Coop's Corner

My first cell phone was made by Motorola. It will probably be my last.

The dilemma Motorola faces is that my experience is multiplied over and over, to the point where (rightly or not) millions of people just don't believe the company's still on the hip edge of technology. That may not reflect the entire story--I'm sure Motorola's got cool stuff in the labs--but perceptions matter even when they're not always true. Motorola has a history of having a hit phone and then going through a terrible drought. And right now, it's suffering through one helluva dry spell.

(Credit: Motorola)

So it was that in the same week Motorola suffered the further indignity of receiving a bargain-basement buyout offer for its phone unit from a Indian consumer electronics company, Research In Motion reported killer earnings. Next to Apple and its iPhone, RIM remains the most innovative company in the smartphone business.

Nothing you can do about the earnings calendar and buyout bids are random. But the dearth of interesting product news out of Motorola at the CTIA wireless show this week underscores its current plight. This show is the place for the world make a fuss over your latest mobile toys but there was Motorola with very little to show.

Instead, the company decided to head to Las Vegas to talk up other aspects of the business. Of course, without any new products in tow, they couldn't really offer much insight other than banalities about the Cubs' chances to break the jinx. (I should give them a nod for having a good broadband infrastructure business. And Motorola remains No. 1 in cable set tops, too. Those are healthy businesses. Unfortunately, it's the flashier, sexier handset business that is screwed and screwed up bad.)

Meanwhile, RIM hit the ball out of the park with its earnings posted Wednesday afternoon. (Hey, the baseball season just started, so humor me.)

The sad irony is that Motorola was considered a hot brand not so long ago. I know it's fashionable to blame Motorola's current troubles on Ed Zander, the former CEO hired away from Sun Microsystems where he served as president under Scott McNealy. But if you compare Motorola to RIM--and yes, I know this is an inexact comparison--the discussion boils down to the difference between a pre-smartphone-era company versus a hipper outfit with real smarts about smartphones. Thursday marks the 35th anniversary of the day a Motorola exec made what is believed to be the first public call using a cell phone.

(Credit: Research In Motion)

Zander enjoyed temporary success after he arrived. But the culture was set in stone by the Galvins, who essentially turned Motorola into a quasi-family business. The Galvin brothers, Paul and Joseph, founded the company in 1928 and the Galvin family continued to hold top management positions until 2003. Unfortunately for Motorola, management talent doesn't always get handed down with the genes. To be sure, it worked at IBM, where Tom Watson Jr. built an even bigger powerhouse after taking over from his father in 1956. His father had led the company since 1914. But by the time the Watson fils retired in 1971, IBM really was Big Blue.

But that was probably the exception to the rule. Bill Ford parachuted in at his great-grandfather's company in 2001, but was powerless to halt its decline. Toyota overtook the company as the world's second biggest automaker (behind General Motors) and the company stopped making great cars. Even worse, Ford became ever-more addicted to gas-guzzling SUVs and pick-up trucks.

Now the plan is to break up Motorola into two separate, publicly-traded companies, one focused on handsets and accessories, the other charged with wireless broadband networks and enterprise-level communications services.

That's what happens when you put the MBAs in charge. I don't know if it will work but if Motorola wants to win back former customers, the more pressing need is to get cool new technology into peoples' hands--and fast.

So I'm puzzling how to make Twitter more useful to me. Up until now, it's been the equivalent of a school science project. Interesting, but random.

Random in terms of what some twits tweet about. The good stuff is quite good. The bad stuff is a waste of time. Twitter's good, but there's a way to make it great. All we need is a smart developer or two to take it to the next step.

Over the course of any 24-hour period, the dreck outweighs the interesting feeds by a 70-30 margin. Of course, this is all subjective and nobody wants a hall monitor to decide what's worthy and what's not. Some people really find it useful to know that so-and-so had a useful business lunch or is off to get interviewed by a TV reporter. My preference is to let a thousand Tweets twitter.

But in Twitter's current incarnation, I'm reduced to passively watching a computerized version of Internet TV. Whatever comes over the transom, I consume--whether it's something I passionately care about or is utterly uninteresting. And as I continue to add names to "follow," it's only a matter of time before the noise-to-signal ratio heads off the charts.

As an aside, I recently added names on the Twitterholic.com Top 100 Twitterholics to expand my Twitter circle. That's only making things worse. I'm interested in following some of the people on the list, but the grouping is pretty much a popularity contest based on the number of followers. It would be a big help if I knew ahead of time what each of these folks liked to twit about.

But that's not asking for the moon. What about finding a way to allow Twitter users to subscribe to followers based around interests or profession? I'd love to go up to Twitter and select individual channels where the odds are that most of what's under discussion is relevant to me.

If there are technical reasons why this is asking the impossible, tell me. Sure, it's a different animal, but technology already lets us get a handle on the daily information flow via subscriptions to RSS feeds or through smart aggregators like iGoogle. So, for instance, I read a daily blog operated by Juan Cole, who is a professor of Middle Eastern history. Cole may publish the occasional post that leaves me flat. But over time I've come to trust his judgment about what's important, and most of his writing appeals to my interests.

Even if he's only off to a business lunch or to do a TV interview. :)

Forget April Fools' Day, there's real stuff to mark April 1, 2008. Thanks to MUNI, the mechanized joke which is supposed to function as a transport system in San Francisco, I'm late to the game. Anyway, kudos to Anil Dash and the other folks who have weighed in on the April Fools' hijinks. Some are funny, a lot are lame, and most are confusing. (Full disclosure: News.com wiseacres posted a few as well. I think they were OK, but you can judge yourself.)

But if you want to mark the occasion, I would offer two anniversaries for your consideration. In 1976, the Two Steves incorporated Apple in Cupertino, Calif. How big a deal was that? Think of how personal computing might have evolved had it not been for Wozniak and Jobs.

The other is the anniversary of Dave Winer's blog on Scripting.com in 1997. I don't want to get into the controversy about who was first, second...or 98th to the blogging party. But suffice it to say that Winer's writings did as much as any to attract attention to what then was an oddball idea at the time. Nowadays, blogging is a conventional outlet for expression. But if you were paying attention in 1997, few "experts" expected the blog to recalibrate widely held assumptions about online publishing. So much for kowtowing to the groupthink mentality underpinning conventional wisdom.

Personal digital assistants, cell phones, smartphones--whatever you want to call them--keep getting smaller, thinner, and lighter. Congrats to the engineers who keep coming up with this stuff, but I'm going blind trying to keep up with them.

My tired eyes could use a break, though I know this is the equivalent of tilting at windmills. We get older and our bodies inevitably start betraying us--sometimes sooner, sometimes later. But if the inventors of tomorrow's gadgets are going to continue to think small, they've also got to start thinking big. From a purely design perspective, Apple did a nice job with the display on the iPhone. Still, that's only a half step. You're still stuck staring at a relatively small screen surface, not to mention you input data via hunt and peck.

Some attempts to answer those questions will come out of the developer forum Intel is hosting this week in Shanghai, China, where the company will provide updates about the progress made by its researchers. In particular, Intel has been trying to find new ways to extend the intelligence of personal devices. The company's marketing term for this is "carry small, live large."

OK, it's corny, but while this remains a work in progress, things are getting interesting. With enough computation resources and built-in sensors, Intel says a device could connect to the Internet via wide-area connectivity and sense physical motion (a la the Nintendo Wii), wirelessly dock with a nearby display in an office, or store and "borrow" the use of a bigger display.

I recall sitting through sundry Comdex video keynotes, in which "tech visionaries" promised a future where regular folks would be able to easily do similar things, beaming business cards or enacting transactions wirelessly. To date, the performance hasn't come close to the hype, but Kevin Kahn, who directs Intel's communications technology lab, says the pieces are finally coming together.

Kahn allowed that one big issue in the field of sensor research remains how to accurately interpret data so a device can recognize an activity, mood, or physical item. Still, he said, the research is bearing fruit.

"One and a half years ago, this was entirely a PowerPoint presentation," he told me before leaving to attend the IDF conference. "Now, a lot of pieces are becoming real in a lab sense. We're looking at technologies which will be very real."

"Obviously, the screen's a limit in terms of the visuals," he added. "Certainly, you can access the Internet but you have to be careful. Some sites don't render well on small screens. So we've been looking in the labs at what would be a more idealized version of mobility."

In Shanghai, Intel will demo a multi-band, power-efficient CMOS transceiver, with the ultimate aim being a true digital multi radio. But this will involve a lot more work on multi-radio integration and miniaturization, as well as the resolution of authentication questions so that a device knows that display X is the one where you want to display your data, and not some random screen.

Beyond any technical hurdles, Intel also will face industry politics: the consumer electronics and computer businesses don't have a great history of talking to each other. But as fragmented as it often seems, the PC side has done a marvelous job when it comes to agreeing upon standards. When it comes to the consumer electronics business, well, just look at the pile of television remote controls piling up on your coffee table.

But Kahn says 2011 or 2012 is a realistic time frame. If so, we're going to find ways to use everyday personal digital devices in very cool and unexpected ways.

"I'm going to be in China," he said. "If I have camera and an Internet connection, I ought to be able to point that device and ask, 'What does that say?' and get back an answer in a sensible way."

Click here for more stories on IDF Shanghai.

Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved a $267 million loan to a Denver, Colo.-based company called Open Range. The idea: build out broadband service for 518 rural communities in 17 states

The loan represents one of the federal government's biggest ever public-private investments in broadband service. Considering Uncle Sam's miserly approach, to date, that's not saying much. But here's what caught my eye: Those without service will have access to broadband and other technologies for the first time in their lives.

Give me a break!

They must be kidding, right? Over the years, the agency has invested billions of dollars on all sorts of infrastructure projects deemed vital to the public, such as water and waste pipes or electrification. That it's taken so long for broadband to win similar consideration is stunning.

When I called the agency find out whether this was a one-off, agency spokesman Joe Fletcher told me there was "no guarantee it will happen in the future."

Let's hope he's playing cute. In the meantime, the hired help in Washington do read their mail, so here's a great opportunity to e-mail and Twitter them to death until they get the message. For once, government bureaucrats have come up with a good idea--one which is long overdue--and here's to hoping they don't live down to expectations and screw it up.

Unfortunately, there's still no consensus about the impact of public capital investment to expand broadband's reach. What it will take is a champion, someone to bulldoze the idea through the government. Something like the mid-1950s push by President Eisenhower and Congress to create the National System of Interstate and Defense Highways.

Andrew F. Haughwout of the Brookings Institution has a interesting piece analyzing the track record of public investments over the years. What you'll find is that the estimates are all over the map so people will pick the expert closest to their political persuasion.

".. research on the effects of infrastructure investment on firms' and households' location decisions tends to find that the benefits of new investments are localized. They are highest near where the investments are placed. This finding makes sense, particularly for public works like playgrounds, parks, or public buildings: the farther someone has to travel to use the facility, the less its net value."

Makes sense to me. You lay a foundation in the right way and the government ultimately reaps benefits in the coin of increasing annual GDP. I'm open to being convinced otherwise, but we've passed the point where the Internet has attained quasi-utility status. Think how different your own lives would be without it. Or how governments and private companies near you would function if they were shut off from the grid.

Something more. The Gordon Gekko types may demur but the fine print in the social contract I subscribe to says society ought to intervene when fate throws folks a curve ball. We can save the philosophical shouting match for another day. In the end, there's no convincing rationale for leaving folks stranded as second-class digizens.

My wife's family back in Brazil is going to love this. Starting, well...now, Craigslist is available in Portuguese, French (both Quebecois and Parisian, naturalment), Italian and German.

Craig Newmark: The world's bigger than English

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Until now, the service offered support in English and Spanish.

In the blurb posted on his site, founder Craig Newmark writes, "The programmers inform me that Basque, maybe Klingon, are next."

Tres drole, amigo (I wish I knew how to say that in Klingon.)

Ray Ozzie: Compared with Microsoft, Lotus was a cinch

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Ray Ozzie is one of the most well-respected computer scientists around. He pioneered innovations in groupware software during previous stints at Lotus and Groove and now is working to bring Microsoft's technology strategy more in step with the demands of the Internet age as its chief software architect.

So when the man speaks, it pays to listen. Ozzie piqued my attention recently when he offered a provocative rumination on the suitability of current operating systems and client machines during a recent interview with Om Malik.

"A student today or a Web start-up, they don't actually start at the desktop. They start at the Web, they start building Web solutions, and immediately deploy that to a browser. So from that perspective, what programming models can I give these folks that they can extend that functionality out to the edge? In the cases where they want mobility, where they want a rich dynamic experience as a piece of their solution, how can I make it incremental for them to extend those things, as opposed to learning the desktop world from scratch?"

Translation: In a 'Web-ified' world, the proprietary approach which propelled Microsoft to fame and fabulous riches is in need of a radical revamp. I'm sure the Wizard of Oz(zie) would put a more ambiguous touch on my interpretation. But as he acknowledged to Malik, Microsoft designed Windows to work on local area networks, not the Internet.

If he could wave his magic wand, what might Ozzie do? The company can go only so far without jeopardizing a profitable, recurring revenue stream. But again, that's looking backward. The more interesting software work is taking place on the Web, not at the operating system level. In part, that's where the software-plus-services approach can help. Pushing out applications as services over the Internet--perhaps on a lease or rental model--is an idea whose time has come. (If you want proof, just look at what Marc Beniof has built at Salesforce.com.)

In his keynote earlier in the month at the Mix '08 event in Las Vegas, Ozzie teased the crowd with hints of a "seamless mesh" or "syncromesh," seemingly reflecting his long research in synchronization and collaboration.

"Just imagine the possibilities of unified application management across the device mesh, centralized, Web-based deployment of device-based applications. Imagine an app platform that's cognizant of all of your devices. Now, as it so happens, we've had a team at Microsoft working on this specific scenario for some time now, starting with the PC and focused on the question of how we might make life so much easier for individuals if we just brought together all your PCs into a seamless mesh, for users, for developers, using the Web as a hub."

Where is he heading with all this? Microsoft's not saying much but my colleague Dan Farber wrote after Ozzie's speech that Microsoft's likely "working on the plumbing required to create a seamless mesh that can synchronize content, services and applications across a variety of devices and user scenarios via the Web as a hub."

Sounds plausible but what an irony that a decade ago, Larry Ellison and Scott McNealy were talking about a not all too different scenario. At the time, those two were barnstorming around the country to promote the then-foreign concept of the network computer. Of course, their aim was to sink Microsoft by obviating the need for a rich proprietary operating system. But at a basic level, the network computer idea revolved around what today we would call cloud computing. Unfortunately for Sun Microsystems and Oracle, it would take another decade before the industry would create fast enough connections and enough storage to make it feasible.

Facebook today but Twitter tomorrow?

The geeks know Twitter but most folks don't, and that's one reason why Facebook was able to persuade Hong Kong rich guy Li Ka-shing to pay at least $100 million for a piece of the company.

As long as Facebook can make the case that it's the hippest of the new, new things out there in cyberland, fine. And for the time being, it's probably got little to worry about. The OpenSocial Foundation--my colleague Caroline McCarthy calls it "The Justice League of social media"--is still a concept waiting to materialize. There are a lot of cooks stirring that pot but it may very well one day become a big deal. Until then, however, it's just high-priced PR.

But there's an interesting discussion around a Twitter versus Facebook faceoff looming. In a video post making the rounds, Gary Vaynerchuk riffs about the quickness of Twitter becoming a factor--at least among the early adopter crowd.

"The instant gratification. The world is moving so quickly. That the fact that we can get that response so quickly. Look AOL Instant Messenger--still around and strong, right? So is Twitter taking a lot from Facebook?"

Provocative question. I think he's onto something. I've no interest in revisiting the entire Sarah Lacy-Mark Zuckerberg episode at South by Southwest earlier this month. Still, the Twitter conversations that broke out in parallel among audience attendees testifies to something real about the potential for the technology. Even among some of my friends, I've noticed an uptick of interest in Twitter. And these are civilians, people who associate a "byte" with lunch. If now they're getting into Twitter, it's time to pay attention. When Facebook's popularity turned viral last year, I saw something similar.

Is there real change in the air or is it a passing affectation? Even though Twitter is faster and more interactive, Facebook, at least for the moment, remains a more "sticky" hangout for users. That won't last if Facebook fails to provide more zip to its feeds. For all the elegance that went into the Facebook platform's design, I prefer something that's tailored to the frenetic mobile, interactive times we inhabit. And no, gobsmacking each other with zombie attacks does not qualify as interactivity.

In the end, the speed freaks will decide the issue. They're still up for grabs but for how much longer? Check out what Vaynerchuk has to say and post your opinion--or Twitter it to me at "Coopeydoop."

In the chronology of Internet browsers, Netscape came out earlier, but Microsoft figured out a way to do most of the same things at least as well, if not better. It didn't hurt that the company violated the law as it mobilized to crush a nascent challenge to its desktop monopoly.

Still, it's an incorrect rewrite of history to explain the triumph of Internet Explorer solely in terms of antitrust violations. Fact is that by the time Microsoft got around to the third incarnation of its Web browser, IE was arguably as good--if not better--than Netscape. We all know how that story finished up.

Mozilla CEO John Lilly holds court.

(Credit: Charles Cooper/CNET News.com)

Nowadays, most PC users are on IE because, well, it's the path of least resistance. But I've long been a big fan of Firefox and so have some 160 million people who now use the product. That's a big enough number to get onto Microsoft's radar. The funny thing is that this relatively small organization of some 150 people puts out a more elegant Web browser than Microsoft with its legion of developers. (For instance, there's still no IE support of next-generation Java script.)

Coincidentally, next week marks 10 years since the release of the source code for Mozilla. Earlier Wednesday, I had an opportunity to hear more about what Mozilla's up to. CEO John Lilly invited a group of bloggers to the company's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters to talk tech. (Rafe Needleman from Webware has kept up a live blog of the product rollout. Check it out.)

I'd love to hear you chime in on this topic, but my biggest bugaboo about Web surfing remains security--and that's where these folks are doing very interesting work. Among other items, pay attention to the following bullet points:

•  In FireFox 2, they shipped the product's first anti-phishing features. Now Mozilla plans to include an anti-malware feature in the upcoming version of the browser.

•  With a click, you can get active information from a company's SSL certificate in the URL to get information about the site to determine whether it's kosher.

Mozilla also is tweaking the overall performance of the platform to extract better memory usage. The organization takes about a year between releases (though this newest version has taken a bit longer). Still, that's an eternity faster than the MO over at Microsoft.

Chalk that up to bureaucracy as well as poor decision making. In particular, Microsoft's 2001 decision to take its foot off the pedal after version 6.0 was a mistake I'm sure management wishes it could take back. Since then, the Web has gotten scarier and cooler, and Redmond has until recently been sitting on its laurels. That's why Firefox has come out of nowhere to take anywhere between 17 percent and 28 percent of the market, depending on which research organization you trust.

At this rate, Mozilla's got a great chance to add to those numbers. Until--if ever--Microsoft gets off its duff and comes up with better technology.

Give Brad Smith credit: he didn't wuss out in front of a potentially hostile crowd.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Microsoft's top lawyer got on stage at a open-source conference in San Francisco and tried to find common ground with the audience.

In the end, it was mission accomplished, and he commanded a nice ovation from the crowd. Still, it's clear that a big divide separating Microsoft from open-source advocates remains.

Smith was sent to the conference to offer another olive branch. Open source raises all sorts of intriguing--and thorny--problems for Microsoft, which still struggles to coexist with a movement that's seemingly gaining strength by the day. And Microsoft still has its work cut out in convincing the open-source world that it's ready to bury the hatchet and repair what's been a tempestuous relationship.

Listening to the questions from audience members was instructive. A lot of people in the community still distrust Microsoft's motives--let alone what they dismiss as fig leaf attempts to participate in the community.

Smith repeatedly sought to persuade the audience that Microsoft's good intentions were genuine. Maybe they are, but that's where the company is hard-pressed to convince the diehards.

Brad Smith,
general counsel,
Microsoft

Most of the people I spoke with yesterday want Microsoft to contribute back to the open-source community in a big way. The pledge last month not to sue over open source and foster more interoperability was a good first step, they acknowledged. But they want a lot more than soothing words.

I think Smith got the message, though he and the rest of Redmond's top brass are still trying to figure this one out. He went out of his way to agree that the likely future of software would be marked by "multiple business models" and that the market was big enough for everyone to coexist.

I'm not going to alibi for Microsoft. When it comes to open source, the company's been so dumb and arrogant that you have to wonder whether someone spiked the water supply in Redmond. But some folks don't want to grok that times change, and even idealogues soften their thinking when confronted with reality.

Toward the end of the question-and-answer session, one guy dredged up a list of silly comments made by senior managers and threw it back in Smith's face. Does Microsoft still believe open source is the equivalent of cancer or communism, he asked?

Smith didn't take the bait, and in his lawyerly best manner, he made it clear that Microsoft has turned the page and moved on.

Probably good advice for all concerned.