The downloading process exposes some seriously irritating bugs and/or design flaws in iTunes, however. I live at the northern edge of civilization on an island (well, my Canadian friends would say the southern edge, and after reading coverage of the Tea Party Convention I’m inclined to agree…) and I have “difficult” internet connectivity. This is no fault of my local ISP, who do an amazing job considering where I live.

But I often encounter TCP resets in long downloads given the Motorola Canopy point-to-point wireless I use, and iTunes really behaves badly. Despite having typed my Store password to begin the download, upon resumption, iTunes will ask me again. And again. And again. Possibly once for every stream that needs to be resumed, but it doesn’t seem to be as well patterned as that. The application hasn’t restarted, I haven’t logged out, it’s the same hardware underneath, why can’t the application cache the Store password used to initiate a given set of downloads for the duration? Perhaps only asking me to retype if the application closes and restarts?

This seems trivial, but if it happens frequently, and you’re not sitting in front of the computer to type your password whenever needed, downloading a season of episodes can literally take days. Three thus far, in fact, for a show I’m subscribing to at the moment. With 29 more items to go. Basically, it’s going to take a week of retyping my iTunes Store password to get the entire season down, given my internet connection (which is normally pretty decent for browsing and other purposes).

Doesn’t anybody in Cupertino test this type of use case?

Of course I recognized the name, and that I’d been a user since their beta release, and I remembered renewing my license again this year, but what I couldn’t immediately remember was whether that software was still an integral part of keeping my information current, sync’d, backed up, etc. Basically, is it necessary, or is it cruft?

That’s a general problem these days, and arguably it’s a worse problem on the Mac platform than on Windows, though of course it exists there as well. It’s more of a problem because Microsoft tries to build more of this stuff into Windows itself and its major desktop/server suites. Apple leaves more of it to the ISV community.

And as I noted in a previous post, good Mac software can be had for twenty, forty or sixty bucks. So people, especially professionals and developers, have a tendency to buy new apps just to see if it’s a bit better than the previous generation. I’ve done that with notetaking software, outliners, todo list management, and a bewildering variety of synchronization, backup, and storage apps and utilities.

All of which means that my laptop consistently has more than one “appendix” running — part of the system but functionally useless because it’s not being used.

And all which contributes to complexity and difficulty in troubleshooting. When my contacts database suddenly is empty, or has three or four copies of every contact (both of which seem to happen to me), which link in the synchronization chain is responsible? Is it syncing Address Book to Google Contacts? Plaxo syncing with Address Book?

Ultimately, to manage all this complexity, we’re going to need to be able to map the information flow between applications, so I can ask the question and get an answer. Today, I have to sit down and check each app’s preferences and configuration, and sort of make a list of where things are flowing, and rebuild the picture every time something goes wrong.

In complex systems, just as much vital information is contained in the links between things, as in the things themselves…

There’s a lot of criticism about what the device doesn’t have built-in, or doesn’t support. And there’s been a lot of “why, it’s nothing but a big iPod Touch.” And the usual lists of “must have but missing” features from engineers and developers who are already gnashing their teeth about how useless the iPad will be.

Here’s why we should ignore premature predictions of doom for the iPad.

Sure, there’s nothing shockingly new here. In a sense, it’s a big iPod Touch. Or it’s a slimmed down Tablet PC with integral Kindle. Actually, it’s all of those things.

What we’re forgetting is that Apple’s main strength isn’t necessarily inventing a new category (marketing spin aside), it is in bringing hard-core user research and industrial design to bear on creating devices which end up “crossing the chasm” to the mainstream for a given technology. THAT is what Apple, and Steve Jobs, are good at. I know it’s hard to remember this far back, but in the late 1990’s many of us had MP3 player devices. I had a big clunky one from Creative Labs, that was crafted to look exactly like an old-school Sony Walkman CD player – despite the fact that I was playing MP3 files, somehow it seemed like a good design decision to make the player flat and round and consequently bulky. MP3 players existed, but let’s face it, in 1998 the “mainstream” didn’t have them — your grandparents didn’t have them to take golfing, or walking the beach, etc.

Apple changed that with the iPod. And it wasn’t just the device, it was the ecosystem, and the support, and the deals they made with record labels who were in the midst of watching digital music eat their business.

We also had smartphones. If you’re like me, you probably had several generations of smartphones before you touched an iPhone. I had several Palm phones, a Treo running Palm, a Treo running Windows Mobile, a Blackberry or two, etc. With the exception of Blackberry in business and government markets, smartphones became a “mainstream” phenomenon with the iPhone.

“Tablets” in various form factors have been around awhile too. There are the modified laptops like the Toshibas. I had one at Microsoft, and it was a “tablet” only in the sense that the screen turned around, rendering the entire 6 pound, 2 inch thick laptop a bulky version of a paper writing tablet. Personally, I think the guys at Motion Computing have been the “tablet” makers to watch — thin, small, and I lusted after one apart from the fact that it ran Windows and was underpowered to do so.

So what I think we’re going to see with Apple and the iPad is that they’re taking the best of the tablet PC tradition — i.e., devices like Motion Computing — book readers like the Kindle, and the app ecosystem of the already successful iPhone, and blending it with their unerring ability to do solid industrial design for high technology.

I have no idea what applications the iPad will find. Will it become big in health care, where Motion Computing has made inroads? Will it replace PCs at home for many people with the need only to do email, browse the web, look up information, and manage photos? Who knows at this point, really.

But if you’re betting the iPad will be a failure at this point, just from looking at the specs and what components it does or doesn’t contain, you’re ignoring the big picture. Which is that Apple has an absolutely stellar track record of looking at developing technologies and areas of application, pushing their engineers and designers to produce something easy to use and gorgeous to look at, and then marketing it relentlessly to large, mainstream audiences.

That’s not a guarantee of success every time. But if Jimmy the Greek were still with us, he wouldn’t give you good odds betting against Apple on this one.

It’s game changing not for third-party ISVs already developing for the iPhone, since they’re used to charging 99 cents to a few bucks for an app. For Mac software developers like OmniGroup, it’ll be challenging. There is already a large Mac software ecosystem with apps priced in the $20 – $60 range. These ISV’s have continued to charge such prices even while iPhone app prices dropped a zero, because the difference in functionality and screen size between a Mac laptop and the iPhone is significant. The difference in what users can do is significant.

iWork on the iPad is a laptop/desktop experience, suitable for the vast majority of home and many business users. And yet Apple dropped a zero on the pricing, basically. With a presentation program, word processor, and spreadsheet available for $10 each, or $30 for the entire productivity suite, how will third party ISV’s charge $50 or $60 for an iPad version of their Mac software apps? Perhaps they can’t.

The problem, of course, comes when iPad gains measurable market share, not when rabid Apple fans line up for first-day sales. Give it a couple of years, and there’s a couple of million of these things floating around, and ordinary people buy fewer laptops and have iPads at home or for travel instead. They’ll get used to buying iPad apps for a few dollars more than a pure iPhone app. They’ll get used to being able to do 75, 80, or even 100% of what they used to do on their laptops or desktops (again, I’m talking about non-developers, non-IT professionals here).

And they’ll start rebelling against the notion that a multi-touch capable, gesture controlled, “natural” feeling user experience should cost $10 or $20, but when they need to sit down at a laptop or desktop computer and go back to keyboard and mouse, the OLD experience should cost $50, $100, or more.

So third-party ISVs should be preparing for another phase transition in software pricing, downward. As always, our demands for functionality and usability and seamless integration rise, and our tolerance for premium pricing drops.

But really who’s in trouble given this pricing is Microsoft. Despite iWork on the Mac, the reality is that Microsoft Office still has a lock on the productivity tools market. Especially in businesses. That hasn’t changed, and it won’t change tomorrow.

Nevertheless, anyone who thinks that Microsoft can continue to defend a price differential of hundreds of dollars for Office apps vs. iWork on the iPad, once the iPad gains market share, isn’t paying attention. Businesses, especially US-based ones, are increasingly challenged to control costs and compete in a tough economy.

Office Standard 2007 costs $400, but let’s say you upgraded from a previous version. And let’s say you’re a small to medium business, and for round numbers you’ve got 100 employees. To upgrade everyone to Office Standard 2007 costs you $23995. To instead purchase an application suite priced like iWork — $30 for the bundle, is $3000 for everyone in your company. You just saved $21,000.

Leave aside the details – whether desktop software really will drop to the iPad level. Whether the ease of interoperating with Office is such that businesses could afford to not have Microsoft Office on their desk. The latter is just a matter of development, and the arms race to break compatibility if you’re Microsoft and recreate it fast enough if you’re a third party ISV.

But one thing is clear. A year from now or five years from now, the combination of Apple and Google are aiming squarely to cut Microsoft’s desktop software business off at the knees. Who knows whether they succeed, but the ancillary effect will be a major restructuring of the economics of rich desktop software businesses, since they live in fitness landscape created by the interplay between these large players.

And significant as the iPad hardware might be (more on this in future posts), Apple just shifted the fitness landscape with a bold move on the software side of the industry, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that in the midst of discussing lacking USB ports and cameras and so on.

This morning, fingers crossed, we’ll learn more about the new “tablet” device.  The leaks have been accelerating for days, business partners ringing my iPhone constantly to tell me breaking news, and of course I’ve read all the non-news news purporting to describe authoritative leaks.

But none of it matters, because ultimately what we want to see is Steve, dressed in his usual black and white, stand onstage and give The Demo.  If you’re in the biz, The Demo is King.  The Demo is where you set expectations, destroy preconceived notions.  The Demo is where you win or lose, fundamentally.  Because before The Demo, the chessboard is empty.  The Demo is where you put your pieces down — not in the starting configuration, but hopefully in position to reach mate in the fewest moves possible.

If you’re Doug Englebart, giving the mother of all demos, you literally change the world by showing us the ragged bits that the rest of us will spend the next forty years making smooth and usable and real.  Everything that followed:  Dan Bricklin’s Visicalc, Alan Kay’s pioneering work, Steve and Steve with the Apple II, Bill Gates, Tim Berners-Lee and the Web, Netscape, Linus Torvalds…all of it the work of giants in our field…all of it playing out the possibilities inherent in that mother of all demos.

Steve Jobs consciously aims at game-changing demos:  the original iPhone demo was, as was OS X and the Intel transition.  I don’t know that today’s announcement will rise to that level, but I hope so.

I think our industry is getting tired of playing out the possibilities inherent in a forty-year-old demo.  It would be nice to have some new territory to explore.

Last Friday night, I open an email from Amazon, and it contains a friendly reminder about my Kindle warranty and what it provides me. And in the middle, a little paragraph precisely describing what can happen if you open the default cover/case backwards — describing the cracking I’ve got. And the email encourages you to get in touch with Support.

After decades of purchasing high-tech gadgets and software, naturally I’m skeptical, but this is Amazon, so I shoot them an email and say I’d love to get the cracks fixed so they don’t get worse, but don’t want to be without the Kindle for very long.

Within 15 minutes I get a simple, auto-generated email saying that a replacement Kindle DX is in the shipping queue, and that when it arrives I should simply transfer any non-Amazon content I’ve loaded onto my old one, swap devices, and send the old one back with the pre-paid shipping label provided. In fact, I have 30 days to migrate to the new device and send the old one back (if I don’t, they’ll simply charge me the cost of the device).

I shouldn’t be blown away by this, because Amazon bases their business on fast service, shipment, resolution of problems, etc. When they estimate the delivery date of a book, I know it’s always that date — or earlier. Returns of erroneous shipments or broken items have always been easy. So I should have expected this kind of treatment for the Kindle.

But I didn’t. Somehow, when the product or service is highly technical — not just an order of toiletries, CDs or books — I’ve come to expect crappy service and support. Haven’t you?

Amazon (and to a significant, but lesser extent Apple) continue to show that customer service and advanced technology and services can go together quite nicely. Kudos, Amazon. And thanks — not just for fixing my Kindle, but going out of your way to remind me that I had every right to have my cracked Kindle fixed.

Over on MadsenLab you can read about my research, but here we’ll stick to the standard fare: politics, food, wine, cocktails, books, legal scholarship, and whatever else I feel like discussing.

It’s good to be back and writing again. Cheers.

Here's what EC had to say:

—–

Sometime after my friend Mark and I talked today, I started
coming down with something.  I now have a high fever and I feel like I'm
going to collapse.  But still I toil on at my desk.

I toil on because I'm afraid to lose my job.  I toil on because I'm afraid
to lose my insurance.  I toil on, because I'm afraid for my daughter and
myself – that we will be without food, without access to health care,
without somewhere to live without this job.

I toil on, despite the fact this nation is a nation of taking chances,
despite the fact that I have a brain full of great business ideas that
should be launched.

I toil on, despite the fact that this nation was founded on bootstrapping
and the entrepreneurial spirit and starting things and shaking things up.

I toil on, because somewhere at home, my baby is playing or sleeping or
crying or pooping, or doing any number of the adorable things that she
does, secure in the knowledge that her bottle will always be full; secure
in the knowledge that we'll always be able to go to the doctor if we have
to.  Because I have good insurance at my job – even if the bacon isn't fat
here, it's still a slice, it's our slice, the slice that we need.

That's what I'd say to Obama.  Then I'd add:  universal health care would
help me to be able to take the entrepreneurial risks that made this
country what it is.  Without little people like me bootstrapping ourselves
into something bigger, we are nothing.

That's what I'd say.

If I had a chance.

I'm an ordinary citizen, perhaps a bit more politically involved than average, and a supporter of yours since the moment you gave that fateful speech in 2004.  You brought the possibility of idealism back to politics after its long slumber during my adulthood.  After a long and grueling primary campaign, during which skeptics daily doubted your ability to secure the nomination, and supporters like me mostly held their breath, you showed yourself to be a serious candidate for this job. 

And on the campaign trail, you confounded the pundits who said you couldn't talk about substance, and could only talk in platitudes and airy phrases.  But your mixture of idealism and pragmatism won the day, as did your competence in fundraising and running a campaign.

And now, you have the job. 

Early indications are that you fully understand the gravity of the situation.  Your speech at George Mason on the economy resonated with seriousness of purpose, and more than a few direct echoes of Frankin Delano Roosevelt's First Inaugural Address, given during the depths of the fiscal crisis as the Depression deepened. 

As an American and long-time supporter of your fitness for this job, I ask only a few things of you.

1.  Clearly and honestly explain the situation to your country.  Demand more of us, as we demand the world of you. 

2.  Be honest about your mistakes.  Don't fear the polls, and keep your eyes on how Americans traditionally behaved:  we admire people more when they can admit their mistakes and then go fix them, than we do any amount of skill in hiding the truth.

3.  Don't lose your principles.  You've got the toughest job on the planet as of noon tomorrow, and the temptation to use your power in ways you yourself deplore and have decried on the floor of the Senate and campaign trail will be overwhelming.  Don't give in.  I can't think of anybody I'd entrust more with this responsibility than perhaps Lincoln or FDR, and they're not available anymore. 

4.  Maintain your idealism, and keep creating it in all of us.  What will get us through the next four years successfully is to not let the idealism fade, especially in the face of all that will happen to us in the next year or two, economically.  We need to believe, and the economy needs us to believe, and we need each other to believe.  And we need you to keep helping us believe.

Do these things, Mr. President-elect, and you'll keep the hearts and minds of Americans.  And as we now know to our pain and chagrin, that bond of trust is critical, and has been missing for far too long between the People and their chosen representatives. 

For too long we've had government of the people, without as much government by the people as we should have, and nowhere near enough government for the people. 

Please, Mr. President-elect, restore the balance.  Thank you.

And regardless of what you believe finally ended the Great Depression—whether you believe it was FDR’s New Deal and the buildup to WWII, or the natural regrowth of the economy creating demand which finally exceeded supply, or a bit of both—it is clear that Hoover’s response to economic crisis was tepid and grudging, and FDR promised firm, activist leadership in the face of crisis.

And that activism and energy played a major role in creating momentum and preventing loss of confidence among the banks and investors that require an intricate web of confidence. Confidence in each other’s ability to make good on loans or contracts. Confidence in the ability of business debtors that they will be able to maintain and grow their customer base. Confidence in the ability of those customers to keep their jobs and pay their bills and mortgages.

To the extent that confidence-building worked in the early 1930’s, it was largely FDR himself who managed to bolster the confidence and optimism of the people, while a new cabinet and executive branch filled with America’s best and brightest tried experiment after experiment, argument after argument, to give business and financial leaders the confidence that their investments in growth would be matched by each other’s consumption and slowly increasing spending by consumers.

The situation we face, as everyone seems to grasp somewhere deep within ourselves, is very similar, and requires the same careful husbandry of confidence and optimism in order to kickstart our economy. In preparing some fundraising remarks earlier this fall, I read the early speeches and fireside addresses by FDR. His First Inaugural speech is amazing, and every American who watched President-Elect Obama’s speech at George Mason last week on the economy was watching a modernization and an invocation of that fateful speech.

And my reading of FDR’s great speeches, which did so much to motivate and lead us out of panic and despair in the early days of 1933, led me to wonder what Obama should say to us in his First Inaugural next
week.

The following is my list of things Obama should tell the American people later today.

1. President-elect Obama should explain to us the intricate web of confidence that ties together our economy, and explain in terms that non-economists can understand how it works so that the people will be able to lend their informed support to the plans now being made in Washington. We do not understand the various bailouts and stimulus packages and how they actually lead to the desired result. Please clarify it, because it sounds like we only get one shot at this and we need to get it right.

2. Obama should make it clear that we are not abandoning the principles of commerce and trade, nor are we becoming “socialists” simply because we believe that some problems are bigger than private resources can solve. We’re all believers in free enterprise now, but sometimes the free enterprise system needs collective action and a concerted effort from everyone.

3. And he should make it clear that this ”help from everyone” to kickstart our economy really means that every American plays a crucial role. President-elect Obama should make a patriotic call to stimulate local and regional economic activity, and not just wait for the big multi-national corporations to recover. This will create jobs and get money and local loans flowing again, even if global trade and large, global companies take longer to stabilize.

4. The president-elect should make it clear that investment in America is the patriotic thing to do, and that rebuilding our economy not only helps us, and our children, but the world. Our humanitarian and democratic outreach to the world, our environmental concerns, and our ability to address problems elsewhere in addition to those at home, depends crucially on a healthy economy. America’s place in the world, and our ability to be a force for change and for good, depends on getting back to sound financial and business shape.

5. And he should outline the nature of his plan and promise a series of regular discussions with the American people, in the spirit of FDR’s fireside chats but with the full force of modern media and communications, to ensure that all of us understand the situation, how each measure is designed to work and how we intend to use our scarce resources wisely and avoid waste. And that we understand how we’re progressing, and where we still need work. Treat the people like partners in this enterprise, not “interest groups,” or “demographics” to be polled. Mobilize us for action, as FDR did, and we’ll respond in kind.

6. And finally, President-elect Obama should call upon us all to temporarily put aside the issues that divide us in other ways; social issues, differences in economic approach, and issues of ideology. Not because these aren’t central to our political life and deserve democratic debate and discussion, but because right now, as in the 1930’s and 1940’s, we have serious issues that we need to come together and solve, with one voice, as one people.

And that is what I think President-elect Obama should say to the American people