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.

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

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.

RouteBuddy

TomTom Home

MacGPSPro

Garmin RoadTrip / Nuvi 880

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!

I saw Luca’s tweet about EventBox, and he’s absolutely right.  This program is super cool.  It’s for managing tweets, rss updates, facebook updates, etc etc all in one place.  So far I’m loving it. Growl notifications for updates, heads-up display.  Really cool.  Grab a copy yourself if you’re running OS X 10.5 and let me know how you like it.

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.

But, while the YouTube experience on the iPhone is pretty cool, Joost offers one thing YouTube doesn’t: commercial content. So I installed Joost from the Appstore this morning. My expectation that it wouldn’t work on 3G was confirmed as soon as I fired it up. A quick trip to the Settings panel and my WiFi was re-enabled.

Within moments, I was watching Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in a 4-inch-screen version of Men in Black. It took about 20 seconds for the film to begin streaming. The quality was great and there were no burps during playback.