Jay Haynes

I am not your customer

I can certainly understand Cingular's desire to have me as a customer once I buy an iPhone. And I will be switching from Verizon on the day the iPhone is available.

But this quote got me thinking.

Says Mark Siegel, a Cingular spokesman, "I don't want to leave the impression that these (iPhone) customers are not ours. They are."

I don't ever feel like a customer of a network (and certainly not a satisfied customer). I have switched cell network providers in the past (and cable and DSL providers). But their service is always terrible and my willingness to switch is very high. The difference in bit delivery between them is just not that great - even though they always claim to be better, they just aren't.

What does this mean for the long-term outlook for the networks? Free Wi-Fi is coming to San Francisco and with the iPhone this means that the value-add of Cingular is going to be very low unless they really can make a better network.

I am not holding my breath.

Oh how we love debt

Of course debt can be a good thing (increasing equity returns with leverage). But at a certain point any entity can get over leveraged and debt can actually start destroying value.

We could be reaching that point, if you factor in the $43 trillion in unfunded liabilites.

The graph below is interesting. But it doesn't factor in debt/GDP which is more important (debt/GDP was actually higher post-WWII). And of course, unfunded liabilities are critical and unfortunately not shown on this graph either - which makes our situation even worse.

Iran v2.0

We should educate each other about the history of U.S. - Iranian relationships before the 1970s. Specifically 1953. Otherwise we are doomed to repeat history.

From The CIAs Greatest Hits by Mark Zepezauer.

The history of the CIA in Iran shows that it isn't the failures of the agency we need to worry about, numerous though they are. Its successes-and Iran is one of the biggest-are far more dangerous.

The CIA did exactly what was asked of it in Iran, deposing a mildly nationalist regime that was a minor irritant to US policymakers. As a direct result, a fiercely nationalist regime came to power 26 years later, and it's proved to be a major irritant to the US ever since.

In 1951, Dr. Mohammed Mossadegh, "the most popular politician in the country," was elected Prime Minister of Iran. His major election plank was the nationalization of the only oil company operating in Iran at that time-British Petroleum. The nationalization bill was passed unanimously by the Iranian Parliament.

Though Mossadegh offered BP considerable compensation, his days were numbered from that point on. The British coordinated an international economic embargo of Iran, throwing its economy into chaos. And the CIA, at the request of the British, began spending millions of dollars on ways to get rid of Mossadegh.

The CIA's plans hinged on the young Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi, a timid and inexperienced figurehead. (He was a mere shadow of his father, who had led a pro Nazi regime during World War n. ) In 1953, with CIA backing, the Shah ordered Mossadegh out of office and appointed a Nazi collaborator as his successor. Demonstrators filled the streets in support of Mossadegh, and the Shah fled to Rome.

Undaunted, the CIA paid for pro-Shah street demonstrators, who seized a radio station and announced that the Shah was on his way back and that Mossadegh had been deposed. In reality, it took a nine-hour tank battle in the streets of Tehran, killing hundreds, to remove Mossadegh.

Compared to the bloodshed to follow, however, that was just a drop in the bucket. In 1976, Amnesty International concluded that the Shah's CIA-trained security force, SAVAK, had the worst human rights record on the planet, and that the number and variety of torture techniques the CIA had taught SAVAK were "beyond belief."

Inevitably, in 1979, the Iranian people overthrew the bloodstained Shah, with great bitterness and hatred toward the US for installing him and backing him all those years. The radical fundamentalist regime that rules Iran today could never have found popular support without the CIA's 1953 coup and the repression that followed.

A rare Apple UI issue in iTunes

I know it is rare, but Apple does occasionaly make mistaken UI decisions. The keyboard command for up/down volume is command + up/down arrow, but the graphic volume is left right. And the keyboard command for next/previous song is command left/right, but the songs are displayed up/down.

Consistency between the virtual and the visual is a virtue.

Cost of Content Delivery

The beginnings of a good discussion at Diversion.

Get Me The Geeks...or an Apple

Tonight's 60 Minutes featured a segment on the rise of the geeks. It focused on the founder of the Geek Squad and the growth of the tech support industry.

Among clips of home electronics, HDTVs, and PCs, there were shots of Macs and iPods. But the segment didn't even mention Apple directly. It was overall a pretty disappointing analysis. Yes, stuff is complicated, yes we all hate having six remotes with 50 buttons each, and yes the Geek Squad and other companies have grown rapidly in response to bad UI design. But the real story, I think, is what is coming next.

Of course Apple is leading the way, but it's not just Apple. It was just a little disappointing that there was no mention of Apple's success exactly because they have solved the problem 60 Minutes was reporting.

Why the iPhone keyboard is better

The iPhone virtual keyboard could prove to be a huge success for a few reasons:

1. The iPhone error correction is a big improvement. I think we have all collectively forgotten that it seemed like a crazy idea to spend significant amounts of time emailing with our thumbs! People will get used to typing without tactile feel if Apple does a good job with error correction. Anyone who has spent time emailing with a Blackberry or Treo knows that errors are the name of the game (Blackberry still doesn't have spell correction and the Treo auto correct is sort of a joke). We have all probably received emails from Blackberry users with the auto signature something like: "Please excuse errors, I sent this from my Blackberry." If Apple's error correction is as good as it is rumored to be, the experience of emailing on the iPhone could be fantastic and more productive (less time correcting messages, more time communicating). It reminds me of debates

I used to have in the late 80s with DOS users who were convinced that their text interface was far superior. The "interface" is not the tactical feel of the keyboard - but the whole experience of entering data and accomplishing tasks with the device. The "enter data" interface for any tiny device like a phone is input + error correction, so if the input (the on screen keyboard) is ok and the error correction is much, much better, people will adopt it very quickly. The whole experience of the interface will feel much much better even if the tactile feel is different.

2. Apple will probably roll out over-the-air (OTA) syncing for iCal (and Address Book). Sure the tiny little keyboard is nice, but what made the Blackberry and Treo really successful is OTA. This is a must have for business now because we do everything in real time (change meetings, contacts, locations, email etc.). Apple is addressing the email part of OTA by supporting IMAP, which is great. And it looks like OTA for iCal might be in the works. iCal in Leopard combined with the new iCal Server can do group scheduling, auto schedule (pick a meeting time when everyone is available) and two-way editing (your assistant can edit your iCal).

I would be surprised if the launch of Leopard didn't include a serious update to .mac with hosting for iCal Server (for a fee of course). It should also include a much needed upgrade to .mac sync (an hopefully end the endless arrows chasing each other as you wait for the sync to finish). The next logical step is OTA with iPhone.

3. The market Apple is targeting is huge - and it is not Blackberry users. The hard core Blackberry users are on a corporate Exchange network. They can complain about the lack of keyboard all they want, but they are a slave to the IT department that runs the Exchange server (no real Blackberry user POPs their email). So if they wanted to get off the Blackberry they couldn't anyway. So Apple probably isn't targeting them. Exchange is an insanely expensive solution (software, hardware, IT staff to run it) and ripe for an alternative, so if Apple gets OTA right with iCal and iPhone, you could see some migration, but probably not much in v1.0.

The second target market is "hosted" Exchange servers (like mi8). These work well and are less expensive, but they still ain't cheap - not by a long shot. So Apple could take some share here as well.

But the third, and I think primary, target market for the iPhone is the gigantic number of small businesses who don't have Exchange set up with Blackberry or GoodLink (Treo). If Apple penetrates this market with a simple hosted OTA iCal-iPhone solution it could be a huge growth driver - they buy the iPhone and pay a monthly fee for OTA based on .mac. And regardless of the price of the iPhone, it will be a huge cost savings over any Exchange server solution.

If the browser is as good as it looks, you can even do a totally free version of OTA with Yahoo IMAP for the email and Google Calendar for group calendaring. Tough to beat that price.

So Apple's strategy doesn't have to be "kill the Blackberry". It's probably more like "Blackberry for the rest of us."

I originally posted this in the comments of good discussion on Steven's blog.

100% Apple

My new experiment: see if I can work with a 100% Apple products. Not just hardware, but software.

So far I am on day two and counting.

A few exceptions, I need Excel for work, but “Numbers” is supposed to be part of iWork ’07. I need Firefox for Google Spreadsheets, but they are supposed to support Safari soon. And finally, I use One Key to set application launching from the function keys on my MacBook (hopefully Apple will make this part of the Sys Prefs like the Dashboad & Expose preference). I still have to wait for the iPhone to get off my Treo. And of course, I still use web apps (Basecamp, Campfire, TypePad, etc).

Finder function key

I haven't used Apple's AppleScript before. But it was very easy to learn. Actually I didn't even really learn it. I just hit record to record a series of actions (go to finder, select the first open window).

It still surprises me that there is no quick, easy way to get to the finder with a function key in OS X. You can application switch (with One Key or DoThisNow and others) and you can get to the desktop with the Expose system preference. But you can’t click any key to bring up the Finder itself with its windows open. So I have to mouse to the dock or comman+tab to the Finder icon (which isn’t quick with 15 apps open).

So I created a little Apple Script - my first. It was very simple:

tell application "Finder"
activate
select Finder window 1
end tell

I saved this as an application and set a function key in One Key to run it. It works great.

Jungle Disk

Link: Take your iTunes on the road with WebDAV and S3.

.mac should get an upgrade soon.