Category: Technology

The worst board in history ….

I generally avoid editorializing about business. Too many years writing “objectively” about the technology industries has me gun shy about taking an un-reported stand. But since I covered Hewlett Packard closely when I was a tech reporter in the 80s and the company was nearing the pinnacle of its reputation as one of the keystone companies in technology, the news this morning that its board didn’t have the gumption to even interview its latest, and apparently lameduck CEO, Leo Apotheker, feels like the last straw in a decline of Sheenesque proportions and I have to say something.

HP’s former dominance in printers, PCs, workstations, minicomputers, medical diagnostics, even financial calculators was the culmination of a noble heritage that literally started in a modest residential garage when the founders hand built an oscilloscope they sold to Disney for post-production sound work on Snow White. HP was never the hippest company — it wasn’t a place I associate with the bearded sandal wearing characters that made Sun and Silicon Graphics and Apple and Next so colorful — but it was the most solid and mythic, a place that capitalized on smarts and research and innovation and was able, against the laws of Silicon Valley physics, to maintain its edge even as it absorbed companies like Compaq and DEC. While I believe “corporate culture” is an oxymoronic construct, “The HP Way” seems to indeed have been a good thing, one that held the massive organization together for a remarkable record of growth and innovation over five decades.

As the founders retired and faded into the philanthropic background, things became unhinged.  Lew Platt missed the Internet. Carly Fiorina over-acquired. Wire-tapping reporters and board members seemed, at the time, like an aberration (now it doesn’t). Hurd couldn’t keep it in his pants and mortgaged the company’s future by slashing R&D … and now after one remarkably weird year characterized by throwing in the towel over and over, Leo Apotheker — the CEO no one had ever heard of before — is the next to walk the plank.  The question is why was he ever even on the boat? I didn’t even know how to properly pronounce his name until yesterday at lunch when my partner corrected me and put an emphasis on the “e” with an accent (It’s “Lay-O” not “Lee-O”).

So what went well in the last year? Not much. The Palm acquisition yielded an operating system that was a lame darkhorse out of the gate. The company had a great success in tablets — once it discontinued them and slashed the price and alienated the first customers silly enough to pay full price when it launched. And the greatest bumble of all — telling the world that it is considering getting out of the vicious PC business before it had a buyer for that business —  effectively killing, in a single utterance, all corporate/enterprise demand for fleets of its PCs and future demand by whatever greater fool buys the business off of them.

The headhunters and the board that was too divisive and busy to interview its last round of CEO candidates is drawing up yet another short list of possible leaders. Whoever gets tapped, they have a major mess to muck out. The situation as I see it without looking at the balance sheet:

  1. The PC is dead. It has another decade in the corporate world, but game over in PCs. Apple won and tablets are the new form factor. HP made its bid and failed there.
  2. The Wintel standard is irrelevant. Microsoft and Intel no longer call the tune. Operating systems are irrelevant in the cloud. WebOS was nice looking, but too late in the Apple, Android, Windows race.
  3. HP dictates few standards, has no APIs, has no developer community.
  4. Printers. Printers are the last mechanical appendage. Think about it. Once hard disks stopped spinning and went solid state, the last thing with a motor is the printer.  Printers are a means to an end, not a future.
  5. Crisis communications. Beginning with the CNET wiretapping, the Hurd scandal and this summer’s string of can’t-shoot-straight missteps, the once golden credibility of the company is very tarnished and tattered.
  6. Marketing. Once Lenovo snagged David Roman — the marketing rock star that gave HP its awesome “The PC is Personal Again” campaign — the air went out of HP’s creative consumer balloon.
  7. China and emerging markets: no where near as nimble or familiar as Lenovo and Acer.
What would I advise the next CEO?
  1. Revive R&D – the game is about smarts and vision and innovation, not balance sheets. Hurd made the Street happy slashing costs. Any brown-suited execution drone from finance and ops can cut costs. People who invent the future are in tight supply and rather be hanging their hats at Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon.
  2. Get a better board. It sounds like a shit fight in the monkey cage at the zoo inside of HPs board. The CEO needs to stack the deck with allies and advisors, not glory seekers who pull down each other’s pants.
  3. Become the builder and integrator for customers — not a supplier of boxes and cables. It’s a cliche to say services are the future. IBM under Gerstner retreated to services and implementation, divesting themselves of the PC business and other commodity hardware plays like printers. But the demand for a big bad ass builder with a vision, who can quickly and elegantly bring a non-tech global customer into this very weird, very tipping-point-world of clouds and tablets and HTML5 and content anywhere driven by NetGen Millenials is huge. The kernel is there with EDS, but not the panache and glory.

HP needs a larger-than-life personality leading it, someone extroverted and blunt but who is jazzed about the future and loves chaos and the thrill of the new. Things are serious, so a serious shakeup and re-think is called for to get re-hinged. Think Gerstner making the Elephant dance at IBM. Applying a balance sheet mechanic is a mistake. The next leader needs some technology credentials as well as operational ones. If Apotheker’s replacement is a grey-faced MBA in his or her 50s then the company is going to molder and lose even more relevancy. If the next CEO is too young they could easily be overwhelmed by the enormity of the organization. I don’t envy the people running this search — HP is a seriously dented can and apparently, according to the excellent piece by James Stewart in this morning’s New York Times — had a hard time getting candidates to take a look after Hurd’s ignoble departure. I literally can’t think of a single name that would get the job done.

Finding new stuff — then and now

I’m sure Malcolm Gladwell or Forrester Research has some nifty term for that type of person who discovers stuff first. You know who I am talking about; the girl in college who bought the first Talking Heads album while the rest of us were still stuck in a rut of disco or bad rock. The guy who saw The King’s Speech three months before you did. The type of person who moves on from Bikram yoga just as you’re discovering the Down Dog position. Everybody wants to be first, but why are some of us better at living on the leading edge than others?

How do trendspotters find the avant garde before it becomes mainstream? Is it intuitive or is it part of their psyche? Someone more willing to buck the norm and have the courage go out on a limb and tell their skeptical roommates, “Trust me, some day these guys are going to be huge”?

I used to have impeccable music spotting abilities, but was always the weird guy in the dorm, defending stuff like Lou Reed, The Ramones while the rest of the world was stuck on the Stones, Beatles, Allman Bros. etc.. I wasn’t super-gluing my hair into a purple mohawk or acting particularly hip — I just could, and still can, listen to very obscure music and intuitively know what’s going to be cool or not. How did I find it in the first place? By paying attention to college radio, especially late night, by reading the Village Voice, and by flipping through the milk crates of some of my more out-there acquaintances. Someone has to start playing it. My only knack was hearing it once and deciding it was worth hearing again.

Case in point. Late 90s I started listening to lots of electronica/techno because the beat rate syncopated nicely with rowing ergometer workouts. I start buying the Chemical Brothers and my teen children pick up the habit and instantly become cool in their own way. Fiction: I still press a copy of Barry Hannah’s “Geronimo Rex” into anybody’s hands who will listen. I found him in the early 70s out of complete luck and chance. Misses? The horrible Little River Band is one album I was ashamed to own.

One rainy day recently my youngest son wanted to go to a movie. Instead of relying on some direct recommendation from a pal, he just pulls out Rotten Tomatoes and looks at the score. Anything under an 80% he won’t waste his money on. Same goes for video games — he has his bible, Game Informer, and follows their recommendations slavishly. I suppose the only difference between him and me using Rolling Stone in the 1970s is media and nothing else.

My oldest son, the auteur, is a total creature of New York’s East Village, NYU film school, and now West Hollywood. His radar is set at max detection for two things: way way out there art film from the likes of Bela Tarr and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (aka “Joe”) ((stuff that will NEVER go mainstream since no one on earth wants to watch a seven hour epic about the decline of a Hungarian farm collective after the fall of the iron curtain)) and electronica which comes in a dizzying number of subcategories from dubstep to intelligent dance music (IDM) to breakcore. His discovery models are interesting – Last.fm in particular allows him to tag music and discover related stuff tagged by other listeners, and I just need to follow his play list history to discover the same.

He was also a fan of a site called Metacritic — which compiled professional reviews and ranked music, games, TV and movies on a 1-to-1o0 score. Then he gave up after one Scandinavian techno band, The Field, inexplicably dominated the rankings.  The point of Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes is they aggregate professional critics — not amateurs like you and me — and give a modicum of authority to the rankings and recommendations.

The power of recommendation engines is very significant in the Web 2.0/Social media set of features. While a lot of pundits opine that user reviews are the most powerful factor in a purchase decision (I trust her taste, therefore I will buy the same kind of car she drives), I think the “like-this” functionality that was  pioneered by Patti Maes at the MIT Media Lab and led to the ecommerce recommendations on Amazon (“People who bought this also bought this …” is very very influential in helping us discover new opportunities in media. The risk, as some critics have said, is that recommendation engines can put us into a self-referential echo chamber where the old phenomenon of a “Top Story Today” function on a news website continues to drive traffic to the same top headline, which keeps it on top ad infinitum.  How often does a recommendation engine push us to the extreme? Exposing liberals to conservative points of view and vice versa?

The notion of using tags and a “genome” approach to music and art to push the “like-this” function we’ve seen in the last decade to a more random, surprising discovery model is what is making the discovery of new art easier and more rewarding.

Anyway, as I sit here listening to the IDM tagged station on Last.fm I find myself “loving” specific songs by hitting the heart icon. Every time I do so, the algorithm looks for tagged matches and further refines my taste for me, all the while taking me deeper and deeper into the avant garde by the hand.

Music solutions

With my music in the cloud and freed from the tyrannical clutches of iTunes, I next turned to the question of how to make it truly portable, especially how to get it on the boat. I juiced the memory on my HTC EVO smartphone to 32 gb with a miniSD card and find that I’m running either the Amazon Cloud Player when on the household wifi, downloading stuff locally for playback on the phone when I’m in the middle of Nantucket Sound and too far away from the cell towers, or streaming from Last.fm when I’m too lazy to deal with setlists of my own stuff.

When I was a iPod person I had one of those iPod dock things — an expensive Bose thing that required a wall socket. Battery powered portable speakers are generally terrible, but the New York Times recently reviewed a bunch of wireless Bluetooth speakers and I went with David Pogue’s recommendation for the Soundmatters FoxL unit. It’s not cheap — I paid close to $200 on Amazon — but it uses a rechargeable Li-Ion battery and cranks very loud volumes when needed. Oh, and did I say it’s wireless? This means no proprietary slot connector for the iPod/iPhone, just a discoverable Bluetooth connection that I can hit with my Thinkpad, iPad, the wife and kid’s iPhones or my Android EVO. The range is decent, but anything beyond 15 feet gives it some issues.

My favorite application for the unit is to tether it to my iPad while I’m watching Red Sox games when I’m on the road in NYC. I am tired of having ear buds jammed into my ears for hours and love the freedom to prop the iPad up and just watch it like the tiny television it was meant to be.

Three weeks and I am very happy with this portable sound solution. The unit is solid, small, and very easy to set up and use. The sound is excellent. This toy is definitely moving into the category of favorite things. Now to figure out cloud music in the car and life will be complete.

 

 

Nagging irritations of technology

For some reason Microsoft Office 2010 has decided I need to select a “profile” every hour on the hour. I can’t for the life of me figure out how to make it happy and go away forever. Not being an Exchange guy, I know it’s Outlook related, and since I am consulting to Edelman I am on their Exchange web client so I can gain access to their internal mail and directory. I suspect it may be related to Google Calendar sync or something, but I do wish it would go away.

Suggestions so appreciated.

Realtime Interactive Olympics? I Hope So

It would appear that the International Olympic Committee bestirred itself from its antediluvian luddite position on online media and demanded that the bidders for broadcast rights cease the ass-hatted pre-Tivo practice of taping and delaying coverage for prime-time American audiences and make available the athletic events in realtime AND online.

Online was a misery of DMA takedowns during Beijing (which I lived firsthand thanks to the paranoia of the IOC that any manifestation of YouTube video would undercut the value of its crown jewel broadcast rights).

While details are sparse from the New York Times coverage today, the second paragraph of Richard Sandomir’s article stands out: “…Comcast responded with a knockout bid and a promise that it would show every event live, on television or online, a recognition of the immediacy of technology and a drastic reversal of NBC’s policy of taping sports to show them to the largest possible audience in prime time.”

If you’ve ever watched Olympic coverage in Europe on EuroSport you’re accustomed to getting complete coverage of every event,  , no matter how long-tailed, in realtime. Think hours of men skiing with rifles and you get the European viewing experience, versus the usual NBC saccharine around some perky pre-pube gymnast who overcame Demeaning Plebney while ardent fans of the 50 meter air pistol get bupkus and have to scrounge around online in hopes someone, somewhere encoded a feed of their passion.

If the Games make it truly online — and they sort of have to now that the world is 100% obsessed with video the way they want it, when they want it — then London ought to be a delight for longtail sports fans. Let’s just hope NBC gets its online act together in time, doesn’t strike a Devil’s deal with Microsoft Silverlight, and delivers a multiplatform stream (iPad, droid, PC) that kicks ass and finally delivers on the promise of a truly interactive Olympics. If I were at NBC interactive I’d be on the phone to the MLB.com guys and looking for some technical ninja help.

The online rights and pay-per-view revenue should, in theory, kick the stuffing out of the old broadcast rights that typified the Dick Ebersol era when there were three networks, no Tivo, and no Interweb. My fingers are crossed.

Ad supported devices or ad supported connectivity?

Amazon’s brilliant decision to knock some cost off of the top of its Kindle by selling an ad-enabled “special offer” version for $25 less than a regular “ad-free” model is a good indication of where things are headed in the consumer electronic space — but not necessarily the best business model. That, I believe, lies in the original Kindle’s provision of free wireless connectivity through the Whispernet service, a necessity to enable the seamless delivery of books from Amazon’s catalogue: easing the sale of the proverbial razor blades onto Amazon’s “razor.”

There are now two hardware subsidy models available to consumers.  The first is the classic mobile/wireless carrier subsidy.  Sign up for two years with AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, etc. and get about half of the price knocked off your new iPhone, Droid, netbook, or Android tablet.   Device makers depend on this carrier subsidy to get the high cost of their device’s bill of materials absorbed and hidden from the consumer. Take a $500 device and use carrier subsidies to drop the price the consumer sees to $200. Not bad and smart business given the average consumer has no clue how to calculate the true cost of the device over the course of the two-year enslavement to the carrier for basically the right to connect to their network. According to Notesbooks.com, an iPhone 4 costs $1,674 over the course of a two year AT&T contract.

Amazon’s brilliance lies not only in its decision to enable a wireless connection to the Kindle with no carrier relationship (Whispernet consists of a lot of cheap Sprint 3G EVDO capacity) — who wants to sign their life away for a two-year handcuffing to a device you know you’ll want to upgrade in at least 18 months? — but now in its insight that the platform is an awesome way to deliver advertising. Given that Amazon is Google’s top customer of paid search, it makes eminent sense for the ecommerce giant to leverage its own delivery platform for its own ads.

It’s surprising Google isn’t all over advertising subsidized wireless connectivity. Afterall, this is the company that pledged to cover San Francisco with free WiFi a few years back, the company that gave travelers free airport WiFi a couple Christmases ago.  If Google, or any hardware company were to bulk purchase network capacity and enable their devices as “start-and-connect” capable, with no carrier contract, the impact on consumers would be huge. So what if I get a little advertising intrusion in my browsing experience. Sparing me the ordeal of signing that $40 monthly minimum with the carrier would be worth every irritation.

This will mean the utter defeat of the carrier’s efforts to keep themselves from becoming dumb pipes. But when you think about it, what value are they delivering beyond their connections? White-label the connections, subsidize the link through ads, and be done with them. And the resulting explosion in connect-anywhere-anytime devices will be more than significant in terms of consumer effects. If I were Google I’d be pushing Chrome netbooks with ad supported connections in a very big way. I pushed for this in a previous life while working on business development for a smartbook, citing the Whispernet model as the way to go, but I guess I was ahead of my time. Amazon gave me some satisfaction that I was right with their “special offer” model.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tablets in the workplace: not so fast

I sucked it up this week and hit the road with only my iPad, leaving the four-pound ThinkPad (T410s) on my desk for the first time. I resolved to be productive using my HTC EVO as a 4G (Sprint/Clear) hotspot and work out of the cloud via Google Docs and Gmail. The cloud part is easy – I’ve been there for two years. The hardware failed.

So I’d grade the experiment a C –

What worked:

  • My briefcase was lighter and I didn’t have the usual worries about cracking a screen. Lighter is good as years of backpacking and shoulder strapping a laptop around has trashed my right shoulder.
  • I generally had decent access to my files
  • The Sprint/Clear 4G is decent as long as I’m in a major airport or urban center
  • It was much easier to roam around an office with an iPad, with instant on and off and constant connectivity as long as the phone was in my pocket

What failed:

  • The iPad is horrible for typing — on screen keyboards are an ergonomic disaster. I was tempted — for a few minutes — to seek out a local Apple Store and invest in an external $69 keyboard, but thought  better of it.
  • Note taking on an iPad is a miserable experience and I suspect one looks like a douchebag when one tries to. See Mark Cahill’s comment regarding a wave of iPads in meetings that have reverted to good old laptops.
  • Google Docs are barely usable on an iPad (see previous post on why my next tablet will be Android-based). The Google app for iPad presents a mobile, stripped down version, with none of the essential tools such as the ability to download documents to the device and then send them as attachments via Gmail, or share them through the usual Google Docs collaboration capabilities
  • I was able to “free” docs and share them by resorting to the QuickOffice Connect Mobile Suite, using that to access Google Docs, and then mailing stuff to people from within QuickOffice. It felt very kludgey.

Bottom line: I’m going to buy a ThinkPad X120e for $500 and go ultraportable. The first ThinkPad “netbook” — the X100 — was terribly under powered with some weak AMD Atom-like wannabe processor knock-off. I’m banking (need to check the reviews) that the processor refresh in the newly introduced X120e will make it a half-way decent cloud PC for road work. I’ll park the T410s on the home office desk, continue to love its classic ThinkPad keyboard, but use the X120e as my grab-and-go and save a pound of weight in the bag. Yes, I am tempted to go with a new MacAir — but the price tag stinks at $999 for 64 gb and I am not ready to completely bail out to the goofy but-oh-so-chic world of the Apple OS.

The Gilded Cage: Why My Next Tablet Won’t Be an iPad

I love my iPad, truly I do.

But this is my last one.

Other than a few iPods over the years, it’s been my first true Apple product — at least one I purchased and wasn’t handed to evaluate — and the experience has been nothing short of excellent since I lucked into one late last April at an Apple store in North Carolina. The anticipation leading up to the launch of the iPad made it a foregone event — at least within the walls of Lenovo — but no one anticipated the excellent responsiveness, elegant user interface, and impeccable integration with iTunes and the iTunes app store. The product was far more than an upsized version of the iPhone, and came as a sharp rebuke to the stylus-based tablet computing model pushed by the PC makers and Microsoft.

Nearly a year later I spend as many hours with the iPad as I do with my classic laptop. I’m purchasing and reading an average of three Amazon Kindle books per week on it, do nearly all of my television/movie consumption through the Netflix app, and use a mixture of browser, Google Earth, and other reference tools as I read and research various non-fiction topics. I hate typing on it

In short, I’m a satisfied customer and am glad I winced and bought the $500 device when I did. I think it represents the most significant shift in computing devices in over twenty years, and has shown a way forward for a completely new model of information/entertainment delivery and consumption.

Now with the next version allegedly already in manufacturing, I  can also say this iPad is probably my last Apple tablet. My next one will most likely be an Android Honeycomb version, not purchased with a 3G/4G contract from a carrier, but most likely a WiFi enabled device.

I shared a table on the Acela to NYC this week with Forrester’s tablet analyst, Sara Rotman Epps. Like any good analyst she took the time to survey me, the average man on the train, on my purchase intentions. I told her — this time next year I’ll probably spend as much as $350 for an Android tablet and expected it would be much lower in build quality than an Apple — plastic instead of brushed aluminum. The real question is what, other than god forbid breakage or loss, will induce me to move to a new tablet. Camera? I don’t think so. Video calling is the most overhyped technology since speech to text recognition.

Why will I leave Apple?

In order of importance:

  1. Monopoly: I’m alarmed by Apple’s monopolistic moves towards publishers — and book sellers — that essentially forces them to sell content — books, movies, magazine subscriptions, through Apple’s commerce infrastructure. This tollbooth will jack content prices up, with the impact inevitably being handed down to me, the buyer. I am sick and tired of Apple’s proprietary/walled garden approach to their platform from the lack of Flash support to sticking guns into the sides of the third parties that have coalesced around the platform to make it so successful.
  2. Google integration. I am a Google person. From Gmail to Google Docs, Google Voice to Google Earth, Chrome to ….. the Google mobile app on the iPad is weak. I am also an Android phone owner, so I want better sync capabilities between devices. Google’s stuff works ok on the iPad, but not great.
  3. Cost: I want to pay way less than $500 for basically half of a laptop. I hated netbooks although I inflicted one on my daughter, but regard the $250-$350 price point to be just right for the form factor. Sure, my next tablet will be made out of cheesy plastic, but slide it into a nice cover/case and who cares? It’s all about the screen and the processor.

Is it time to cut the cable on TV?

There has been much buzz building over the past year about moving television away from a satellite/cable delivery model to an IP solution where the viewer pulls down programming from a pay-as-you-go or all-you-can-eat store such as iTunes or Netflix.  Pushing the DVR out of the rack and replacing it with an IP delivery solution such as AppleTV, Google TV, Roku, or even an XBox requires a leap of faith I suspect many won’t take for another few years. But confront a monthly DirectTV bill approaching $200, do some math on one’s digital content expenses (fodder for a future post) and the economics of moving to a new model is compelling except for a couple big stumbling blocks.

First off, as the insightful interactive TV blogger Uncle Fester pointed out recently, while the world is moving to a time-shifted model where programming is recorded and then viewed at one’s convenience, sports will remain a real-time event and as such — given the expensive scale of the broadcast rights — is not likely soon to migrate from Fox or ESPN to MLB.com or a sports-specific streaming provider.

Second is the spotty distribution of high bandwidth to the home — America’s shameful data networks continue to lag other countries (Korea for example) — and without a dependable high speed connection IPTV fails for the masses.

Uncle Fester provided me with a first generation AppleTV unit a couple years ago and it sort of languished in the closet — being connected and pressed into service on a couple of occasions, especially by my offspring who are far more comfortable with consuming their shows on a PC. For them it is fairly natural to decide to watch something then go find it on iTunes or Hulu or even YouTube.  That first generation AppleTV was a challenge to embrace because of the meager DSL rates I was experiencing on Cape Cod (350 to 400 kbits per second) and because my home network was primarily Windows XP machines with an unstable iTunes machine because of my need to switch PCs every few months in my former role at a PC company.

This all changed last week when I killed off Verizon DSL and replaced with with a much speedier Comcast connection and then ordered the second generation AppleTV device — for a mere $99 — and plugged it’s very straightforward HDMI out into the flat panel over the fireplace. Two things drove me to the new device — first was AirPlay, the ability to push video from an iPhone or iPad onto the television with amazing ease, and second was the integration of Netflix.  At this point I’d declare that AppleTV is providing at least half of the content consumed, especially spur of the moment video on demand via iTunes, or “channel surfing” through Netflix’s instant offerings.

The ability to stream movies stored on my ThinkPad into the unit and onto the screen via the home Wifi and the Home Share capability in iTunes is more than convenient and holds big possibilities for sharing home digital video, etc. Installing Apple’s remote control app on my iPad makes text entry into search boxes a hundred times easier than moving a cursor around with the AppleTV’s little remote (itself a nice example of Apple design engineering). All in all, I can’t recommend the new AppleTV highly enough.

For more on the cord-cutting phenomenon I recommend the New York Times‘ series on the topic.