is, the web isn’t killing papers with its competitive advantages. The web is killing papers by beating them over the head with their own cockiness. First, newspapers they’re always the purest, best source for news–and this is sometimes true, but more because of the deep pockets of paper financiers than because newspapers employ English majors and journalism grads. To say you need more than a sense of fairness, a knack for clarity, and a smidge of brevity to succeed in the reporting business is only a partial truth: but the flip-side of this expression, the one that says only nimrods work for online outlets, is false. Newspapers employ good purveyors of the written word, and so do web sites.

But the thing that’s killing newspapers right now isn’t a disparity in newsmaking power: In fact, they can get the news to their web sites as fast, or faster, than the most well-informed blog or Slate.  Actually the real problem in the paper business lies in the dimishing value of print advertising to potential advertisers.  The web has a near-zero production cost when compared to the composing costs of a newspaper. This means advertisers aren’t required to spend as much money on the web to get the same mind share in return, at least in theory.

Furthermore, content management techniques on the web outstrip any current CM thinking in the print periodical industry.  The web is a cheaper, faster output mechanism that doesn’t require QuarkXpress or InDesign labor, doesn’t require expensive inks and press upkeep, and doesn’t impose a diesel bill for distribution. Yet these issues alone don’t undermine the success of the newspaper. Remember, newspapers still think they are all-in better than web sites.  Cockiness is at the heart of the matter.

The web also empowers the news preferences of the consumer, something newspapers have struggled with. Lifestyle nonsense doesn’t matter to the guy who wants the business section and real estate doesn’t matter to the single twenty-one year-old.  The web solves this by putting the end-user in command of his news consumption preferences. Of course, it does so at the expense of the tactile pleasure of handling and reading the news from the printed page. While sentimental, this can’t be over-valued.

That said, it’s easy to pick on papers because of what the’re bad at. But there are still free rags that turn a profit.  And there are still monthlies that turn a profit. I write for several of them. There are also small-market dailies that break even or make a small profit by concentrating on the news that is hyperlocal in nature: high school sports, local arts, and the like.

But if the Times and the small-market news shop alike are going to be in business in 10 years, it’s going to have to be online.  The boomers will start dying and the diminishing value of print advertising will so burden the print industry that the web will be, for some shops, their only option.

Hopefully, my friends in the print industry recognize this long enough before it happens that survival is still an option.  The newspaper industry must first recognize that classified advertising is not the model of the future but of the past.  Paying $40 for something you can do on EBay or Craig’s List isn’t going to work any more.  Moreover, display advertising can continue to work but only if newspapers learn how to subsidize print production costs using the web. This is a difficult proposition at best, since the web itself has no physical production costs to speak of.

Newspapers: here are your keys to survival.  1. Keep it local. 2. Play the web game and learn how commerce works online. Classified advertising is a dying ilk.  3. If print production and daily delivery remain close to profitable, find out who your customers are. If they’re over 50, by and large, it’s time to move online for good.

I hate to say it. I really do.

I mean, do you know anybody who gets hot and bothered about plumbing?

Jeff Pulver, whose own motions to transform his flagship VON expo and publishing operation into a “more than voice” effort seemed to indicate, two years ago, that VoIP has lost its sex appeal.

Is that death? Maybe not, but in this neck of the woods, something is dead when people quit talking about it.  Here in Cleveland, nobody was ever really talking about VoIP, except the partial players like Cisco VARs, and even they had to be careful not to call it “VoIP”.

Interestingly, there’s an obvious correlation between this death and Om Malik’s rant about the pigsty of mediocrity in which the U.S. business world now sits.  This is the best piece Om has EVER written, no question.  And it has almost nothing to do with VoIP technology. Instead, it deals with today’s craptacularly perfect storm of of crummy debt, bad business decisions, over-reaching government and under-achieving American companies.

The mediocrity and “it’s good enough” attitude has been at the heart of VoIP disappearing from the excitement radar.  Early pure-plays didn’t innovate useful services when the window of opportunity was open. Vonage didn’t offer an open soft phone, just as Skype never made a SIP proxy available to their users. Two huge mistakes.  But there’s more.

The cable companies insisted on bundling data, TV, and phone service, and then didn’t differentiate their phone service from that of the existing LECs.  So, not only couldn’t you get dedicated data service and choose your own voice provider, but you also got stuck with substandard phone service to boot.

Equipment makers insisted on asinine licensing structures (are you reading this, Cisco and Avaya?) for the privilege of using their “good enough” solutions, while scrappy, VoIP-only startups were sidelined by the general lack of decent broadband access.

It’s like all the elements of the telecom industry revolution were there–just at the wrong times. Broadband became pervasive, and just as it was getting unbundled (thanks Congress), the competing network operators went belly up, so ASPs and hosted voice providers, having sunk millions and millions into excellent new offerings, had no way to get their services to the masses.

Those that did survive did so because some insider bank gave them a loan to keep the engine running just a little longer, and then a little longer, and then a little longer. And when banker keeps pumping non-revenue dollars into out a cash-losing business, the banker eventually comes for his money. When the banker can’t collect, the treasury secretary buys his debt.  When the treasury secretary loses all his money, he prints more.

Then, suddenly, a gallon of milk costs $20.

That’s mediocrity from start to finish.

10. Darla Mack.  If you’re a Nokia nut, there’s no better destination.  The self-proclaimed “mobile diva”, Darla tries just about everything with her Nokia phones.

9. Rich Tehrani. The brawn and brains of TMC, Rich has been in the industry as long as any of us, and his blog is a great mix of gadget news and insider industry info.

8. Alec Saunders.  Alec’s in the trenches daily as a VoIP visionary (he declared VoIP dead this morning) and application developer, so he’s usually weeks or months ahead of trends.

7. Om Malik and his band of creative cohorts. It’s pretty hard to ignore the guy that breaks just about every telecom industry rumor 24 hours before it turns into news.  Some of his underling’s stories are habitually wacky (obsessed with all this overstated carbon economy BS, for example), but generally,
Om’s is one of the best blogs around.

6. Ken Camp and Sheryl Breuker.  I’ve been in the Ken Camp camp for years now. Now that Sheryl’s on board with Mr. Camp, they’ve begun leading the way in a movement I expect will become the norm in 2009: VoIP people concentrating on social applications instead of VoIP.  That’s my plan anyway, so I’ll be keeping tabs on Ken and Sheryl.

5. Esme Vos.  No longer the lone female in my list (thanks to Darla and Sheryl), Esme is primarily known as a event/expo organizer who concentrates on municipal WiFi, having founded the MuniWireless expos. But she’s got something to say about software, Apple, Nokia, publishing, and a bunch of other stuff I care about.

4. Andy Abramson. A keen observer and predicter, and a new media relations specialist by day, Andy has more contacts than any two other people.

3. Phone Boy.  Dameon “Phone Boy” Welch-Abernathy: the only guy I know with a name longer than my own.  His blogging habit is better than mine, too.   He mainly blogs about gadgets, Nokia stuff, and social networking.

2. Jeff Pulver. Like Camp, Breuker, and others, Pulver is leading the retreat from VoIP charge to social media through video and social web applications.  I love reading Jeff’s blog. He posts a ton of photos and track logs.

1. Martin Geddes.  He doesn’t post often, but it’s always worth the read.  Also, this guy pulls no punches. Just as I aspire never to do, Martin Geddes never sets off the the bullshit detector.

The county seat, and home of the college, is the City of Elyria, and tonight I attended a council meeting during which the 11 council members were deciding whether or not to establish an official I.T. Dept. and increase the number of I.T. staffers from 2 to 7.  Of course, the city is also considering Police and Fire layoffs, so this issue is a natural hot potato.

The vote came up to tonight on Council’s agenda.  So I donned my best charcoal grey suit and purple tie, jotted down five pages of notes assembled from the talks I’ve had with various councilmembers and the city’s two I.T. managers over the last six months, and addressed council in a speech that went 6 minutes over my allotted time.

In my pleading, I wanted to know: where did they come up with 7 staffers as the ideal?

The Mayor responded by telling me, and all present, that the software consultant ACS, a Minneapolis-based firm that specializes in municipal line of business ware, was instrumental in coming up with the 7 number, and so, apparently, was the college. OK.  Free consulting MUST be superior.

The city wants to hire a full-time web developer to work on its 5 web sites–again, while considering laying off public safety officials. The Police Chief was on hand, glock-in-holster, to let Council know that he could cut nothing except people at this point, if asked to shrink his budget.

Haven’t these guys ever heard of WordPress?  It’s pretty hard to justify a $80k guy when you can get a consultant to do a Parks and Rec template on Joomla for a grand or less.  Not that I would take that sort of work.  But here’s where it got fun:  when I dropped the term, “content management”, I could just FEEL the wind getting sucked out of the room. Nobody had the faintest clue what I was talking about.

And then it dawned on me. Municipalities like Elyria have been left behind.  Little midwestern towns have been convinced that I.T. is what it was 30 years ago: expensive, inflexible, and inaccessible to people with more than 5 grey hairs on their heads.

Another local municipality, North Ridgeville, also in Lorain County, which runs its servers on a certain formerly-dominent networking product that now runs only on Linux, just can’t justify putting out the money to go with Windows and Active Directory, despite 95% of the world having moved to Windows Server some years ago.

How in the bloody heck will I ever be able broach the subject of VoIP with these guys?

These organizations are Tech Hostages, made inept and held to zero progress because their decision makers are committees that spend 39 minutes reading identical ordinance description over and over and over with a chairman saying “first reading” after each iteration.  It’s like listening to paint dry.  No, it’s worse.  I’m very much a democracy supporter, but if we can’t get these folks to innovate in the democratic process, how can we expect them to use technology more fervently, more effectively?

That, dear friends, is the job of Ted Wallingford.  Convince the Midwest that, at least when it comes to the silicon part, it’s OK to emulate Silicon Valley.

This is Brown Minutes and the Heartburn Chuckle all wrapped together. But I can tell you why this telecom crash is occuring. Remember, once an industry is scaled to its max, like the telecom industry, the only way to succeed is to generate profit through new innovations. Merely recycling established ideas with different pricing and bundles may be good for short-term cash grabs but has little to do with the sustainability of long-term profit.  Just ask Yahoo. They’re dying because of that axiom right now.

The Manufacturers

Companies like Cisco and Nortel have done too little to move the VoIP revolution beyond the customer’s demarc, while tradeshow talks about SIP trunking and a spirit of cooperation in using the Internet to replace the PSTN have all been hollow talk designed to please the audience of the day.  True, end-to-end VoIP still isn’t reality unless you’re willing to sit in front of your PC and run Skype.   To say Skype carried out the VoIP vision more successfully than Cisco and Nortel ought to be greatly humbing to those companies, but it’s really true.  Skype got it.  Cisco, Nortel, and Avaya didn’t.

The big manufacturers continue to be the only powers with enough leverage to move the carrier giants away from circuit-switched technology, yet the manufacturer’s own uncertainties about recooping licensing fees and retaining customer-base (through lock-in rather than innovation) have scared them away from issuing the carriers a real challenge: build an all-IP global voice network or we will.

The Carriers

The carriers are firms like AT&T, Windstream, Verizon, BT, and so on.  Their obsession with the billing unit (the almighty minute) has made them helpless to see the possibilities of a software-rich, application-based global ecosystem.  Consequently, the most successful apps to arrive on the carriers’ networks, the ones most embraced by the public, overwhelmingly have one purpose: to steal billable minutes from the carriers. The innovation disappeared and the scrappy new players in the market, the ones with the power to transform the public’s thinking about telecom, instead got stuck doing the same old thing the big telecoms do to put bread on the table: bill minutes.

The Government

In the United States, deregulation under President Clinton in the Telecom Act of 1996 went in all the wrong directions and didn’t do enough to create entrepreneurial freedom in telecom. It failed to recognize that the Internet was going to eclipse the PSTN in terms of consumer participation, and as a result, it positioned the carriers to remain in their highly subsidized comfort zone.

Further mistakes were made when the FCC became distracted by lobbying for Network Neutrality legislation. As with many things, the passage of time revealed that Netnoot was a solution in search of a problem, more often than not.  Apparently nobody at the FCC realized that the free market would provide for the needs of consumers who didn’t want to participate in a 93-octane Internet.  So the FCC spent a lot of time looking at issues that were overstated and geared to bolster the chances of a few admittedly excellent Silicon Valley content startups who didn’t want to get choked out by the carriers.

Shame on us for not recognizing that the carriers are too inept to succeed in the content business anyway. And shame on the FCC for wasting all that energy when they should’ve been looking at ways to encourage greater adoption of end-to-end IP technology.

The Conclusion

So, when you have three willing participants in a massacre, you get a massacre.  The three power players in our industry–boxmakers, regulators, and networkers–are playing the same tune.  Protect revenue by doing nothing. The fruits of that labor are now obvious.  Like the automotive industry, which has a frighteningly similar situation on its hands, the answer now is the same as ten years ago: innovation.  Put on those thinking caps, MIT grads and garage tinkerers. We’ve got an even bigger hole to think our way out of now.

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light and sound similarities

Phone Boy has a snappy post up today.  He’s appreciating Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 while simultaneously blasting the same-old-same-old intellectual currents of the blogosphere.  While I’ve never read 451, I do agree with Phone Boy that the amount of original thought coming out of the blogosphere has diminished considerably.  It seems that this has occurred mostly since more people started blogging regularly.  Professional blogs, amateur blogs, good blogs and shitty ones.  From Engadget all the way down to the proverbial full-time mom earning income at home for three bucks a post, the blogosphere, and the Web 2.0 world at large, is filled with increasingly irrelevant voices.

And why are they irrelevant?  Because they’re all saying the same stuff.

At its start, Web 2.0 was uniquely set apart from Web 1.0 because it neither sold the user anything (ie. Amazon 1.0) nor tried to replace an offline product (ie. NYTimes.com 1.0).  No, Web 2.0 was mostly about using the collective of individual user opinion to democratize good ideas, and perhaps even to monetize those good ideas.  Often, those good ideas were just blog posts with fresh philosophy or some tidbit of revelation about technology or science.  Sadly, Web 2.0 moved away from that whole idea, and it’s devolved into a sort of commentary on the technology industry where every author claims to be an industry insider.  I liken it to a guy who plays great poker quitting in order to write about other poker players because it’s easier to write about them than to play against them, ie. easier to write than to THINK.

If the blog aggregators have told us one thing, it’s that we, as self-proclaimed industry insiders, mostly think alike.   Is there a fear of public scrutiny that keeps us from blasting each other on our blogs?  Or is it simply bad form to have a public debate any more?  I don’t seem to have a problem with taking people to task publicly. Maybe that’s because I don’t have a problem being taken to task myself.  In fact, I do it so much that I’ve been called a grump, picky, hypersensitve, overly critical, you name it.

Don’t care.

I appreciate those who adequately express their own isolated opinions, rather than piling on the prevailing dogma of the blogosphere at any given moment, blowing the wind of whatever current Online Weather System is buzzing through.  Honest, concrete expression of unique ideas is what’s missing from these buzz machines.  A prevailing concept blows through the blogosphere and gets just beaten absolutely to death by the Agreement Monster.

Critical thinking goes out the window and you get a chorus of two hundred 22-year-old part-time bloggers saying Cloud Computing is to file servers what file servers were to mainframes, each unaware, at first, that his contemporaries are all reporting the same “news” as gospel. By the time you’re done reading Techmeme’s top post on any given day, you’ve probably consumed 15 posts that agree whole-heartedly, 5 posts that have a keyword match on a tag but are either unrelated or one paragraph in length, and 1 or 2 posts of dissenting opinion.

In questioning the easy-to-hold points of view, I often sacrifice traffic.   And that’s OK, because at least I’m telling the truth.  I don’t usually post about something unless I’m passionate about it, compelled to write about it, because frankly, there are better ways to spend my time–helping clients, helping my kids with their homework, etc.–than writing my umpteenth Thesis of Ultimate Agreement with Blogger X or Blogger Y.   OK, if I agree with you, you’re less likely to hear from me on my blog.

That’s OK, there are thousands of others who agree with you.  And you’ll hear from them.   Because they want the traffic from blogs.com and Techmeme.  But how many times do you really need to read the same opinion?