u l t r a m o o k i e

Yes, I have an iPhone. I have had one for a week now — my lovely wife gave the iPhone to me as an early Christmas present! Isn’t she the best?? The acceptance of the iPhone is a complete reversal from my anti-iPhone attitude of earlier months.
So, here were some of my [...]

Yes, I have an iPhone. I have had one for a week now — my lovely wife gave the iPhone to me as an early Christmas present! Isn’t she the best?? The acceptance of the iPhone is a complete reversal from my anti-iPhone attitude of earlier months.

So, here were some of my beefs from previous postings, and some corrections (ie. me eating my words) or “still beefs”:

• Customers need to escape from their contracts to get an iPhone since the iPhone requires AT&T service. Our family plan with T-Mobile had been on a month-to-month basis for almost a year now, so that was not a biggie.
• iPhone costs too much. This was a beef when the 8GB iPhone was $600 and the 4GB iPhone was $500. Now that Apple has dropped the price of the 8GB iPhone to $400, it is not as big of a price pill to swallow (still expensive though) — I bought the very first generation iPod (ah, five whole gigabytes and six years ago) for the same price, but, the iPhone provides a helluvalot more functionality.
• No 3G on the iPhone. This is still a beef, but thank goodness for WiFi — I have WiFi access in all the regular places I am at (home, work, parents, Eileen’s work, etc), so that helps. I also have free AT&T WiFi access because of our DSL package. But, still EDGE access is pretty darned slow and that can’t be overlooked.
• “How can I buy music through the iPhone?” You can’t. You can now.
• Non-user replaceable battery. This is still a beef.
• Screen will scratch up easily. After owning an iPod touch (which is going up on Ebay soon), I have been corrected on this one. The glass screen on the iPod touch and iPhone are really resistant to scratching (unless you carry diamonds in your pocket).
• The iPhone is gonna weight more than a Windows Mobile device and pull down my pants like a Treo. Wrong again on my part. The iPhone is very light — not plastic toy-like light, but it has enough weight to make it feel solid, yet not “heavy”.

What got my wife and I really interested in the iPhone was the iPod touch — jailbroken and running iPhone applications, that is. Steve Jobs really did a number by removing the iPhone applications — especially Mail.app — from the iPod touch. Sure, the iPod touch has Safari and that can be used to check webmail, but the total convenience of Mail.app is indescribable. It really does make a difference. The other apps are also pretty cool; Weather and Stocks by Yahoo!; Google Maps by Google. Steve Jobs was quoted as saying, “The iPod touch is training wheels for the iPhone.” After using both the iPod touch and iPhone, I agree with him. Did the iPod touch have to be training wheels for the iPhone? No. Steve Jobs orchestrated it so that people who used the iPod touch only got a small taste of what the iPhone could do (I don’t believe him when he says the applications were not included just because the iPod touch is a “music” device) — and if they were interested, they would “trade up”. Good business strategy on Jobs’ part.

Let me get this out though: The iPhone is not the perfect mobile device. It has a bunch of flaws: No cut & paste, no Flash support in Safari, it crashes, and other minor things. But, what it does, it does really well — and it is a mobile device that will change the way other mobile device makers think when they start designing iPhone-killers. My SonyEricsson w810i was a great phone and it did everything the iPhone did: Mail client, Web client, music, video, camera, and other things. But, the iPhone just does it much better. The virtual keyboard works great, a lot better than the chiclet keyboard on the Treo, and on-par with the spacious keyboard on the Sidekick II. iTunes syncing makes a big difference when it comes to music management (since I am an iTunes using guy). The camera on the iPhone is not as good as the auto-focus on the SonyEricsson though.

After a week with the iPhone, am I happy? Damn straight, it is the best mobile device I have ever used — and I have gone through a bunch of mobile devices, some of them smartphones too (Nokia 6682, Treo 600, Sidekick II), none of them match the iPhone. I eat my words from my previous posting doubting the iPhone. I have been converted.

Update: I forgot to mention stuff about how I carry the iPhone around. I know people that carry the thing “naked” in their jean pockets with their keys and wallet and stuff. I’m a little paranoid about that (even though I know the screen is pretty scratch resistant). So, for the last week, I have been carrying it around in my old orange Timbuk2 Accessory Case (no longer available). I was looking for a really good case for my iPhone all week long and had been thinking about two: Agent 18 Eco iPhone Shield and the Contour Showcase for iPhone. The Agent 18 got shot down after I found reports that the case scratches the chrome on the iPhone face. The Showcase is really, really nice, but I like being able to hold my iPhone without a case around it. Finally, I found the Sena Ultraslim iPhone Pouch. Perfect case for my iPhone. Eileen picked one up for me today, the case fits the iPhone like a glove and works great.

TheStreet.com is running a great rebuttal to The Peanut Butter Manifesto.
So, now heads must roll at Yahoo!. If so, I’d like to nominate the first one: Brad Garlinghouse.
Who is Brad Garlinghouse? He’s the Internet’s own Charlie Brown, a Yahoo! senior vice president prone to griping about peanut butter in his fatuously titled “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” [...]

TheStreet.com is running a great rebuttal to The Peanut Butter Manifesto.

So, now heads must roll at Yahoo!. If so, I’d like to nominate the first one: Brad Garlinghouse.

Who is Brad Garlinghouse? He’s the Internet’s own Charlie Brown, a Yahoo! senior vice president prone to griping about peanut butter in his fatuously titled “Peanut Butter Manifesto,” in a stark revelation of the managerial crisis that has swamped Yahoo!’s headquarters, is being taken far too seriously.

The article goes onto explain the deeds of Garlinghouse and also what good has come from those deeds.

Yahoo! should start with accounting for Garlinghouse’s performance. Under his watch, Yahoo! Messenger let a huge opportunity for voice-over-Internet protocol, or VoIP, slip through its fingers as eBay snapped up Skype. And Yahoo Mail dropped behind Google’s Gmail as the most prestigious Web-based email domain.That performance has been more chunky than smooth, yet Yahoo! has gotten off easy. Earlier, Garlinghouse was CEO of VoIP leader Dialpad, which promptly spiraled into bankruptcy, but not before Garlinghouse laid off 90 of his 140 employees. A 2002 case study of Dialpad in the Harvard Business Review discussed how Garlinghouse struggled with a failed business model while rival Net2Phone won a $1.4 billion investment from AT&T as well as deals with Microsoft and Yahoo!.

Before Dialpad, Garlinghouse was a venture capital investor at CMGI, one of the most spectacular dot-com blowouts. Its stock has fallen from $164 in 2000 to $1.40 today. CMGI wasn’t content to be an overvalued, money-losing Internet company; it wanted to breed dozens of them, some under the brown thumb of Brad Garlinghouse.

In 2003, Garlinghouse drifted into Yahoo!, where a signature deal was acquiring — no kidding — Dialpad to create a VoIP division you’ve probably never used. It’s not clear if Garlinghouse owned any of the Dialpad shares that Yahoo! bought in the transaction, but Dialpad seems to have since morphed into one of the superfluous lines of business that Garlinghouse is now advocating shuttering.

An unnamed Yahoo and I have had talks about layoffs. He made a good point, which is echoed by this article. Yahoo! will probably not have to layoff people because people will start jumping ship soon — if this kind of turmoil continues internally, we will start (and I think it has already started) losing some very bright and smart people to our competitors.

Should we layoff people? No. Should be put duplicate efforts together? Yes. Think what awesome product would come out of the marriage of the brain powers of del.icio.us and myweb! Think of the product that would come out if the brains between flickr and photos started to work together! Don’t consolidate and layoff people. Consolidate projects and put all the brain power together.

Here’s Garlinghouse in that 2002 Harvard case study on the peril of “irrational” layoffs: “If you cut your headcount, you destroy your ability to grow … so you cut your headcount again to reduce burn. The result: a death spiral!”

Boy, Garlinghouse should really take the advice of…err…himself. I am advocating that all Yahoos go out and buy a nice jar of Extra Crunchy Skippy and leave it at Garlinghouse’s cube.

Is hype all that people (ahem, investors) remember?  Because if it is, have I got a few bridges to sell.
I have complained about this before.  And, here I am pointing out yet another Google flop.  This time around, it is the much hyped PayPal-killer from Google:  Google Checkout.  When it was released two months ago, [...]

Is hype all that people (ahem, investors) remember?  Because if it is, have I got a few bridges to sell.

I have complained about this before.  And, here I am pointing out yet another Google flop.  This time around, it is the much hyped PayPal-killer from Google:  Google Checkout.  When it was released two months ago, the Google hype machine was at full tilt.  Google-lovers and Google-fanboys everywhere proclaimed that Ebay was going to be in trouble.  Google Checkout was going to kill off PayPal.

Bah.

Just like Google Talk, Google Finance, Google Pages, and Google Reader…Google Checkout is a much hyped flop and Ebay has nothing to worry about.  Don’t believe me?  Check out this article.  There are some serious performance and stability issues with Checkout.  There are reports of Levi.com removing Checkout because of performance.  And there are also reports of Checkout flubs which resulted in two weeks of trying to get an order cancelled.

Remember, Checkout is not beta.

The only thing Google seems to be good at is search.  But, as we are seeing:  The search market share for Google has topped out.  Investors should be a bit more wary at this point.  Google is throwing a lot of products out onto the market and not many of them are showing good returns.  Sure, the products get a lot of hype when the get released, but it’s a lot of noise and not much get-up-and go.  Google’s best product is showing signs of decline as competitors are getting a bigger piece of the pie in search.

But, I have to wonder.  How short are investors’ memories?  Is it only the hype that they remember?

Ever notice that you’re not “surfing” the web much anymore?  Sure, sometimes when you’re researching something, you’ll be going from site to site looking for information.  But, the days of “web surfing” have come and gone — ending a long time ago.  Nowadays, people have “comfort sites” that they visit daily.  My guess is that [...]

Ever notice that you’re not “surfing” the web much anymore?  Sure, sometimes when you’re researching something, you’ll be going from site to site looking for information.  But, the days of “web surfing” have come and gone — ending a long time ago.  Nowadays, people have “comfort sites” that they visit daily.  My guess is that these sites come in these forms:

• Forums for a particular interest of the person (say HowardForums for mobile phone nuts).
• The Default Homepage (say Yahoo!)
• Friend sites — most likely visited via a Feed/RSS aggregator
• A Search Engine — for those times when searching is necessary
• News site
• Finance site
• Online banking
• Social network site (say MySpace, Flickr, or Yahoo! 360)
• Shopping (say Amazon or Ebay)

My question to you is, do you still “web surf” on a daily basis?  Or have you settled into a routine web experience?  One that takes you to familiar and comfortable sites.  What compels you to seek out a website outside of the ones that you visit on a frequent basis?

I’m so tired of the Google hoopla. Everytime they announce some product — that was a rip off of some other site — the media instantly gets a hard-on (sorry, I had to use that phrase because it is quite appropriate for how the media reacts to Google news). After the initial period [...]

I’m so tired of the Google hoopla. Everytime they announce some product — that was a rip off of some other site — the media instantly gets a hard-on (sorry, I had to use that phrase because it is quite appropriate for how the media reacts to Google news). After the initial period of slack-jawed “I’m looking into the light” type admiration, the media instantly starts to proclaim the death of the company that originally implemented the idea. I am soooo tired of this cycle. Let me name a few products:

Gmail = “Death of webmail for Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail”

GFinance = “Death of Yahoo! Finance”

GSpreadsheet = “Death of Microsoft Excel”

GTalk = “Death of AIM and YIM”

GMaps = “Death of Yahoo! Maps”

GPages = “Death of all free webhosting sites”

GBase = “Death of Ebay”

GRRSReader = “Death of Bloglines”

And it goes on and on. It’s plain stupid. Today? It’s GBuy. “Ooooh, Google Buy is going to be the best,” the easily excitable press exclaims. Immediately, they exclaim, “Google Buy is going to be the death of Ebay!” Bah! Get with it people.

GBase was going to be the death of Ebay. Didn’t happen folks. GBase didn’t go anywhere (except for letting spammers post their warez). Gmail, GTail, GFinance, GPages, all of them…they haven’t amounted to much — much less amounted to anything worthy of the press that they get. Hell, things like Gmail and GMaps haven’t had much change to them in a while. Things like Picasa have just recently learned how to do albums! Geez.

The press has better stop drinking the Google Kool Aide.

Sad.  Just plain sad.
By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others.
Stupid Republicans.
Say good-bye to net neutrality.
The concept of [...]

Sad.  Just plain sad.

By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others.

Stupid Republicans.

Say good-bye to net neutrality.

The concept of network neutrality, which generally means that all Internet sites must be treated equally, has drawn a list of high-profile backers, from actress Alyssa Milano to Vint Cerf, one of the technical pioneers of the Internet. It’s also led to a political rift between big Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo that back it–and telecom companies that oppose what they view as onerous new federal regulations.

Well, if you make a lot of long distance calls, this maybe a great deal for you. Skype is now offering free long distance calling to all of the US and Canada. The deal lasts until the end of this year, at which time they’ll decide if they keep on offering this sweet [...]

Well, if you make a lot of long distance calls, this maybe a great deal for you. Skype is now offering free long distance calling to all of the US and Canada. The deal lasts until the end of this year, at which time they’ll decide if they keep on offering this sweet deal. I don’t know how they are going to support this kind of access, but it is a boon for people who like to talk on the phone.

From Skype:

Yes. It is really very, very free. There’s no prepayment, no minimum use, no subscription, no monthly fee, no nothing. You just download and install Skype and then you start calling. Both the caller and the number called must be in either the US or Canada. There are no strings attached.

Skype is really fighting hard to get people using their service instead of all the newcomers. Yahoo! Messenger with Voice costs one cent per minute to make PC-to-Phone calls. Google Talk doesn’t offer up this type of service. And then there are the VoIP companies like Vonage and Packet8 which all require a monthly subscription.

I’m sure the Bells are getting a little anxious.