Poppycock.  Listen, the judge is wrong.  And even if 90% of the world agreed, what American official is going to get caught with blood on his hands for extradition?  Let’s stop worrying about how we’re all going to have to behave different in this Orwellian digital future and just suffice to say the guy’s an uninformed moron who made a mistake.

This is all much ado about nothing. Can somebody back me up?

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.

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.

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.

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.

So how is it that you come to be the best at something that isn’t your core business, just so you core business can flourish?   Well, you avoid the pattern exhibited by Microsoft–cut into as many markets as possible while clutching onto second-rate products (Live Search) and outmoded business models (XBox Live).  Ultimately this will mean that Apple’s failures over the years–their poor product offerings like .Mac–were things that they wisely dumped instead of clinging stubbornly onto like Redmond always seems to do.

Apple recognizes that–when THEY put out a crap service like .Mac–they have to cut their losses. Hence no more .Mac.  Ultimately, the same will be true of Mobile Me, when Google and its ilk replace every feature of Mobile Me with something better. And then, Apple will likely dump Mobile Me rather than try to compete in an area where they aren’t wanted and can’t do better.

This is why Apple won’t embrace Live Search. If they’re willing to cut their own failed initiatives and recognize that somebody else can do something better (Google Sync, anyone?), then why in the world would they embrace Live Search.

Snow Leopard or not, I don’t expect a Microsoft/Apple search alliance.

Now that Gmail has bested the Outlooks of the world, it’s a good time to assess the state of desktop software. There are some things that work better on your computer (your music app, your photo editor, your spreadsheets), and there are some that work better online (everything else).

Everything else is better online?  You mean like iMovie, or podcast production, or something secretive, or multitrack recording?   See, cloud humpers like this guy from Slate only look at software from the vantage point of office productivity–and EVEN THERE, the rationale of the Cloud’s superiority is overstated. The Cloud offers no tightly-integrated, productivity-boosting desktop environment, after all. Drag and drop? Nope. Personalized formats and preferences?  Not so much. And what about CONTROL?

Over the last few years, we’ve seen many programs shifting from the first category to the second—now you can get spreadsheets and photo editors online, though they’re still not as good as programs hosted on your computer. But e-mail has crossed the line completely. Hosted services like Gmail are now the most powerful and convenient way to grapple with a daily onslaught of mail. If you’re still tied to a desktop app—whether Outlook, the Mac’s Mail program, or anything else that sees your local hard drive, rather than a Web server, as its brain—then you’re doing it wrong.

Oh, really?   Never mind the fact that most people who choose Outlook or Entourage do so because of the benefits of Microsoft Exchange.  Not to mention the fact that it simply may not be a good idea  for Google to be the “world’s hard drive”.   Limited contigous storage is one drawback of the Google Apps / Cloud approach.  So is privacy.

Please, talk about the net-based apps with all of their qualities, pro and con, instead of all this mindless babble about how Google killed Outlook…   Come on people, think critically!

To coincide with T-Mobile’s announcement earlier this week of the availability of the G1 mobile phone in March 2009, a German version of Truphone Anywhere for Android is available and will be the first native language multi-communications application in the Android Market in Germany and Austria when it launches at CeBIT 2009.

As well as being able to make low-cost international voice calls, Truphone customers can also easily instant-message their friends across a variety of networks including MSN, Yahoo!, Google Talk and Twitter from within one Android application. Customers can also call friends anywhere in the world on Google Talk for the price of a local call, and similarly will soon will be able to instant-message and call their friends on Skype.

Truphone is also available on the Apple iPhone, the Apple iPod touch, Blackberry and Nokia devices.

The wording of the announcement is tantamount to admitting defeat on Vista:

Over the past few years, you’ve asked us to make some changes to Windows. We listened closely. Now it’s time to share an early look at how we’ve used your feedback. Windows 7 is faster, more reliable, and makes it easier to do what you want.

We sent out our company newsletter today. Katie, my CRM manager, wrote a piece about Windows 7.  I don’t know why this release has so much buzz. Maybe it’s because Microsoft has returned to sane version numbering.  Or maybe it’s because they’ve kind of become the underdog, what with Google and Apple trundling all over what’s left of their Windows XP ego.

In any event, I’m actually looking forward to Windows 7 beta tomorrow. See you in the download queue.

similarities between light and sound

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pc magazine

recording an orchestra

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light and sound similarities

Right off the bat, the similarities in mechanics to Second Life are greater than the differences.  Of course, Sony’s graphics are superior, with the virtual world having less jaggies and pixelation than Second Life.  As far as I can tell, you can’t create or craft virtual items in Home the way you can in Second Life, but that could change as this is merely a beta.  Item creation inevitably leads to virtual perversion, so time will tell.  Remember that Second Life “rape” case?

My girlfriend hooked up a USB keyboard, which worked as expected. The chat interface, without a keyboard, is the same on-screen keyboard seen in many PS3 titles, and is too frustrating to bother with.  If chat is your thing, a USB keyboard (we borrowed one from our iMac) is a must.

We created two characters to try out. One that looks like me-skinny, pale and white–and one that looks like her–skinny, pale, white, and cute.  It is remarkably easier to get your avatar to look more like your real-life self that it is with, say, a Mii on Nintendo’s Mii Channel.  Of course, Miis are supposed to be caricatures, and I don’t suspect Nintendo has a Wii social network up their sleeves.

Walking into Home’s first main area, a town square, the female avatar was immediately inundated with chat requests and “really close” dancing by the other (male) beta testers. There were hundreds of male avatars running around, but I only counted three females including my girlfriend.  So, not exactly chick-friendly.  I’m guessing that the PS3 and XBox have far fewer female users than the Wii, since the dominant offerings for the Sony and Microsoft systems are shooters, Madden, and racing games.

There are some neat things in Home, despite its freshman appearance.  Though the stores in Home’s virtual shopping mall were “unavailable”, there was a giant-screen in the town square running a game trailer for Far Cry 2–a shooter, imagine that.  Also, there is a rather cool bowling alley where you can play arcade games that look like old-school standup machines. Pool tables (like the one shown at right) and bowling lanes provide real value-add gaming experiences, so that’s cool.   A poker room would be even cooler, but Sony apparently hasn’t licensed a fast-enough hand evaluator to get poker running in the beta.

Some of the participants were chatting about a version of Home for the PSP, but it boggles the mind. Why anybody would walk around a virtual world on a 3-inch screen when they can just walk around the real world is beyond me.  In a way, the same argument exists for the full-on PS3 version of Home. I guess it’s the same issue I’ve had with all these virtual world chat / emote / fantasy environments like World of Warcraft and Second Life. Perhaps that’s why Google canned their virtual world project. Somebody at Google must’ve had the bright idea — hey, what’s so bad about wandering around the REAL world, anyway?

It seems that there are a lot of unfinished ideas in Home: entrypoints into other games, participant contests, and so on.  The things that do work (which surprised me) are buddy call (where you can call buddies from your list like a telephone), open-area voice chat, and the virtual games.  Everything else more or less reminds be of stuff we’ve already seen a thousand times, whether it be Sims Online or the Mii Channel. Here’s hoping Sony can crack this nut.  They’ve made it useable.  Now it’s time to make it USEFUL.

Another example — I was reading an online novel, a blog novel.  On the sidebar was an AdSense block, and my eyes gravitated towards the AdSense before I finished reading the first chapter.  The advertisement was for a woodburning fireplace. OK, I thought, there’s got to be a fireplace somewhere in this chapter.  Sure enough, I got the end of the chapter, and there was a brief scene with a fireplace.

It dawned on me that the author’s click-through rate on this chapter is probably quite low, since woodburning fireplaces may not appeal to his readers as much as, say, BOOKS.  And being that it was a fantasy novel, perhaps his click-throughs would’ve been better with ads for fantasy artwork, figurings, or some such.

Google would do well to improve AdSense by allowing webmasters to indicate which keywords correspond to the products or services they’d like to see advertised on their sites.

That is–NBC, Disney, and the traditional TV gang are concerned that localized use of these relatively low frequency channels will impeded delivery of television service.  To which I’ll say this.  Most folks who consume a lot of TV (me not included) already receive television delivery through cable, fiber, or satellite schemes, making interference a non-issue.  The remainder tend to be people who don’t watch a lot of TV or people who are of little interest to advertisers.

So the question is: what are the TV people so upset about? Control.

Their industry is vanishing under sands blown by the winds of change.   Consumers’ awareness of user-centricity has pushed the debate over good access technologies into the spotlight, and the stubbornness of local telcos and cable operators to deliver on the promise of post-broadband Internet services has forced the hand of those who benefit most from a heavily utilized Internet infrastructure: Microsoft, Google, and the like.

Not surprising. And definitely a welcome move from my point of view.

It will be interesting to see how the spectrum ends up getting used.  What devices will facilitate the use of these channels?  Will we see new kinds of access points, or will local service operators finally be able to deliver good wireless last mile access along with their other services? Imagine post-broadband speed from your satellite operator or even your local television broadcaster.  This opens up a lot of possibilities.

Or is Cloud Computing the latest in a series of niche technology paradigms that is receiving much broader credit and faith than it is due?

Time will be the ultimate judge, of course. Will the Cloud end up a buzzterm that in retrospect seems silly to have given so much due, joining previous dead buzzterms like “push content” and “webcasting”?

It seems to me that the Cloud’s best role is that of a shared infrastructure, where teaming creates economies of scale for data manipulation, high-intensity calculation (like rendering, indexing, and DSP), file sharing, content management, and other multi-node or multi-user tasks.

But why is the trumpet sounding so loudly on behalf of using the Cloud to host productivity applications? Who really wants to give up the comforts of desktop apps for the “greener” pastures of the Cloud?   Microsoft Office may be moving online, but does it really matter whether my launchpoint for the software is my local drive or a web server?  It’s not like I’m running out of hard disk space.  Moreover, there are many frustrating nuances to using productivity apps through the web.  Native drag and drop is missing.  Font management is effectively missing.  And what about bandwidth?   Ever try to embed a 300 DPI 11×17 RAW into a two-page spread using the Cloud?  Drink a cup of coffee, nom a doughnut, and it *might* be done by the time you’re finished with your snack.

Oh, and what if your Internet connectivity goes down.  Eh, sorry, there goes your document.  And, oh, by the way, you can’t relaunch the office suite until your Internet connectivity comes back up.  Just yesterday I had a Salesforce.com-using client asking me how to get web reports from Salesforce.com without Internet access. She was offline.  I told her to go find a WiFi hotspot. See what I mean?

We love things because they’re new and bold, and perhaps not because they warrant our adoration. Cloud Computing is just such a concept.  Not saying there isn’t a noble purpose for it, but farming processing tasks to the cloud is smart because it doesn’t slow the user down, doesn’t require an online-all-the-time user state, and doesn’t require desktop OE interoperability the way user-facing apps do.  That’s why I’ve never been a real big fan of Zoho or the Google apps, and why I’m unlikely to become a Cloud-based MS Office user.

I actually agree with Microsoft’s hesitation on this one. Sure, their arrival to the Cloud party is late, but look at what is being celebrated at this bash: something most people A) don’t need B) can’t use regularly and C) will actually experience better results by avoiding.

Google’s Gears technology seeks to bridge the gap between web-service-based apps (last year’s word for “the Cloud”).  Hardware-centricity still matters, because ultimately it’s hardware features that sell people into the Cloud to begin with.  So if web computing is the end-all-be-all of desktop apps, things like Gears are going to start coming from Microsoft.  If not, Microsoft will have saved a ton of R&D money.

Gadgets are sexy, and they are the face of the global network.  Imagine buying a suit from a store where all the sales reps are ugly, slow, and occassionally take a very lengthy lunch break during the middle of your measurements.  You wouldn’t come back to that store.   That’s why high end clothiers have well-dressed, well-groomed, attentive salespeople.  They’re on when you’re on, they help you at all times, and they look good.

The Cloud can’t possibly provide the same level of service when it comes to desktop apps.  Not today, not tomorrow. Probably not next year.  So I’ll keep buying my suits at decent stores and I’ll keep my productivity apps where they work best for me–my desktop.

The trick to understanding Google’s publicity lag for GC is the core technology they use: VoIP.  This technology family has not fully matured, and isn’t likely to be pervasive until somebody, Google, really figures out how to get the final frontier of datacomm applications–realtime media–OFF of traditional transmission mechanisms and ONTO the web. Up until now, VoIP and telephony have remained largely excluded from the Google party, relegated to a climate of inaction where business dictates the preservation of legacy, circuit-switched networks. End-to-end VoIP hasn’t materialized yet, so the penetration of services like Grand Central into mainstream culture has been low. That’s got folks wondering why Google is apparently just sitting on what we in the industry consider to be a gold mine.

So why hasn’t Grant Central become the showpiece many of us expected?  I think I have the answer: the industry isn’t ready.

The opportunity for Google to capitalize on Grand Central might still be ahead of us, not behind us. Grand Central’s core technology is VoIP call-switching.  Software is used to automate this core technology and create a very simple, very useful palette of telephony tools, mostly for directing incoming phone calls to cellphones and SIP agents such as Gizmo Project.

I see Grand Central mashing up with services like searchable voicemail, language translation, Fonolo, which dials phone menus to save time, and things like SwitchVox and Fonality, which provide SIP-based telephony at the desktop.  To Googlize voice, the notions of search and user-preference-driven intuition  have to enter the equation, and Grand Central gives Google a means to this end.  But, I say again, the industry may not be ready.

In the background, Google is doing what it can to ready the industry–making access to the network more ubiquitous, fighting regulation of currently open access mechanisms (primarily radio spectrum), and readying a path to open converged platforms via its Android mobile operating system.  All the while, Google has avoided the nasty temptation to cozy up to the big phone companies, because of their affinity for the status quo.

A little success on each of these fronts could create the perfect storm for GC, just as the desire for cheap advertising and darn good searchability created the perfect storm for Google during Bubble 1.0.