All Things

I’m a longtime Mac user (still have 2 original 128K Macs), and I stuck with Apple even thru the dark ages of the 1990s. But iCloud is the first thing that’s made me seriously think about dumping Apple in a long time. Developers are starting to revolt, too.

It’s not just a technical problem, it’s the combination of Apple’s lack of transparency and their whole philosophy about not treating your data like it’s sacrosanct. Sure, they’ll be careful, but come on, no system is perfect. That’s why we have backups. But by turning backups into some sort of black box only THEY control, Apple basically has turned itself into God.

It was bad enough when they started iOS and users had to dig around forums and such just to find where their iOS data was being stored on their Macs, so they could make sure it was included in backups. But now that I foolishly turned on iCloud (it’s not all clear how momentous a change that is), it would take a major effort on my part to figure out how to turn it off without losing anything, and I suspect it will be automatically turned on before long anyway.

And it’s so SO terribly SLOW. That’s the kiss of death in the computer biz. Don’t they remember anything from the early Mac vs. PC battles? Now they’re in a similar battle with iOS vs. Android and are making many of the same mistakes.

One of the genius moves in development of the original Palm Pilot was working hard to keep tap counts to a minimum. I loved how I could press a button on my PDA, go immediately to the app (still in its last-open state) and quickly add a note, appointment or contact. On iOS, I first have to swipe, then enter my 4-digit code (a necessary evil, at least till iOS gets something like fingerprint recognition), then press the app button, wait for it to open, and then when I finally get going, there’s usually several more screens and taps than really needed.

Well, that was BEFORE iCloud. Now the biggest wait of all is when I’m finally ready to go. I honestly get concerned I’m going to forget what I wanted to write down sometimes!! It’s making me hate iOS, sadly. I can’t imagine all this on my iMac, too, with even more important data.

Apple doesn’t know their own limitations which, sadly, is usually an early sign of a company headed downhill. They’re good, much of the time they’re really good, but no one’s perfect. Apple really doesn’t have a very good track record with cloud services. MobileMe was reportedly far worse, but at least had a less draconian architecture than iCloud.

Criticism of iCloud isn’t an attack from the outside, even Apple’s biggest defenders admit it’s a mess. I just hope this time, Apple will be a mature enough company to listen to its users and developers and give us choices and more transparency, soon.

Obviously the U.S. healthcare system is very broken. It’s simply not helping doctors to do their job, instead it’s creating lots of busywork that gets in the way. This interview once again highlights how doctors are working harder for probably less money, yet costs have kept skyrocketing. This sure sounds like failed management.

Former Senate Majority Leader Frist’s family is very wealthy, they started Hospital Corporation of America, and he himself is an MD, so it’s interesting to see him interview ‘his’ doctor. But I’m not sure how to reconcile his doctor’s comments with some of those trying to reform medicine.

Earlier this week, I spent an hour or so retweeting highlights from the Health Innovation Summit (HISUM) conference in San Francisco, where Silicon Valley folks like Intel’s Andy Grove (now suffering from Parkinson’s) discussed ways to innovate in healthcare. They kept emphasizing the importance of data, and how you’d have to work your way in from the outside. Major structural change of the system seems really difficult.

Anyway, some years back I would have said that education reform was our #1 national priority, and healthcare was 2nd. But now I think healthcare has become the top priority. We’re seeing all kinds of wonderful innovation in education, but the healthcare system is just as broken, just as demanding of continually more resources, yet so far resisting innovation. I guess the VA is something of an exception (I gotta admit, the first time I read that the VA had become a bright spot in medicine, I nearly fell out of my chair).

The tablet market is growing and changing faster than any I can ever remember. Almost every *day* there’s an important announcement. The change seems way faster than PCs in the 1970s-80s, for sure. Is there something more going on than just the introduction of another computing device?

I’m beginning to think so. Steve Jobs apparently thought so, too, reportedly calling Apple’s iPad the most important thing he ever did. Obviously, it’s way to soon to guess how that will play out, but maybe we can learn something from history.

A Historical Pattern

If you look way back in time, let’s say about 4,000 years ago, you’ll find another tablet, one made of soft clay, written on with a stylus. We still have tens of thousands of these tablets (as well as cylinders, etc.) that were dried and became permanent records. It was a standard technology for a long time, along with the various cuneiform scripts that could be written on them.

Perhaps nearly as old an invention, but slower to gain widespread use, were scrolls made of papyrus developed in Egypt, and parchment, or dried animal skin, more commonly used elsewhere. These were a standard technology of the first millennium B.C. - starting, perhaps, 3,000 years ago.

Then about the first century A.D., a book form of paper or parchment known as the codex came into widespread use, its popularity spurred by the growth of Christianity during the same time. Another major leap forward, about 2,000 years ago.

Considered in light of this historical pattern, one can’t help thinking that Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable-type printing press, about 1450, was late in coming. Why didn’t this invention occur earlier, perhaps in some other place noted for its printing or learning, such as Japan or Baghdad?

Well, apparently it did - ironically about 1041 in China, origin of so many inventions, by a printer named Bi Sheng. But the technology didn’t catch on until Gutenberg’s improvements four centuries later. What an incredible lost opportunity - and maybe a lesson to all of us today that we shouldn’t accept the recurrently-popular notion that everything has already been invented!

The True (?) Significance of Tablets

So the thought that keeps occurring to me is that tablets aren’t just a new computing device. Rather,

Tablets are the latest leap forward in a long-running trend of innovations that occur about once a millennium. They are the new paper, re-invented once again.

Now I know others have said things like this. There’s so many computing inventions nowadays that really are, in many ways, profound. I even used to have a book from Microsoft declaring CD-ROMs to be ‘the new papyrus’. But consider these claims anew in light of this long-running historical trend. And there’s something else unique about tablets, something we didn’t see with other technologies, and certainly not with CD-ROMs:

Tablets - especially the iPad, but not only the iPad - are selling like crazy. Even by computer industry standards, the adoption rate of this new technology has been phenomenal: among consumers, business and students. Sales of the iPad have made it the fastest-adopted new consumer electronics device in history, surpassing the DVD player.

At lower price points than the iPad, Amazon’s Kindle has also been a strong seller for several years, and even Barnes & Noble’s Nook and newer Nook Color have done surprisingly well.

Competing in the Tablet Market

Because Apple has such a lead with the iPad, which is selling at huge volumes for a new device, the price to stay in this game has gone way up. Amazon has obviously just placed its huge bet on tablets, pricing the new Kindle Fire at $199, quite possibly below cost.

To compete, makers will have to produce huge volumes to get unit prices down enough to reach competitive price points, and likely be willing to take losses on these huge volumes for an extended period. It’s easy to see how many companies may be second-guessing staying in the market, and for many an exit, or better yet a collaboration, will indeed be the right move.

But for the really big players in information technology and publishing, can they afford to view tablets as a niche market, or merely an extension of print?

Is paper a niche product?

Amazon seems to have come to this realization recently, as they now have rushed their first color tablet to market, and are widely believed well along in development of a more advanced unit. They simply could not be left dependent on Apple’s tablet, and Apple’s sales fees for books sold on it. Is this situation any more tenable for other big booksellers and publishers? Barnes & Noble’s main retail competitor, Borders, has now disappeared, having lacked its own website and tablet that B&N has.

The Need for a Tablet Strategy

In light of all this, and considering they had the well-regarded WebOS, it’s hard to understand how a company like Hewlett-Packard could just give up on tablets - if they have. Could you imagine an office machines company of the past, like NCR, IBM or Xerox whose machines didn’t handle paper? It was the standard medium of the time. They didn’t have to own paper mills, but they had to have enough control of the medium to be able to get it to do what they wanted.

So how far into the tablet market does a large computer or publishing company need to be? How much control of this new medium is necessary in order to stay relevant? Those are questions impossible to answer clearly at this point, but IBM sure wouldn’t have gotten far if its Social Security check writing machines had to pay 30% of every check to a competitor.

I can’t help wondering if HP’s decision to exit tablets and WebOS, along with the PCs that could also run it, will be reversed. Already HP’s CEO has been dismissed, and an extra production run of TouchPads ordered.

It’s going to be fascinating to watch the tablet market over the next few months. Barnes and Noble will likely make the next move, and then Apple is rumored to be preparing to introduce an iPad 3 early next year. In the mean time, a dozen or more also-ran Android tablets, as well as Blackberry’s Playbook and many others will be vying for life this Christmas season. I’m sure quite a few won’t be around a year from now, or else be acquired, possibly by non-computer companies determined to have some control over their future.

Have we seen the last major entrants by now? Who knows? Microsoft’s and Google’s plans still seem fuzzy, but in any case we can be sure the bar will continue to be raised at a fast clip.

I hope it’s clear that any major tech, publishing or other media company without a tablet strategy is playing with fire, of the old-tech sort. It will be interesting to see if HP does dive back in, making the major commitment needed to stay in this market. Are there intellectual property obstacles in their path? In any event, Jeff Bezos has placed his bet, and Barnes & Noble has received a $204 million capital infusion from Liberty Media that should finance further Nook development.

Unlike a lot of contenders, HP has a real long-term chance of winning a fair share of the tablet market, and even leveraging WebOS to move further into phones with the Palm Pre line, and to plot an escape from Windows on the desktop. I’m sure there’s many reasons not to take the leap, but on the other hand, who can afford to say no to a once in a millennium opportunity?

This is what keeps me from E-readers:

Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins

I take extensive notes on the books I read, which is why I generally prefer hardbacks. By the way, you can usually get very good-quality used hardbacks from Amazon.com for less than the price of a new paperback. Best-selling author & pastor Rick Warren also does this.

Recently, I had a discussion about writing in books with one of my sons, the #1 book buyer, and only Kindle owner, in the family. He was reluctant to write in his nice new books, but I urged him to do so. I told him what R. J. Rushdoony, noted 20th-century theologian and prolific reader, had written on the subject (Rushdoony read a book a day for most all his life, and had an entire second house devoted to the bulk of his library).

It seems that Rushdoony ought to have known better than anyone if writing in books was a good idea, at least for those who maintain a library and use their books for research. I had to recall from memory when I spoke to my son, but thanks to the Chalcedon Foundation’s nice new website, I was actually able to find what he wrote:

When I was a student, I carefully avoided marking my books, a habit then which causes me grief now. I just spent about half an hour trying to locate a valuable statement in a book I read and did not mark in the 1930’s. If you own the book and plan to use its materials, mark and index its important data and comments.

- Chalcedon Report, Random Notes 71, Note #5

Jeff Bezos likes to talk about how we need a dedicated reading device like the Kindle. Maybe this works great in place of a paperback novel to read on the beach, but what about non-fiction? What about serious study and research? It seems that tablets like the iPad will take the lead there.

But in any case, before that can really happen, we NEED a standard format in order for E-readers to be taken seriously as true study and research devices - even barely adequate for the way I (and quite a few others) like to read.

See this gallery at life.com for 46 great photos:

A Brief History of Computing

Here are some highlights, with my own notes…

3 - Jacquard weaving loom, 1801, amazingly was first to use punch cards
6 - Babbage’s analytical engine, 1837
9 - ENIAC, 1946
11- UNIVAC, 1951
12- UNIVAC successfully predicts 1952 Eisenhower landslide, even though CBS doesn’t believe it and waits hours to report!!
16- First integrated circuit. Talk about humble beginnings!
19- Englebart’s early wooden mouse
21- Apollo guidance computer
23- Early ARPANET (ie Internet) nodes
27- Apple I, April 1976
28- The Two Steves (Jobs & Wozniak), 1977
31- First IBM PC, August 1981 (no one will ever need more than 640K, right?)
33- Original 128K Mac, January 1984. Still have 2 of those.
43- Wikipedia, January 2001. Arguably one of the most successful human projects ever, yet no one thought it would work just 10 years ago!!
44- Original iPod (5-10GB)
46- iPad, still not even a year old

For the story about UNIVAC’s smash success predicting Dwight Eisenhower’s landslide victory over Adlai Stevenson, in the 1952 presidential election, see this Wired article:

Nov. 4, 1952: Univac Gets Election Right, But CBS Balks

With calls for yet another government bailout, right after the last one, it’s hard for Americans not to be really frustrated about the state of the domestic car industry. I’ve been watching its decline my entire life. It’s kind of like watching the slow decline of Sears (starting maybe a decade later), which was so big and dominant, it’s taking a very long time, but when it comes the end may be pretty ugly.

For a business starting out so high on the totem pole, it can be quite a challenge to acknowledge a severe turn of events. This happened in the car biz by the late 1960s, but I really think Detroit is still - after four decades - in denial. They’ve never had their Sputnik moment, their Pearl Harbor or 9/11. Instead, they’ve been like the frog in the pot that’s slowly warmed up.

Congress has made sure the frog stays reasonably comfortable, but for how much longer? American cars have improved quite a bit in recent years, but do GM, Ford & Chrysler get it yet about how relentlessly competitive the auto biz is nowadays?

They need to entirely overhaul their company cultures, because it’s not going to get any easier by just surviving to 2010 or whenever. Detroit automakers must get rid of their quick-fix mindset and adopt company cultures that embrace continuous improvement and place engineering & quality above marketing. Otherwise all the king’s (president’s?) men aren’t going to be able to put humpty-dumpty’s brand back together.

Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh really hit the nail on the head recently when he pointed out that a company’s culture and its brand are really two sides of the same coin (Video, quote at about 9:20). Detroit doesn’t seem to get this. Unless they overhaul their entire businesses, then their brand message is never going to stay aligned with reality for long.

Cadillac is just one example. Way back in 1990, the GM division won the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award, and appeared to be on its way to establishing a quality reputation for its product line. Sadly, the other day I was looking at the current Consumer Reports, and several of Cadillac’s most prominent models are listed as not recommended by CR because of less-than-average reliability.

Maybe today’s Cadillacs are quite a bit better-made than those of a decade or two ago, but so are Toyotas, not to mention Hyundais and even Kias. Consumers are smarter, too.

I know there’s some folks in Detroit who’ve been working really hard for a long time trying to make things better and I’ve been rooting for them as much as anyone, but until the leaders there get past the idea of just surviving the current crisis and start thinking strategically, any government bailout is probably just money down the drain. It’s the culture that’s got to change.

I just left a comment on Rex Hammock’s blog rexblog, where he questions whether Marc Andreessen is right to say the demise of the New York Times is inevitable.

It’s probably safe to assume the Times will end up quite different from what it’s been in the past, which very well may upset a lot of folks, but that’s not to say it’s a doomed enterprise. I see two key issues to their survival: how willing are they to embrace new technology (& kill off the old when necessary) and - as I’ve already suggested - will they aggressively look for ways to combat information overload?

Marc Andreessen’s blog is certainly one of the best, nevertheless I’m not so sure it’s wise to write off the NY Times. They appear to be one of the few old-media companies that really seems to get the first requirement, embracing new technology, especially in the time since they became an early adopter of RSS.

Since then, they’ve added some video, made their content free, and now become an investor in Automattic (purveyor of WordPress). Besides, they’ve got a great global brand.

I recall someone arguing about a decade ago that as technology improves, most all colleges (as with textbooks) will end up using lectures by just a few star professors from top schools, that the internet would effectively raise the value of the top “global” brands, while lowering the value of most local brands.

I’m not sure if this is correct, but if so, it might seem to likewise apply to top media outlets, provided they were aggressive about adopting new technologies to spread their content. At the same time, all media players need to be looking hard at how to better package/deliver/archive their content, so that users can access and recall it as efficiently as possible.

Otherwise, the entire media biz is going to have a hard time growing, as we rapidly reach a limit to how much more information we can absorb in this new attention economy.

Business Week Senior Writer Stephen Baker has been soliciting comments for an upcoming story on blogging/web 2.0, and his summary of the responses so far is pretty much on the money.

My main concern, as noted earlier in Twitter & Taking Info Overload Seriously, is that information overload has ALREADY become a big problem, is rapidly becoming worse, and few media folks (or anyone else) are taking it seriously.

I remember back when USA Today started publishing, how it was criticized for publishing in a short-article format. Comparisions were made to TV news, with accusations of dumbing down complex issues. Some feared it would be the beginning of the end of serious journalism.

Well three decades later, the New York Times and Wall Street Journal are still cranking out in-depth articles. These are now available to anyone in the world with internet access, so those fears were certainly exaggerated.

Nevertheless, while both have been aggressive adopters of internet technologies and online presence, they - and other media - may struggle financially if means aren’t developed to help us better find, track, and consume the information we need, and then suitably record/re-publish it. This is a critical business concern for the publishing and advertising industries.

While USA Today-type capsule summaries are one way of dealing with information overload, we also need to be able to manage effectively more in-depth information sources, too. There really is a rapidly-growing stream of valuable, specific content being produced now, and we’ll never really be satisfied with any solution that simply restricts, without helping us access, more of this content than we can currently.

Indeed, the continuing growth in the number of channels of information is staggering. We’re going to need powerful tools to manage that. There’s much more to be said about this, but what we really need is a vibrant conversation about how best to handle information overload. What’s the crux of the problem - how do we define it? What kinds of tools would be truly helpful?

Here’s the comment I left on Steve Baker’s blog:

Information overload is a BIG problem, and I’m amazed how little that reality has registered with most people and with journalists and other media folks.

The answer isn’t simply read less, because the availability of quality, specific and useful information (that you need or really want for your job, life, etc.) is exploding.

What’s missing are powerful tools to help us manage this information in a convenient, non-redundant and timely manner.

Information is coming in - and in the case of bloggers, flickr users, etc. going out - from so many directions that organizing/integrating all that is going to become a big aspect of social networking, and computing/telecom in general, in the near future.

Dana Blankenhorn has posted an interesting article discussing how open source software is being divvied up among top software companies (IBM, Google, Microsoft) in a way reminiscent of Japanese keiretsus. She argues that only these three seem to have the “size, scope and ambition” to play in this space, though Sun also continues to seek such a dominant position.

According to the article, in American usage “keiretsu” has become a term describing a much looser form of business association, with one large company and a number of smaller ones beholden to it in various ways. The Mozilla Foundation’s dependence on Google would be a good example, a relationship of substantial ties between independent entities.

Years ago, I was thinking open source might end up being its own “keiretsu”. Nevertheless, I guess it was inevitable that it would instead end up fragmented and mostly beholden to big companies. Blankenhorn cites the examples of IBM-Red Hat and Microsoft-Novell as other instances of such ties.

On the other hand, if these big companies do things right, open source software can advance and still end up producing a thriving ecosystem. IBM’s relationship with the Eclipse Foundation is a prime example.

It seems that key to the whole process is how a Big Co. views the software product lifecycle. If it accepts that functionality gradually will become commoditized, it will view open source as the likely end-point for most proprietary software. Such a strategy/outlook will result in the Big Co.’s typically releasing the source after some years/decades, with the intent of building still-proprietary software and services on top of it.

IBM did that with VisualAge (now Eclipse), and has also worked hard at promoting the open-source Linux operating system. On the other hand, Microsoft seems to want to milk its Windows operating system forever, which makes it hard to play well in the open-source world.

While it may seem wasteful, companies such as Apple have shown that a steady discarding of old technology can do a lot to promote innovation. I keep waiting for more companies to follow their example.

Evidence continues to mount that “creative destruction” is indeed a key process in a healthy economy. Peter Drucker argued that companies ought to continually make way for the new by killing off old products, rather than waiting for the market to do it for them. Henry Ford’s reluctance to part with the Model T, and its nearly destroying Ford in the process, is the classic case study on this.

With software, however, there’s a difference, since many software products are foundations for other systems (software or hardware), or integral to the use/retention of valuable data produced by them. For this reason, it’s not as simple a matter to remove a program from the market. Software may be used for many different purposes by different customers. Some may be able to switch quickly to new products, but others would incur great cost.

Consequently, it seems inevitable that users are eventually going to demand some kind of protection from software vendors - or else from government regulators - that a software product’s source code be made open source if the product is abandoned. At the least users would be protected, and possibly the product might see further development by others (WordPress, successor to b2, is in some respects an example of this).

More interesting, however, are the more state-of-the-art open-source projects such as Linux and Eclipse, that promise innovation and a product that is “built right” for the future in a platform-agnostic way. Knowing that a software product will be here to stay, because the source is available, seems to be such a strong draw that many of these best-of-breed projects have been able to attract top talent to contribute, often on a volunteer basis, as well as substantial support from Big Co.’s such as IBM.

For the software industry to thrive and not just reinvent the wheel, we need strong and viable foundations to build on. If these Big Co.’s are willing to kill off the revenue streams from their old software somewhat before it dries up, their code may well retain importance, or even grow in dominance as Eclipse has. This can offer a strong foundation both for services and for additional products higher up the stack.

Moreover, it will produce an overall healthier software industry ecosystem, since the underlying code will continue to be developed, increasing the value of it and everything higher up on the stack, due both to stability and to greater innovation.

Mashable and others have been reporting that the venerable Classmates.com site is now about to do an IPO (initial public offering), at a valuation of $125 million. Started in 1995, Mashable’s Pete Cashmore says Classmates deserves credit for being the first social network, begun two years before the now-defunct Six Degrees.

While it may seem old, dull and boring to the digerati types (and it’s not Facebook), Classmates might still be pretty interesting to average users, if they are smart about making the right enhancements. I like Classmates; they continue to be slowly but steadily adding folks from my school classes. I’ve only communicated with a few, but think the site still fills a viable need (I’ve had virtually NO success locating anyone my age - 44 - on Facebook or other networks yet), and they’ve got the market share/critical mass to make it work.

As others have noted (generating considerable controversy), the big social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook appear to be attracting different sorts of users. While Facebook is now pulling in a lot of older technically-inclined users, the large bloc of non-technical older Americans is pretty much being left out. Obviously Classmates is too specialized to serve all their needs, but it’s the kind of simple and inviting format that would likely appeal to a lot of average folks.

My main complaints are with the pricing and the speed of the site. Classmates needs more functionality to be free and to get away from the True ads, which seem to be their main advertiser. I suspect if the site were faster to navigate and search, folks would spend more time there. Monetizing a site nowadays with AdSense, etc., generally isn’t too difficult, so I don’t see why they couldn’t offer more free functionality and still be viable.

Of course, any school-oriented site should have plenty of ways to generate well-performing ads (though even Facebook doesn’t seem to have succeeded at this, yet), but I suppose Classmates could also keep their paid subscriptions. In the several years I’ve used Classmates, I haven’t seen many people going this route, because you have to pay so much up front just to try it for a short time.

If sites like Classmates are going to have a paid subscription model, then they should by all means offer a less costly middle tier (above the free tier) and segment their market between those who don’t mind paying $20 or more to try out a site that may (likely) disappoint vs. those of us who aren’t willing to risk much until we know we’re going to get our money’s worth!

As with any social network, the key is users returning to the site on a regular basis (Facebook’s strength). Classmates is good about sending weekly emails announcing new members from your classes, but the site is slow to load and navigate, and when someone does try to communicate with you, you can’t even see it without paying a considerable amount for a subscription.

Obviously, basic communication features should be free. Maybe subscriptions could add the option of a blog page or other customization, the opportunity to have a page for that particular class, etc. There are so many possibilities, the site ought to be worth $125 million, considering the number of users (50 million) that they’ve signed up.

A few other ideas for added functionality (maybe some of this exists already but could be enhanced and made more visible):

• Stores for sale of school related merchandise (shirts, stickers, etc.)
• Alumni association pages. My high school’s alumni association has become much more active and is now even conducting a campital campaign to raise money for improvements! With the internet, these activities are much easier to do, and a site like Classmates provides a key ingredient - finding and keeping in touch with people.
• As I’ve written about elsewhere, it’s still VERY hard to locate your former teachers, and Classmates already offers this functionality (membership for teachers, etc.) but it’s almost completely ignored. They need to make a push to sign up teachers, which I suspect would stimulate a lot of other interest, and maybe a fair amount of free media coverage.

As I hinted at above, I find Classmates interesting in part because it’s so different from the sorts of things that the Silicon Valley crowd get excited about. The Valley folks have brought us a lot of good things, but also have some huge blind spots. A large part of the country is moving MUCH more slowly onto the internet, and there’s still not that much available on the net for for folks who didn’t grow up using it.

Classmates isn’t Facebook, but I really believe that there are still a lot of great business opportunities on the net for serving older folks (which, as far as the internet goes, is pretty much anyone over 35). Even though they have a lot of disposable income, many of these users are still fearful of doing too much, of making purchases online, etc. Sites that seem stable and “safe” have a certain appeal that a wild and woolly site like MySpace could never offer.

Since I posted my Initial Thoughts About the iPhone, Dave Winer has described his experience after four weeks, and it’s not too favorable:

iPhone, month 1

He describes, for instance, how he couldn’t quickly retrieve a phone number from an email and return a call, and is generally unhappy with the iPhone’s email function, as well as its touch-screen keyboard.

Worse, in an interesting observation Winer notes:

“It also seems we’re going to have a long-term discussion over whether it makes sense to have a “mobile web” or take the iPhone trade-off, more effort to use its web (lots of scrolling and pinching), but making the whole web accessible, mobile sites or non-mobile sites. I think what Apple has attempted is noble, but it’s not going to work. The screens have limited resolution, and even if they didn’t, even if they could cram a billion pixels into every square inch, there’s the limit of how much detail our eyes can see and how big our hands are.”

It does seem that some people’s eyes and fingers fit the iPhone’s diminutive size better than others. I’ve long felt that the trend toward ever-smaller devices is a mistake. Early in the Treo’s development, when Palm (or probably it was still Handspring) was eagerly describing how wonderful it was that they were going to make it yet smaller, I got frustrated enough to write them about it, but to no avail.

If the iPhone starts to falter, it will be in no small part due to its form factor, and maybe then handheld device makers (besides Blackberry) will finally start to listen. Many devices, especially phone devices, are TOO small, and keyboards are important to a lot of folks, especially for texting and email, and must be gotten right. Some users seem to like the iPhone’s touch-screen keyboard, but clearly it’s not for everyone.

Winer, who’s been involved with Mac software since the early days with the ThinkTank and More outliners, and seen both the good and bad sides of Apple, concedes that “the iPhone is much prettier than a Blackberry and feels better in your hand. I’m not mocking Apple for that, style matters, esp in a personal device.”

He figures that “the iPhone, if it attains success, will reach it the way the Mac did, after the initial fatal flaws are removed, in the “iPhone Plus” or whatever.” Indeed, a lot of folks seem to have forgotten that in 1984, initially Mac sales were good, but soon stalled after the early adopters (including myself, even though I’m not usually such) bought theirs. The original Mac was not really a very useful machine until the memory was bumped from 128K to 512K.

I’m sure that Apple is already working to fix many of the first-generation iPhone’s deficiencies, and will do it faster than Apple did in 1984-7 with the Mac. Nevertheless, the question remains whether they’ll be open to more radical changes - such as a bigger device with a bigger screen and real keyboard - which may be necessary to pull in a lot of the Blackberry’s users and other folks no longer in their twenties.

Internet Duct Tape (formerly EngTech) has an interesting post about proper use of categories and tags in WordPress. Eric says:

“One of my first and longstanding complaints of WordPress is that it does not understand the fundamental difference between tagging and categorizing. Categorizing is like taking all of your socks and putting them into drawers based on colours. Tagging is like sewing a little label on your socks that says when you bought them, how to wash them, … Categories add organization and tags add semantic information. A category can be a tag, but if you use your tags as categories you’ll eventually have a right old mess.”

This is an interesting question because in my experience, there’s never just “one” right way of organizing or presenting information. To find an appropriate way to organize something, you must consider the use and the user.

The goal with tags, categories or whatever scheme is to organize the information in a way that you or another familiar user can find everything, while presenting it to a new user in a way which allows them to easily assess what all is there and then navigate through it to access what they’re particularly looking for. Consequently, I think it depends on the blog how many categories or tags are appropriate.

In my WordPress blogs, I use multiple categories with each post, so I guess that means I’m using them like tags, not true categories. This and my other Blogsome (WordPress) blog, RealCurrents, each have a few dozen categories, used like tags, but it’s not too hard to scan them all as they’re listed on the right side of the page.

My personal blog Light Side on Live Spaces is only allowed one category per post, but that’s OK for a simple blog like that, though I still find myself wanting to add a category every once in a while. If I had a lot of photos on that site, then I’d certainly want a good tagging system, however.

Closer to the other extreme is my aerospace blog (currently still on Xanga), in which I like to note all kinds of esoteric things and so have close to 200 tags,

http://www.xanga.com/AeroGo/tags

so folks can look up specific aircraft, certain famous individuals, manufacturers, etc. This tag cloud really functions more like an index.

For those who want to use categories more properly, as unique groupings, Eric’s post links to an interesting and fairly lengthy discussion by Lorelle VanFossen, Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags. She says that

“In the simplest of terms, I think of categories as the table of contents for your blog, a kind of general outline that directs visitors to general topics that you blog about. Tags are more like the index page of a book, a list of key words people will use to search for specific terms.”

She also includes a helpful discussion of how limiting yourself to a small set of categories can help you focus and really think through the purpose for your blog. Nevertheless she notes that she ended up including one category as a sort of “catch-all”, giving it a vague name, “Web Wise”.

Regarding tag clouds, I’ve noticed several ways of presenting them on various sites, typically with the more popular tags in larger type. While that’s a good idea, many times the tags are organized in a rather unhelpful way. I even saw one site where they were in a spiral!

For a site like AeroGo, where it’s likely that the average user is not looking for one of the top 10 tags, it would be better if Xanga presented the tags not only alphabetically as currently, but also in orderly columns, as in a book’s index, though keeping the varying font sizes. This might be overdoing it for many sites, but it would be interesting to see an experiment on a big site like Flickr of several different tag cloud presentations and the resulting click-through rates.

Like Google’s simple but (truly) helpful index, I wonder if on a lot of sites an alphabetical, index-like tag cloud might produce better results, though a simple tag module added to a page wouldn’t have room for all that. In any event, as the “semantic web” becomes more of a reality, I suspect more detailed tagging systems will gain value and prominence, as they help users drill down to the specific information they’re looking for.

Jane Quigley has posted on her blog Setting Contexts a quite positive report of her first two weeks with an iPhone, declaring that her 8GB iPhone has exceeded all her expectations. In particular, she notes “iPod sound is … a definite step ahead”; “While the keyboard was a little challenging at first, I was a pro after just a couple of days”; and that “battery life … has been great”.

While there are apparently already well over 100 iphone apps available, she lists some of her early favorites, as well as some other resources. The ones Quigley recommends include Mockdock, PocketTweets, gOffice, Meebo, and Ta-Da. Perhaps not surprisingly, there’s already a new GTD (Getting Things Done) app for the iPhone, iNozbe, as well.

The iPhone launched to a tremendous amount of anticipation, and even a funny video by long-time Mac & Palm author (and tech journalist) David Pogue. Despite the hype, it seemed that most all the initial user feedback was, indeed, similarly positive.

Now we’re starting to see some detracting reports. Some think usability issues will make the iPhone unsuitable for business. That raises one of my own questions - how good is the iPhone, actually, as a phone? It’s one thing to just try calling, but what happens when you’re busy - can you use it easily one-handed, or while driving, or is using the iPhone about as bad as texting while driving?

There’s also the question of whether the iPhone (without physical keys) will satisfy teens, young adults and anyone else who’s a texting addict. I’m certainly curious about the practical usefulness of the keyboard, probably what I most miss in my current Palm handheld. If Apple does succeed in making a good (not barely adequate) touch-screen keyboard, it will be a major step forward in interface design.

Now to my own impressions. I’m not in a hurry to jump to the iPhone, but have spent maybe 10-15 minutes on it a couple of times. It’s clear that I’m getting a little better on the keyboard, but am not yet convinced I’ll really get good at it. It was really surprising, though, that the horizontal keyboard isn’t available for all the applications.

That said, I’m sure there are a number of improvements Apple will continue to find to better the keyboard experience. This is where thinking about the little details, an area where Apple excels, can really pay off. I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of such features are already there waiting to be discovered. GeekSugar has already noted one tip for speeding up punctuation.

The second time I used the iPhone, it slowly dawned on me that what I really miss isn’t so much the keyboard, but the mouse. Just editing URLs in Safari was quite annoying. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but the keyboard layout didn’t seem to help much for editing, either. On the other hand, the multi-touch screen works quite well for navigation, but you can’t really get the full benefit of it when browsing the web on the slow Edge network.

One thing that surprises me is how little discussion there’s been of basic Palm functionality on the iPhone. Does the iPhone come with apps that can replace the basic Palm Datebook, Address, To-Do and Memo functions, and import their .pdb files?

There has been a lot of discussion about whether the iPhone will run OS X applications (and presumably Mac apps like Excel). Right now the answer is apparently no, but I don’t see why Apple couldn’t set up some kind of partitioning or something on the iPhone that would make that work, while still protecting the reliability of the phone and connectivity functions.

Perhaps the real hold-up in such a scheme for running OS X apps is memory, and with more flash memory will come OS X as well. Certainly, 4 or even 8GB seems to be an awful limited amount of memory for a multi-function device that’s also supposed to be a media player. With the way flash memory prices have been falling, waiting for a bump up to 16GB (at least) would probably be a good idea. Apple has a long history of introducing computers without enough memory, and I suspect the iPhone is the latest example!

Obviously, the Palm and Mac compatibility are important issues for current Palm and Mac users like myself, who are looking for a handheld device that really moves forward the “handheld computing” part of the equation as an important part of moving to one unified device. I expect the iPhone will satisfy these needs, as well, given time.

While the iPhone as a beautiful gadget and interface is itself rather compelling, perhaps the main question, really, is how long will it be before there is an equally-compelling must-have application that drives the second wave of its sales?

I wrote last fall about how Apple Needs Better Support for Mac Printer/Scanner Problems. Thankfully, it appears Apple may be aiming to invest more in printer functionality, as it has reportedly acquired the rights to CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System.

My previous post described how I’d continued to see occasional problems with printers on OS X, noting a particularly difficult problem I was having at that time with my HP 1320, that ended up taking up more than a day of my time and several weeks to get resolved. I still get fairly regular hits from Google searches for “hppostprocessing” error messages, so if that’s you, check out the comments to the previous post.

One of my main complaints involved the lack of diagnostics. While Mac OS X printing support through the Printer Setup Utility is fairly automatic, when there is a problem, there’s virtually no diagnostics to help you sort it out. I’d hope that improving such diagnostic support would be a priority for Apple.

Besides that, I’m still noticing various little quirks with printing on OS X (and am still running 10.4.8). Usually these aren’t showstoppers, but the system is doing something unexpected, which makes you wonder if there are lingering bugs. The bugs do occasionally bite, as they did the other day when everything kept printing with my 2 pages/page preset, regardless of what I entered in the print dialog (restarting resolved that).

As I wrote before, I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist”, who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. The Ars Technica article does suggest that “The purchase could also be a good thing for CUPS, since Apple’s support for the project could lead to further improvements (if Apple chooses to release them) and to more pressure being placed on printer manufacturers.”

In any event, it’d be a lot more efficient for Apple and the peripherals folks to get together and iron things out, before millions of users have to scratch their heads - and then bang them against the keyboard in frustration.

Astroprof’s Page has an interesting discussion of the difficulties of science journalism.

I think the quality of science coverage is improving at many of the major newspapers at least. As Astroprof mentions, Mark Carreau has, for example, done a good job for the Houston Chronicle. Perhaps it’s a positive outcome from the Challenger tragedy, but it seems that about that time many of the media outlets here in Houston started giving a lot more attention to manned spaceflight. The “main” industries in Houston have long been oil & gas and real estate, but for quite a few years now space has also been accorded that sort of status by the Chronicle and several of the TV and radio stations.

An experienced, knowledgeable science reporter is hard to replace. I subscribed to Science News for years, but after Dietrick Thomsen and Jonathan Eberhart left, the physics and space coverage were just not the same. I doubt most publishers have the means to get into a bidding war for the limited supply of top talent, and no one could expect a relatively new science journalist to be able to match their reporting.

One of the problems with science and tech journalism is that folks in these fields often expect journalists to do all the work. Such a mindset would seem ridiculous in politics, where there’s whole staffs of hacks feeding carefully-crafted sound bites to the media and identifying “talking points” for their candidate’s every appearance.

Businesses likewise spend vast amounts on marketing and public relations, but most researchers, and even technical staff inside many businesses, somehow don’t seem to think these functions are part of their job. Of course, a lot of engineers, scientists and programmers aren’t that good at communications skills, or just plain don’t like to talk about themselves, but somebody in these research groups and engineering departments needs to take up the role of communicator, so the outside world can understand the value and needs of their efforts.

Journalists are under a lot of pressure with the kind of deadlines that most of us couldn’t even imagine, so it’s only smart to realize they’re going to need some help. That’s one of the things I’m trying to do with some of my sites, particularly AeroGo (for aerospace and engineering education) and RealCurrents (for current events), in which I’m trying to provide important but little-known background information and to point out things deserving more attention (which I generally categorize with the tag “Press Coverage Holes”).

Where there are failings in science/tech journalism, beyond just ignorantly trying to cover a field the reporter knows nothing about, I’d say that one of the biggest problems is that of naively swallowing pronouncements from big research groups without knowing what is going on elsewhere. We saw some of that a few years ago, for example, with some coverage of the Human Genome Project, that focussed too much on the government research, ignoring Celera Genomics’ private effort that ended up getting done first.

The result is that journalists are often lacking in understanding about the overall policy and business aspects of research, and consequently end up focussing too critically on superficial technical aspects. We saw that just this past week, when many media outlets were talking about the possible abandoning of the International Space Station, due to computer problems - what was a rather remote possibility, technically, while saying not a word about how NASA’s busily going about building a station they expect to abandon anyway, not too many years after completing it.

It seems to me that journalists ought to be a little easier on programs that suffer technical glitches that are really just part of the normal course of research & development, but be discerning enough to realize when an effort has really lost its way or when a policy has serious unresolved issues. With so much needless technical criticism, a lot of R&D managers are understandably gun-shy about the press, which just perpetuates the disconnect to journalists described above.