Many of the cool ideas that have been brought everyday use by the computer industry over the last several decades were first contemplated at Xerox Parc. In particular many of the ideas that led directly to the Mac. One of the visions at Parc involved computing devices existing in three formats; tabs, pads and boards. (Think pda/phone, light tablet computers, and compute servers built into building with large interactive wall-mounted displays).

The ways we use computing do seem to be evolving in this direction.  It seems like everyone I know carries a Tab (iPhone, Pre, Blackberry, Android), and we’re starting to see the promise of blackboards with Surface and wall-mounted analogs.

We are likely to receive a bastard hybrid of a tab and a pad from Apple some time soon.  Certainly the rumor mill/slash pent up desire is all clamoring for such a thing; basically a jumbo iPhone/iTouch (duct-tape three iTouches together to get a sense).  It will be another good step in the right direction.  Still too heavy and a little small, and the battery life will suck, but everything else may be what we need.

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Aaron Patzer was in Cincinnati to speak to the GCVA earlier this year, and since then he sold his startup Mint for $170m. I thought his presentation to GCVA was excellent and he gives a nice outline of his real life experiences with costs at various stages here:

Juice Pitcher Aaron Patzer

Everyone seems to have noticed over the past few months just how twisted some of the decisions Apple is making are.  They chose a faulty carrier for the US market so they could line their pockets with kickbacks on the monthly fees, they rejected the Google Voice app, the Apple legal team seems to want to make jailbreaking your phone an act of terrorism, they held up information about single-payer healthcare,

But if you only ever learn one thing about interpreting human behavior it should be this: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

The idea that Macs were somehow immune to malware because of superior engineering never held any water.  (It was observed that they were not as interesting of a target because of their lower percentage of the population.  Though really my gut tells me it was because people who tend to write malware tend not to be people who own Macs and therefore had nothing to develop Mac malware on.)  Apple isn’t a superior engineering company, it is a superior marketing company. And down that road lies trouble.

Large companies are by their nature schizophrenic.  Being made up of many autonomous parts they will make contradictory and hypocritical decisions (a major benefit of startups is the lack of vested interests and turf to protect).  At the very least the competing forces of protecting the market share they have while knowing (in smart companies anyway) that they need to constantly re-invent themselves to keep someone else from stealing their lunch causes problems.

Take the app store for example.  Brilliant.  Stupid.  Evil.  Brilliant because it creates a tightly controlled way to get apps onto the precious device.  In theory this protects apple from the bad PR of a rogue app that starts crashing phones, as Microsoft took grief for years over ‘blue screen of death’ crashes that were caused by device drivers they had nothing to do with.  Stupid because over time it has become too much of a good thing, we had a wave of pioneers who hit big, followed by a wave of fortune-seekers.  That was all fine but now we’re entering the settled phase and in this phase innovation has to come back into the picture or the app store and the iPhone will stagnate.  Evil because Apple wants to own all the choice territory and so they will make decisions to keep out apps that people really want because they impinge on their prime real estate.

Aside from decisions made to protect turf, I think we are seeing signs of the impending divorce between Apple and Google.  This is going to be messy.  The most visible aspect of Google on the iPhone is of course the maps app, and Apple has recently taken steps that could lead to their own app.

But the root cause of any perception of evil is due to secrecy.  The reasons for deep secrecy around Apple products are to protect its magical image.  If we had visibility into more at Apple there wouldn’t be nearly as much excitement around launches, it would be much harder for them to keep the high level of quality they do manage to achieve because it would make killing not-fully-baked devices harder (just imagine the suck if Apple shipped hardware the way it ships software, shudder).  Perhaps most importantly the press wouldn’t work themselves up into a lather over every tiny scrap of rumor they come across, unfounded or not. 

This secrecy comes at a cost, people assume dark motives are hidden by dark rooms.  We can’t see the stupid, so we assume brilliant but twisted motives.  And paranoia creeps in.  There was a lot of noise generated by someone posting pictures of their job offer from apple, evenly divided between “whoa cool!” and “dude you’re going to be fired for posting that.”  One gets the sense working at apple is like serving in a really hip dictatorship.  Kim Jong Il with a marketing budget.

Apple may have already lost the PR battle for awhile.  Public opinion tides turn in ways that seem to seldom be based on objective reality. App authors will certainly be exploring building apps for Android and the newly freed WebOS platform. And I suspect Microsoft has something very sexy in store for WinMoble 7 (native Silverlight 4.0 apps on a dual-core arm processor anyone?).

Eventually Apple will figure out as Microsoft did that open is better.  They’ll get smarter about what they keep secret.  They’ll realize that adopting an interoperable stance works out better for them in the long run.  Let’s hope it doesn’t take the 10 years it took Microsoft to adapt.

I made the switch to using gmail through a web browser exclusively almost five years ago, and I’ve never looked back.  For a brief period of time I was forced to use Outlook for calendaring only at a company that was still tied to Exchange, and I resented it every time I had to open it.  Since it became available I’ve also been using Google Apps for my family domain and multiple company domains.  If you are in a startup there is no reason for you to be stuck with legacy technology and self-hosted email.  You can be up in running in under an hour.  So if you aren’t already using it here is a list of just a few reasons why you need to be;

1. You shouldn’t be spending money on anything that you don’t absolutely have to.  That includes email hosting! Are you generating your own electricity?  Writing your own development tools?  And yes, it is still free for most purposes.  The page tries to hide that fact now by emphasizing a big button for the paid version, but what you want is the standard version which is free for up to 200 (!) users.  (If you have email to move see my note below.)

2. You shouldn’t be spending any time on anything that isn’t core to your business either!  Unless your business is running mail servers (and if it is, sorry brother your days are numbered) you have no business being busy administering a mail server, and your IT folk should be working on things that add value to your customers.

3. Hosting of email from places that throw it in with your web site hosting typically sucks.  It is awkward to administer, web mail if they have it is inferior, and the spam filtering? Forget about it.

4. Move to Google, say bye to spam.  I went from nearly a thousand a day to a dozen a week.  And that’s with multiple publicly available email addresses pointing to me.  I’ll take it.

5. Recent improvements make it much simpler to manage multiple email addresses from a single login.  After many years they finally got rid of the darned “on behalf of” headers that used to show up for Outlook users.

6. Dump Outlook.  For reasons known only to the Office team Outlook continues to be a huge resource pig.  Lots of threads, lots of memory, mysterious CPU load.  Offload all that to a server and get back the resources better used for development tools, design tools, etc.

7. Stop the interrupt driven day.  In case you didn’t get the memo: you can’t multi-task.  Getting little pop-up messages when an email arrived was cool, about 10 years ago.  Today it is a disaster.  Turn off notifications of email arrival on your desktop, turn them off on your phone.  Only check mail at fixed intervals.  No wonder you aren’t getting anything done!

8. Don’t be tied to one computer.  Or worse, don’t be trying to keep multiple copies of Outlook or any other email/calendar client in synch.  Don’t ever hook your phone up to synch.  With your mail and your calendar ‘in the cloud’ life is greatly simplified.  Suddenly every computer in the world that is connected to the internet is a place you could potentially handle email.

9. The best back-end for mail and calendaring for your mobile phone.  Period.  If you use a phone that supports sync properly (just get an iPhone already) new calendar items appear on your phone or in the cloud within seconds of being created from the phone or in the browser.

10. Multiple calendars will save your sanity.  Create calendars that are shared between team members (or between family members!).  I have my calendar, my wife’s, shared company events, shared family events and ‘info’ (notes about people being on vacation etc.).  I can see everything that is going on at a glance and avoid schedule conflicts.

Note: If you have lots of email archived that you want to upload to have access for searches you should go for it.  There are multiple ways to accomplish this depending upon where you are moving from.  Local client tools will enable you to upload from a local store (like your old Outlook files).  If you have a mail server that you are migrating from you can suck all this email across for free; the feature needed to accomplish this is only available to paid domain accounts, but you can get a free one-month trial.  The transfer will take a day.  You do the math.

Have you made the switch?  Happy?  If you haven’t what is holding you back?

If your web site makes use of any of the more popular javascript libraries, including jQuery, that are used for AJAX operations you may be able to benefit from a new free service. 

This new service from Microsoft makes use of their thousands of geographically distributed servers.  By pointing to their servers instead of yours for these script inclusions you benefit twice; your pages load faster because the ‘weight’ of that download is shifted onto a server that is likely faster and closer to the viewer, and you get to skip that amount of bandwidth being incurred.

Depending upon the speed and location of your server and the visitor, the improvement can be quite noticeable.

Read more and see code snippets at http://​www​.asp​.net/​a​j​a​x​/​c​dn/

Elizabeth Edwards and Noël Gauthier did a live interview on Cincinnati’s channel 9.  Noël was at the In One Weekend event a couple weeks ago and I really enjoyed his being there.  Elizabeth is the driving force between IOW and Cincinnati Innovates.  If Noël wins you’ll know why .

I won’t delve into the arguments around the premise of universal health care, there are many better places to look at this and the ROI data speaks for itself and most people seem to get it.  What I want to address is the benefit to a specific segment of the overall economy, chiefly increased and more successful entrepreneurship.

Startup founders are faced with enough burdens and obstacles as it is.  There are big benefits if we can remove two principle ones, the fear of an insurance gap for themselves and their family, and the difficulty of providing reasonable insurance for staff during the period where every dollar put toward sustaining growth makes a substantial difference in the likely success of the company.

Anyone considering striking out on their own as an entrepreneur faces a challenge with insurance.  I’ve faced it many times myself.  Cobra goes some small way toward helping, but it can be tremendously expensive (and the stimulus bill is helping right now but that is temporary).  For young entrepreneurs who are or have a spouse who is “of child-bearing age” it is particularly expensive and scary.  How many inventions, products and companies have we missed out on because the potential entrepreneur didn’t want to jeopardize the well being of their family?

Once you are at a point where you can bring on staff you face this challenge again.  A fat benefits package helps entice people to larger companies.  Small companies and startups don’t have bargaining power to get better plans at better rates.

I would argue our current system is a major impediment to actual capitalism.

  Fully 40% of high-tech workers work in small businesses. The Small Business Administration states that 60–50% of all net new jobs created annually over the last decade were in small businesses.  If that surprises you at all remember the first tool at hand for a public company to raise their share price is to lay people off.  Unfortunately these jobs often come with a price; little or no health insurance, and policies that are easily cancelled by the supposed insurers just when they are really needed.

Even if we can’t all stomach universal health care right now (the right thing is always resisted initially) we should be looking seriously at what an economic boost we would get from providing the kind of plans large companies can afford to entrepreneurs, small businesses and individual contractors.  The best way to get that is some sort of single-payer system.

We’re already paying for it, we’re just not getting it.

  The last weekend of August I participated in InOneWeekend 2009, Cincinnati’s version of an entrepreneurship crash course.

IOW is billed as an event that will build a start-up company in 3 days.  This is of course impossible, but it is an exciting premise.  It is a necessary white lie that adds to the experience, the way “Based on a True Story” spices up movies that have bugger-all to do with actual events.

The Good

  This is an amazing way to network.  Instead of just standing around chatting you get to see people thinking on their feet, generating idea and defending them, seeking understanding and finding consensus.  Brilliant stuff.

Great crowd.  I really enjoyed meeting everyone, even when we were in violent disagreement over something.

Passionate backers.  The team that plans and executes IOW really believes in what they are doing and puts obvious energy into it.  Without that it could never be pulled off.

The Bad

One Hundred is a lot of people.  There were moments when it was far too many.  Great things are generally not created in this fashion.  There is a reason the expression “design by committee” is derogatory.

Not enough techies. Even with a hundred people I don’t think we had enough technical people in the group.  Ways need to be found to get the word out more in the technical community so a deeper and larger team can be attracted.

Compromise. People who have spent most of their lives since college in large companies have learned to do a number of things well, and one of those is rapidly reach compromise.  The problem with compromise is that the majority of the time it involves the least interesting solution or idea.  I rather uncharitably termed this “concentrating the suck” in one moment of frustration.

Scope. The nature of the event causes many viable ideas to not be viable in that forum.  Most good ideas will end up requiring expertise that is not on hand or readily available, or lengthy R&D, or large initial investment dollars.  With none of these available you’re pretty much limited to a web-based service offering.

Real startups are generally a small, highly focused group of people working hard in ways that don’t really resemble what can be done in this setting.  I hope participants who are serious about joining or starting a startup are seeking out information actively.

The Ugly

As stated at the top, the premise that a viable company can ever come out of a one-weekend event is not quite true, and there are two primary reasons:

The first is there is no founder.  Strong founder(s) are the most critical requisite for a successful startup.  The idea is very much secondary, most ideas have no value without execution.  The keynote speaker from Pixar mentioned this about their creative process “A great team will take a bad idea and either fix it or throw it away”, different context same principle.

  The second is naiveté.  You don’t know what you don’t know.  Frequently I hear from people who have what seem like great ideas for a new product or service, but that idea is based to some extent on an incomplete understanding of the problem domain.  This is part of why real start-ups are hard work, and why so many fail.  You will start with a flawed premise due to lack of information most of the time.  And then you will iterate.  You will fail as quickly and cheaply as possible until you start finding success.  If you fail to learn and iterate you will fail.  That is what it is all about.  But in a group of 100 people who are ‘locked in’ for a weekend you are pretty much guaranteed to zero in on a ‘good idea’ based on incomplete knowledge, and then, as a friend put it in another context “We don’t have enough white board space to write down everything we don’t know.”

Even so we may have pulled a rabbit out of the hat with Dipidee.  I learned some things right after the weekend that revealed some of our naiveté in the space, but the people that are attached to it have useful experience in the realm and aspects of what we did have been validated as good concepts.  Now we’ll see if the idea can be iterated on cheaply and quickly enough to make a go of it.

One last point of ugly; the food (prepared by UC campus food service) was particularly bad.  Pizza that resembled its namesake in shape and color only, and sandwiches that seem to have been prepared 24 hours in advance. Maybe I’m spoiled from the extravagant spreads and break foods provided at Microsoft events and the good old days of the Game Developer Convention (back when it was in San Jose and called CGDC).

The bottom Line

InOneWeekend is a cool event and I heartily recommend it for anyone who has ‘itchy feet’ and is thinking of starting a business, or is already in their own business and could use a recharge.  It has a place in the ecosystem for startups and it points up some of the areas in which Cincinnati is currently lacking.  More about that another time.

The kids are fleeing Facebook.  The millenials never trusted Twitter, and now that their parents and even grandparents are hip to Facebook, it is all over.

I have to confess I’ve never been a big fan of Facebook.  I totally get its appeal, but in some ways it is a bit much, and I really never understood using it for business contacts.  But now even Verizon gets it.