Month: September 2005

In an interview with CNET, the internet pioneer evangelized sensible ideas about public policy for the internet.
Cerf told CNET that he finds it ””troublesome” that various states and localities have been proposing and implementing measures to outlaw municipally sponsored broadband networks. “Why on Earth would we inhibit people from making their own investments–deciding, for example, to float a bond?”‘.
Cerf has also been out talking to Hollywood, encouraging them to ‘view the Internet as an alternative distribution outlet. “Some are responding positively, but some legal departments are still having trouble swallowing the idea.”‘
Hopefully Cerf’s well-respected presense and active evangelism will help Google throw its weight behind good tech policy and counteract the force of the telecom and content oligopolies. The tech business strategy mantra is “commoditize your complements.” Google benefits when there are fatter pipes available to more people, and more content available for indexing and related ads. The world will get better when the innovative business that see the fortunes to gain pry off the stranglehold of stagnant businesses who only see what they have to lose.

Socialtext is considering the use of Asterisk as a telephony server. We use a mishmash of skype, vonage, POTS, and freeconference.com to support our distributed team. It’s amazing that it can be done at all, but the string and baling wire is getting tiresome. “Can you hear me” isn’t amusing any more, and wastes plenty of valuable time.
The open source telephony server toolkit has tremendous potential to provide low-cost telecom services for small-to-mid-sized businesses But somebody needs to step up and market the heck out of it.
I was browsing through the Asterisk site itself, and the sites for some Asterisk VARs. The sites all focused on a long, long, long list of features. The laundry list is probably helpful for a telecom geek who knows exactly what she is looking for, and is in search of the specific set of protocols, hardware devices, and functions.
The “feature list” approach is next to useless for a small business person who wants to know how their telecom needs can be met effectively. A good marketing person would talk to small business people and understand what sets of capabilities they’re looking for in a phone server. Then they would explain, step by step, what Asterisk can do, and what the packages contain. The laundry list of features would show up on the site as a third level of detail, when the customer, now with a better understanding of what they are looking for, can see the details and compare to alternatives.
What’s needed isn’t marketing fluff — airy promises about enhanced productivity solutions yada yada. It’s for basic, clear, education so customers can learn what to buy and how to buy it.

Personal computers were overwhelmingly successful in because they supported a wide variety of software and peripherals. PCs put digital control of words and data into the hands of end-users, routed around central IT bottlenecks, and a multi-billion dollar market was born.
Special-purpose word processing computers bit the dust. IBM’s monolithic model — where you bought the computer, storage, peripherals and software from the same vendor — lost market share. Microsoft played a huge role in making the PC explosion happen in the 80s and 90s.
Now, Microsoft is breaking this model that made it successful with its upcoming Windows Vista operating system. Audio and video are the latest media to move from the exclusive control of central distribution into the hands of end-users. And Microsoft has written Vista to keep that control out of end-users’ hands.
This News.com story explains how Vista is designed to restrict audio and video capabilities:

For the first time, the Windows operating system will wall off some audio and video processes almost completely from users and outside programmers, in hopes of making them harder for hackers to reach. The company is establishing digital security checks that could even shut off a computer’s connections to some monitors or televisions if antipiracy procedures that stop high-quality video copying aren’t in place.

The News.com article goes into more detail on how Vista reduces opportunites for software developers, hardware devices, and end-users.
This is a fine reason not to upgrade to Windows Vista when it comes out. A software upgrade ought to provide customers a better product, not a worse product.
This is also an opportunity for entrepreneurs building on Linux and web-based services. People who can package easy-to-use, open personal creativity systems have a vast market to gain that’s being left behind by Microsoft.

The superb What Geeks experience contrasts with the dismal customer service black hole which is Cingular Wireless.
My account has fallen victim to the merger between Cingular and AT&T Wireless. I sent Cingular a payment, but continued to get dunning phone calls. It turned out that while I had changed the address from Cingular to AT&T, I had failed to update my account number to the new Cingular account. They couldn’t find my payment. So I double-paid using my credit card to keep them from turning off the account.
The next step is to fax bank and bill-pay records of the transaction to their research department. The support person had a helpful demeanor, but was unable to confirm the fax number of the research department, or any way to check on the problem once the records had been faxed in. I’m scheduled to get a call back on Wednesday.
In the meantime, Cingular has a visible amount of my money earning interest somewhere. If one has bad memories of MCI billing “glitches” that turned out to be genuine, one might start to be suspicious at this point. There’s plenty of money to be made by double-billing people who have problems with the AT&T conversion. Hanlon’s Razoroffers some mild comfort to the paranoid: “Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence.”
p.s. Here’s Chris Shipley of Network World and the Demo conferences telling her story about getting stuck in the AT&T/Cingular transition.

I dreaded an endless cross-vendor finger-pointing maze when when the Microsoft documentation for securing a wireless network contradicted the Linksys documentation, and the Microsoft rep tried to send me to Fujitsu.
At that point, I gave up on the vendors and called Whatgeeks a rental help desk service that promised assistance at $.99 per minute. The Whatgeeks tech support person was superb. He helped me through configuring security for a network with several versions of Windows and different speeds of network cards. Then he helped with another network misconfiguration. The tech was polite, informative, knowledgeable and efficient. What great customer service. Highly recommended.