Global Nerdy

Drew "Rocketboom" Baron has backed out of a Microsoft Zune launch partnership. He hints at a couple of reasons (including some cryptic stuff about Microsoft's behavior towards him in the past), but the main complaint is that Microsoft put some non-disparagement restrictions around use of their Zune logo on the Rocketboom site in conjunction with the launch.

Naturally, this hits Scoble, etc, etc, and ripples through the blogosphere. Carl "Blackfriars" Howe's post, for example, says:

Come on, guys. An End User Licensing Agreement for a logo? I thought Microsoft wanted publicity for Zune.

Props to Drew for recognizing an attempt to gag bad reviews in advance. Those efforts always backfire, and this one appears to be proving that rule. And given that Engadget's latest screenshot of Zune installation errors are reinforcing Microsoft's reputation for buggy software, Drew seems to have been appropriately leary of being able to say only good things about the Zune experience.

I don't know whether Baron (or, for that matter, Blackfriars) is being fair. I'm sure every company has standard, boilerplate langauge stating that their trademarks can't be used to "disparage" the company. But, fair or not, it's teh social.

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Tags: social, Zune, Microsoft, Rocketboom, logo

A quick widget note. Ajaxian says the W3C wants to stop the widget madness and put some standards around the whole space:

Arve Bersvendsen of Opera let us know about the new working draft from the W3C: Widgets 1.0.

Everyone and their mother have created their own widget specifications, and now as a developer you need to make choices. Do you want it to work on Dashboard? Google? MSN? Yahoo!?

If the big hitters supported this widget standard then we could write once, widget everywhere. Kinda :)

Maybe someday writing widgets will be as easy as creating web sites!

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Tags: widgets, W3C, standards

AppleInsider (a daily visit for me) seems to have gotten a bit ahead of itself with this article suggesting that a Disney patent filing heralds a wireless iPod from Apple:

Built-in wireless connectivity is an inevitable feature in the evolution of Apple Computer's iPod digital media players, and it appears that Walt Disney Co. could be ready and waiting to deliver some of its live ESPN content when the first wireless models arrive.

In a patent filing made last Nov. and published by the United States Patent and Trademark Office on Thursday, the entertainment conglomerate detailed plans for a ESPN-branded cell phone user interface that allows users to wirelessly receive ESPN video content, scores and other sports-related information in realtime.

However, it notes that the systems and methods described in the filing, titled "Graphical user interface for electronic devices," may also be used with electronic devices configured using a different hardware makeup.

"For example," the company wrote, "systems and methods of the present disclosure may be applied to other mobile electronic devices, such as PDAs, pagers, etc., and to other handheld electronic devices, such as, e.g., the iPod digital music player (available from Apple Computer, Inc.)."

Whoa there, Trigger! Not so fast. The way I read the filing, it specifically groups the "different hardware" devices upon which this wireless widget could operate into two types: "mobile," and "handheld." What's the difference? Take a look at the examples.

The mobile category includes pagers and PDAs. Now, who knows what they mean by "PDAs" but pagers are definitely mobile devices connected to a network. They clearly distinguish this class of devices from merely handheld things, like the iPod. An iPod is only mobile in the sense that you can put it in your pocket, but it's tethered to a computer in order to be useful.

Now, do I think we'll see iPods with wireless capabilities? Probably. [Do I ask myself questions and answer them? Yes.] I haven't got any insight into whether that means an iPhone, or Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth for iPods, or both, but this filing doesn't look like evidence of anything. So, smoke perhaps, but no fire here.

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Tags: iPod, Disney, ESPN, wireless, widget, iPhone

I've been thinking about this story over the morning and, no matter how I look at it, it seems like a pretty bad idea. A New Scientist article has a laywer/professor calling for ISPs to be liable for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks emanating from their networks:

Internet service providers (ISPs) should be made legally liable for the damage caused by "denial of service" (DoS) attacks carried out via their networks, a leading internet lawyer says.

At a conference called Blocking Denial of Service Attacks on the Internet, to be held in London on 13 November, Lilian Edwards, an internet lawyer based at the University of Southampton, UK, will argue that legal measures must be taken if these attacks are to be stemmed. Edwards notes that ISPs currently have no legal obligation to check data relayed to and from internet users. She thinks, however, that governments could require them to do so.

Where to begin? Let's start with the fact that once you accept a government mandate that ISPs are somehow responsible for some harmful traffic (DDoS packets), what's to stop ISPs from being held responsible for all harmful traffic, such as the transmission of (wait for it…wait for it…) child pornography (that's right, I'm doing this for the kids)? Furthermore, the definition of "harmful" is important. I think traffic on peer-to-peer network protocols should be treated by default as benign, but I'm sure Big Content would think otherwise. How about "hate literature," or propaganda from the terrorist enemy of the day? You see where I'm going with this: the ISP marketplace can only function if the job (as defined by the government) is that of a neutral carrier of traffic, shuffling every packet with equal disinterest.

Moreover, the marketplace is actually fielding the kind of services Ms Edwards describes. Both AT&T and Verizon, to cite just two examples, tout security in their backbones, including the ability to detect and defuse DDoS attacks before they hit their customers' network gateways. DDoS attacks are, ultimately, an economic problem—they degrade network performance, and can halt online business—and the victims can and should treat it as a business risk to be mitigated through technological means. There are plenty of ways for them to do so without the government mandating that ISPs carry the bag.

It's a curious choice of target for the involuntary assigment of liability and risk transfer. Surely the ISPs of the world aren't the most responsible party in a DDoS attack? What of the companies who provide vulnerable operating systems? The customers who misuse, misconfigure, or undermaintain those systems, making them ideal zombie targets? ISVs whose software defects render systems vulnerable? And, of course, we have the criminals conspiring to commit these crimes themselves. There's enough blame to go around that it seems strange to focus the blunt instrument of government regulation on ISPs in particular.

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Tags: DDoS, ISP, liability, regulation, security

I wouldn't expect Arik "Byte of the Apple" Hesseldahl to come out with a rave for Zune, but I do expect him to be clear-eyed about the prospects for Microsoft's latest iPod challenger. That's why I actually take it seriously when he says Zune is "Falling Down on Cool."

Remember the three rules of cool, as documented by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker almost a decade ago. First: The act of discovering cool causes cool to move on. If you accept that the iPod is still cool, as many still do, then the Zune can't help but seem an arriviste, an interloper, poseur product encroaching on well-defined "cool" territory. When the uncool discover a cool place, the cool take their business elsewhere. Microsoft's a little light on the cool bona fides, despite the Xbox 360.

The Zune will seem a not-pod, proving the second rule of cool: It cannot be manufactured, only observed, and then by those who are themselves cool. An iPod is a requisite accoutrement of cool. This is the result of a carefully constructed marketing effort on Apple's part. Any attempt that Microsoft makes to market the Zune will fall short of the high bar set by Apple, which has an almost natural sense for turning its ads into entertainment. Describe for me three Apple TV ads you remember from the last two years. Now, try to describe for me three Microsoft ads. Bet you can't. That's the Apple marketing machine at work.

Finally, there's the third rule of cool: You have to be cool to know cool. And since when is Microsoft cool? The iPod was cool from birth. The Zune will be seen for what it is: a me-too product that is expressing Microsoft's envy at not being cool. It will carve out its own niche of the market, but by this time next year, it will be considered a dismal failure.

A lot of tech punditry focuses on the feature set ("feeds and speeds") and buzzword compliance ("it's social-x!") of new new things, which means it almost always loses sight of the irrational, emotional factors that go into making one product a hit and dozens of other similar, perhaps even more capable, products duds.

Rules for cool may be as hit-and-miss as rules for happiness, or rules for art, but the fundamental observation—that iPod is a smash in large part because of its inherent cool factor—points to a giant challenge for Microsoft.

The popularity of a closed system is determined by its ability to fulfil on the expectations of the customer (and not because IBM annoints you as the perferred OS for their new PC thingy). In a mass consumer electronics market where the only performance concern is battery life (you can't meaningfully claim music performs better—3x faster!—on one digital audio player over another), and there's no exclusive content advantage (all online music and media stores come to offer basically equivalent catalogs over time), Microsoft can't just say "Newer! Better! Faster! More! Now with Office for Zune!" It comes down to the customer's personal, inarticulate desire. If that desire is for "anything but an iPod," Microsoft's in luck. If it's for "something cool, like an iPod," then Microsoft has to hope there's something about the Zune people aren't seeing yet. 

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Tags: Zune, Microsoft, cool, iPod

Looks like Meebo and Reddit are being cast as the El Mariachi of the startup world. Hits that got made largely outside of the "studio system" for an almost mythically low amount of money. The $7,000, financed on credit cards movie became something of an archetype following Rodriguez' success. The Times is doing their best to establish the same mythology in the technology world:

In the last couple of years, hundreds of other Internet start-up companies in Silicon Valley and elsewhere have followed a similar trajectory. Unlike most companies formed during the first Internet boom, which were built on costly technology and marketing budgets, many of the current crop of Internet start-ups have gone from zero to 60 on a shoestring.

Some have gone without venture capital altogether or have raised far smaller sums than venture investors would have liked. Many were sold for millions before venture capitalists could even get in. That has been a challenge for venture capitalists, who have raised record amounts in recent years and need places to put that money to work.

“V.C.’s hate it; they want you to take big money,” said Jay Adelson, who is the chief executive of two start-ups, Digg and Revision3. Digg took some venture money, but far less than backers offered, and Revision3 has been running on about $850,000 raised from a group of angel investors.

Won't somebody please think of the venture capitalists?

The article is right in that it takes a lot less to get an online business off the ground these days. A lot of the expensive infrastructure built out of the telecom boom (bandwidth, data center capacity) is available for much less than it initially was being sold for. Combine that with rich free (as in speech and beer) and open platforms, languages, and development toolkits, and a better understanding of how to turn HTML and JavaScript into a real application UI, and you can deliver real software but as a service.

Scaling up won't even impose the same costs it has. Imagine building the next Meebo not on rented servers, but out of virtual appliances deployed on something like Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Simple Storage Service (S3). You get to leverage Amazon.com's buying power and management efficiencies, and you don't have to scale in advance of your worst-case-scenario capacity forecasts.

Even so, don't expect to see your favorite general partners tapdancing by the highway for nickles any time soon. Besides not knowing of any VCs who can tapdance, a company still needs serious money to serve a global audience, particularly if it wants to get to that level quickly. Bootstrapping and cadging together angel money is a slow process. Moreover, the low barriers to starting up a company mean that there's just that much more noise in the market. Breaking free of the crowd is an expensive proposition, and a few million bucks wouldn't hurt.

So, while starting your technology company has gotten cheaper, it certainly hasn't gotten any easier. Nor has it become magically inexpensive to grow your company for the long run. Rember, once the studios discovered El Mariachi, the $7,000 wonder, they spent several times that amount on print transfers (from 16mm to 35mm, if you must know). Without that later stage, larger scale investment, nobody would have seen the movie.

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Tags: Meebo, Reddit, startups, VC, El Mariachi, Amazon.com, EC2, S3

Big news day for Zune, and it's not really spinning in Microsoft's direction. The Wall Street Journal's Walter "Uncle Walt" Mossberg and the New York Times' David "I Haven't Got a Nickname for Him" Pogue both published their thoughts on Microsoft's new player today. Pogue bottom lines his experience this way:

Competition is good and all. But what, exactly, is the point of the Zune? It seems like an awful lot of duplication — in a bigger, heavier form with fewer features — just to indulge Microsoft’s “we want some o’ that” envy. Wireless sharing is the one big new idea — and if the public seems to respond, Apple could always add that to the iPod.

Then again, this is all standard Microsoft procedure. Version 1.0 of Microsoft Anything is stripped-down and derivative, but it’s followed by several years of slow but relentless refinement and marketing. Already, Microsoft says that new Zune features, models and accessories are in the pipeline.

For now, though, this game is for watching, not playing. It may be quite a while before brown is the new white.

While Mossberg concludes:

Overall, the iPod and iTunes are still the champs. Still, I expect the Zune to attract some converts and to get better with time. And this kind of competition from a big company with deep pockets and lots of talent is good for consumers in the long run.

So neither of them trashed Microsoft's newest pretender to the iPod throne, but this is a high-stakes game, and these aren't ringing endorsements, either.

Seriously, do you want your stuff being sold as "good for you in the long run?" That's the way you sell cod liver oil, not a digital music player.

Tags: Zune, Microsoft, Mossberg, Pogue, Apple, iPod