Thinking aloud

I was in the new Natick Collection Apple store tonight. (Yes, the “Natick Collection” is just a mall — but to be tragically hip it had to become a “collection”.)

The place was mobbed and we finally got a chance to try the new iPods.  I immediately went for an 80GB iPod Classic to compare it to the 5th gen 80GB model I currently have.

My first impression was that Cover Flow made the thing very slow. Yes’s Owner of a Lonely Heart was loaded on this unit and while I listened to it, I rapidly pressed the center button. As any iPod owner knows, pressing the center button while you play a song takes you through a loop of additional play functions, like skipping back and forth or changing the rating of the song. I was doing this to see if Apple added any new functions to the loop. They did — the ability to shift in and out of shuffle mode.

But what blew me away is that if you press the button rapidly while the song is playing, the music stutters. I couldn’t believe it…I tried every iPod Classic in the store and they all did it.

Apple is now in its baroque period: constantly guilding the lilly with pretty stuff while the basic technological content slips. The fact they shipped the device like this is proof positive that Apple is cruising on design and brand, and that the technological core of brilliant innovation they used to combine with imagination has begun to wane.

As Porky Pig says,  ”Th-th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks, for the iPod.”

I am well-known to be car crazy. And BMW is well-known as one of the most desirable brands in the world. So, it’s no surprise I draw many lessons from them and try to apply them to high-technology marketing in general. Trust me, this brand has enthusiasts (”a community” in Web 2.0-speak) to die for.

What the marketing whizzes who will ”teach” you how to have a brand like BMW don’t get is the flawless head-fake BMW’s marketing machine routinely executes by producing the exact kind of propaganda their hard-core community wants to consume while at the same time officially ignoring that community.

Two examples. First, this document describes in numbing detail the innovations and design philosophy of the then-new 2006 BMW 3 Series. Ostensibly, it’s for internal use only. But this document “leaked” into the enthusiast community and how many times do you think I, for example, have read this document? (Answer: too many. Most obscure thing I learned? That the interior door pulls for the left and right front doors are different, a point BMW makes to stress that real design takes into account things like the location of the window switches. Now, go look in your car. Are the pulls mirror images of each other? Hmmmm?)

How many times do you think other enthusiasts have read it? Now think about how many times its target audience — salespeople in BMW dealerships — read it. Brilliant marketing: write something “exclusive” for an audience that could care less, but make sure it gets out — as a leak — to the people who really care.

Today, the BMW world community is all a-titter…just freakin’ shakin’…with excitement over the new M3 (pictured above from the BMW USA web site in “European trim”…another nod to the dreams and aspirations of hard-core BMWphiles).

How to keep the excitement at fever pitch? Simple: issue a 93-page press kit on the car. Make sure it leaks so the enthusiast sites can post it. Fill it with an rich mix of over-the-top hyperbole (”…the BMW M3 has ranked alone as the epitome of ultimate dynamism derived directly from motorsport, a car offering powerful and superior aesthetics, as well as a truly incomparable driving experience…”) and ennui-inducing technical detail (”…electronically controlled power screwdrivers [are used] on all critical bolted connections…”). Then, in the most brilliant move possible, delay introducing the product into your largest market until the propaganda has generated intense longing in the community. The link above is for the UK introduction. Convenient, ain’t it?, that the US and UK markets share a common (OK, nearly mutually-intelligible) language.

I don’t have the words to describe how astonishingly successful BMW is at managing (or is it ”manipulating”?) its community. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go re-read all 93-pages…

While everyone else was drooling over the iPhone, I knew to stay away. I suspected a consumer disaster of epic proportions when Apple, rightly famous for its brilliant products and exquisite marketing, collided in the marketplace with AT&T, one of the worst consumer vendors in the history of Earth.

Cellular One…no AT&T Wireless…no Cingular…no AT&T has been the target of repeated customer lawsuits (here and here) and has done just about everything it can do to customers from over-selling Digital One Rate in the late 1990’s to consistently scoring at the bottom of Consumer Reports subscriber surveys.

In fairness, none of the cell companies are very good. But the prize for being the worst for the longest and consistently treating customers like dirt goes to whatever-they-are-calling-themselves-today AT&T.

When Apple, the control freak of the consumer electronics biz, made the rounds of carriers to see which would allow it to control the user experience (this is from Wall Street Journal stories that you need a subscription to read), only AT&T signed up and in return got an exclusive for the iPhone.

I’ll bet you Steve Jobs and Apple are regretting that decision. It’s been a mess, with the ‘Net exploding with horror stories around activation and porting numbers from other carriers. AT&T and Apple are both minimizing the impact publicly, saying that it’s only a few customers.

I know how I’d feel if I’d just made a $2000 commitment to the iPhone — $600 plus 24 months of service at a minimum of $60 — and I was in the “2%” having problems. (Get this, even if you are an AT&T customer you must still activate for two more years. Talk about extending the sentence!)

C’mon…we all know when they’re saying “we had an unexpected surge” or “we’ll clear it up soon” it means it’s outta control. Can we really believe that AT&T didn’t know how many iPhones would be in the stores on June 29th? That they couldn’t have sized their systems to prepare for that number?

The thing is, this must be amazingly painful inside Apple. I feel for them. They tried to keep control of the experience, but they aren’t a cell phone operator…they just really don’t know how to screw customers.

AT&T has sure taught Apple something about control this week. It’s one lesson I hope Apple doesn’t take to heart.

I apologize for the knowledge-base-like title of this post, but I did it in hopes the search engines will index it and save some other poor shlub the four months of effort it took me to get my iPod to synch with my HP Pavilion desktop.

In case you found this post after months and months of searching for others who have the problem that under Vista iTunes slows to a crawl and will say “syncing iPod” for three days or more without actually doing anything and can’t wait to read my more detailed tale of wow, here’s the link to what you need.

Now, back to my tech support catharsis. I upgraded to Vista from XP on my Pentium D 3Ghz machine right after Vista shipped. Everything worked but the iPod. When I connected it, it would hang. The rest of the system was fine.

OK, I figured, Apple wasn’t supporting iTunes on Vista. So, I’ll wait.

Then, both Apple and Microsoft started fixing the problems. Plus, this same iPod connected and synched flawlessly on my ThinkPad running Vista. If you can get a ThinkPad running Vista to synch with your iPod…well you get the idea.

So, I swapped cables on the HP. I uninstalled and reinstalled iTunes and QuickTime dozens of times. Finally, I wiped the hard disk and reinstalled Vista cold on the theory that the XP upgrade left vestigial shmutz that messed up iTunes.

Nothing — and I mean nothing — worked. Calls to Apple had them scratching their heads as well. Search after search on every search engine with every combination of search terms I could think of produced nothing of use. One thing years of technical trouble-shooting has taught me is that you rarely discover a new problem yourself. Especially after four months, someone had to have had this problem. But just wasn’t yielding to my attempts to find even a small clue.

Finally, in an act of desperation, I connected an old 2G FireWire iPod to the HP and it worked perfectly.

Voila! It must be the USB ports, right? Right. But where do you get updated USB drivers for Vista? Actually, you don’t. You get updated .INF files for the chipset in your computer (if it’s an Intel chipset on the motherboard) that tell Windows Vista how to configure the USB ports. Apparently, the .INF files that ship with Vista aren’t compatible with this motherboard’s chipset and the Apple iPod. Imagine that: the installed configuration of the OS (remember, I installed from scratch) doesn’t have compatible configuration files for the USB drivers…at least for this motherboard and chipset combo.

Every other USB  device appeared to work perfectly, with the exception of the speaker mute button on my HP USB keyboard. That fact made this problem even more devilishly hard.

So, there’s my tale of woe for the Internet community in hopes it helps somebody. If you have an HP Pavilion with an Intel chipset and iTunes won’t synch with your USB iPod, update the .inf files.

First, I hope this racy image won’t have the MPAA giving my blog an R rating…but it was such a cool graphic I couldn’t help myself.

Well…ahem…back to the post at hand.

I’ve been taking some…uh…commentary from both friends and business associates about my apparent infatuation with all things blog and podcast, but especially about all things WordPress. You know, comments like “It’s OK to stop ranting about this now” and “Here comes the blogger.”

Mostly I smile and take it in stride because I know what they don’t: there’s a subculture around WordPress that is worldwide, massive and far more rabid that I could ever be.

It’s simple. WordPress is just too cool to ignore. Consider: a multi-user content management system easy enough for non-techies to author in and which middling geeks can setup and maintain for…uh…zero dollars.

But it’s not just that the system is so rich. It’s that there’s this amazing community that supports and enhances it. It’s the whole subculture that makes it so engrossing.

And what’s always amazed me about technical subcultures is their binary nature. Once you stumble onto (or into) them, being involved is like driving a fast car on the track. It consumes you a little.

The other side is that if you aren’t “in it,” not only does the subculture not exist at all for you, but you are likely to swear the subculture can’t exist. If someone twists your arm and forces you to look, the binary off state makes you minimize the value of the subculture (”Who reads blogs? I don’t know anyone important who reads them.” “Nobody’s making any money from blogging.” “My customers are pizza delivery people.” “Blog, schmog.”).

Today, two things happened that made it clear to me I’m clearly in the on state with the WordPress subculture.

First, I found the WordPress podcast. No surprise here…I loved it. This is a high-quality, authentic podcast about the subculture. It’s proof positive this thing has gotten bigger than outsiders can see.

Then, tonight, I had a long email thread with a plugin developer whose plugin isn’t working for me. Lemme tell you, Microsoft and IBM can’t support a product better than this or at lower cost. This guy is doing it for the community…for the subculture…because he likes it and he knows how important it is.

So, all I can say is, it’s good enough for me.

I’ve been Turkmen-bashing Apple here a lot (just read the most hilarious obit for Saparmurat Niyazov) for not yet having released a Vista-compatible iTunes. I can’t decide if it’s out of what I suspect is pique at Microsoft having shipped an OS that’s so Mac-like or, more probably, if it’s being a big, slow and unresponsive conglomerate that’s cruising more on astonishing marketing than satisfying customers.

Lest it be said I never have a nice word for Apple (as is often said about me and Microsoft, to whom I will shortly return to bashing like Niyazov’s beloved melons dropped off a roof), I gotta say my new 80GB iPod’s audio quality simply blows me away.

I have two kids. A teenager and a tween. As you might imagine, they are hard on iPods, destroying an average of one every 18 months. That’s OK, because the stinkin’ batteries don’t last that long anyway.

(Roger Greene, for whom I used to work at Ipswitch, is apparently as inveterate a heat-seeker as I am. When he upgraded years ago to, I think, a 4G iPod, he asked me if I wanted his 20GB 1G unit. Even though I already had a 10GB 1G iPod, I was glad to have the spare unit – my kids had already started eating iPods. Today, neither his nor my 1G iPod can last the two minutes it takes to play The Doors’ Hello, I Love You. And the $15 Apple sent me to make up for the short battery life buys about 4% of the 5.5G 80GB iPod. Thanks so much, Apple. At least you could honestly assert every successive iPod had better battery life than the previous generation.)

In what is probably a self-serving justification for satisfying my toy habit, the way it works here is that the kids get my latest iPod as a hand-me-down when they kill one of theirs. I get the new one. (-:

This time, I was really worried about passing along my 60GB 5G black iPod video when Becca came home and said:

“Dad, the iPod broke.”

“You mean you dropped it? Treated it like a bookmark between your 500 page history and math books in your backpack?”

“C’mon, Dad! Do you have to be so annoying? It just broke.”

The audio quality of that 5G iPod was superior, delivering vastly better performance than Bill Machrone heard on the 4G iPod. If you are willing to make slightly larger MP3’s using LAME’s VBR mode (I use 320 kbps as the maximum bit rate) and something like EAC (troublesome as it is to use) to really get them bits off the disc cleanly, you can produce MP3’s I defy you to differentiate from the uncompressed WAV file. With my Sennheiser PX100 phones, the 60GB iPod sounded sublime. Sure…purists will complain about “artifacts” and other inventions normal people cannot hear. But with this unit, there were times I would be running and would have to stop dead just to listen to the music. It was just that sublime.

But I am happy to report that the 5.5G 80GB unit I bought to replace the 60GB unit I gave my kid sounds even better. I wonder if the improvement is due to better decoding. But increasingly, I have come to think that the 5.5G unit sounds so good because Apple reduced noise in the amplifier.

Unlike nearly every MP3 player I’ve heard, this 5.5G unit says completely silent as you crank up the volume in phones with no program material. No hiss, no pops. Just silence. When used with the Logic7 audio system (13 speakers, 450 watts) in my car, the sound is simply astonishing.

This thing is so good it’s almost worth the price Apple makes me pay for a scratch-seeking, astonishingly fragile, non Vista-compatible MP3 player.

</Turkmen-apple-bashi>

Hello…Apple? Could you please please pretty please ship the freakin’ update of iTunes for Windows Vista?

I know – I just know – you have the thing finished. After all, if nearly everybody else could have their products somewhat ready for Vista, couldn’t you? I mean you own the whole MP3 marketplace, right? Surely someone on the iTunes team had access to MSDN and copies of Vista since frikin’ November, when it shipped to businesses.

You’re just waiting to inflict suffering on Vista early adopters, right? I don’t care if it’s spite or callousness. You’ve had your fun. Now, you gotta get over it, move on and ship the damn thing.

Seriously, you’ve made the point: Vista is hard to upgrade to. But is it really necessary to make the point by killing my iPod? I can’t sync pictures (I left the darn computer on overnight), music and podcasts syncing is a mess and takes forever. My library is a disaster. If you can ship a fix to play iTunes store purchases, you can ship the whole thing.

C’mon now…you’ve made the point? How about acting like you like the customers who bought iPods to use with Windows.

I know that in the torrent of comment, wailing and teeth-gnashing the blogosphere, podosphere and ipodo-universe will generate about Steve Job’s comments on digital-rights management, my little post here will live in obscurity. Still, I can’t help myself: I’m blue in the face with envy…Envy of Apple’s marketing brilliance. And the power they have to call the kettle black.

Face it, this diatribe is as self-serving, as blind to reality, as any piece of propaganda written during the Cultural Revolution. Apple doesn’t give a damn — not a freakin’ blob of spittle — about “openness” or “accessibility.”

But, by putting the onus on the record companies for the big, bad DRM Apple is “forced” to use (against its will!), they neatly avoid the real issue: they’d rather die than open iPod to anyone.

But the world will applaud Jobs for taking this stance. Apple has neatly deflected the fact that its near monopoly of digital music players and downloads gives it market power it refuses to use. And by smearing everyone from Microsoft to the big record companies, Apple brilliantly panders to the conventional wisdom while adding luster to its brand.

Man, these guys are good…really, really good. I only wish I could stop feeling like Winston Smith.

Wow! Is this Internet thing powerful or what?

Over the Xmas holiday, a well-known security expert and professor in New Zealand named Peter Gutman wrote and posted on the ‘net a scathing critique of Windows Vista’s new DRM technology.

Now, it’s nearly impossible for you to go anywhere on the ‘Net without seeing people podcast and blog about it.

Wait…hold on…wait! Before you decide you would rather die than read an expose of Vista security, consider Gutman’s “Executive Executive summary”:

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

The entire paper is full of such pithy, outraged writing, and I highly recommend it to you.

But I am struck by two things…beyond my outrage at the allegations Gutman makes.

First, this is another example of the overriding importance of the ‘net. People from the CAD community, the security community and a bazillion other communities have begun fervent discussions of this paper. Normally, these communities are somewhat isolated from each other. But when something like this “breaks out” into general discussion among communities, it’s a beautiful thing to watch and so much more powerful.

Second…and here’s where I can’t help myself…I just love it when MSFT gets whacked. I know they’ve tried hard to reform themselves. I know they aren’t the overarching power broker they once were. And I know there are lots of hard-working and bright people in Microsoft. Still, they deserve it.

Microsoft is a leader in an industry where strong, undiluted ideas come right at them. They can’t plead innocence. But they have a consistent habit of being tone deaf.

I’m sorry that it makes me gleeful that they’re getting whacked. But it amuses me to watch a company that built a monopoly on the back of an open, ubiquitous platform clumsily close that platform and pay the price at the hands of multiple online communities.

I am seriously bent out of shape by an editorial entitled “Franchise Freedom” that I read in the January 2, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal.

I can’t link to the editorial here, because even the Journal’s red-meat-Republican opinions are locked behind a subscription site. (How very web-centric…how very authentic it makes me think they are when they report on the Internet. See?…I’m so upset I am “side-ranting.”)

What’s got me so fired up are the unfounded, baseless accusations printed in the editorial to add emphasis to the Journal’s support of the smoke-filled-room FCC action to “deregulate” the cable TV franchising process.

Fortunately, nobody believes this FCC gift to the regional Bells will stand.

So, enter the WSJ…defender of mega-telcos against people like me. I am apparently “beholden” to the cable industry. (I may be infamous elsewhere, but I absolutely guarantee you nobody in Charter Communications in Worcester knows who I am.)

I and my hard-working colleagues on the Southborough Cable TV Committee have been, apparently, “shaking down” Verzion for things like service to our whole town, requests to interconnect their system with the existing system for public programming and a fair level of support for continuing that programming.

I’m incensed. (Duh!) I wrote the Journal a letter, which met with complete silence. I’ve copied it here, mostly for catharsis.

Last year, you may remember that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia got upset for being caught giving a gesture in public that conveys precisely how I feel about the Journal’s editorial. Since Justice Scalia is a favorite of the Journal’s opinion editors, I though I’d send them an “alito” of my own. Maybe they understand that better.

Here’s the letter I sent the Journal:

Dear Sir and/or Madame:

Usually, your more strident opinions roll off my back easily.

But reading Franchise Freedom (WSJ, January 2. 2007) felt more like being stabbed in the back. As a member of a “so-called” local franchising authority, I vehemently reject the accusation that anyone is “shaking down” the competitive cable applicant in my Town. Further, nobody I know working in the largely volunteer cable franchising authorities in Massachusetts cities and towns is doing anything “at the behest of the cable industry.” It’s wrong of you to assert that is the case and an insult to many of the good people working on these issues at the local level. Painting us with the brush of corruption is facile…and dead wrong.

On the contrary, the Bells have used their resources and power at the Federal and state regulatory and legislative levels to seek expedited entry to the cable business while simultaneously dragging their heels and bemoaning their fate at the lands of local officials. They simply placed multiple bets…and the FCC rolled their number. Meanwhile, they just sat pat. The irony is that with local authorities – like my Town — who have consistently expressed a desire for rapid negotiations and which want vigorous cable competition, the imperious Bells have slow-rolled us while seeking a better regulatory deal.

What the FCC’s decision has done is to introduce chaos to the franchising process, ultimately delaying cable competition by ensuring legal challenges and injecting uncertainty into the process. Disrupting 40 years of well-established process does not accelerate government. It paralyzes it, and for far longer than more comprehensively thought-out deregulation would have. This was bad public policy…and a not-so-subtle parting gift from the Republicans to the Bells.

You have reflexively sided with the Bells, impugning not just the entire cable industry (an easy target, I must admit) but also scores of well-intentioned and civic-minded people who have until now effectively managed local cable franchising. The system does need improvement – and both Democrat FCC Commissioners said as much during hearings – but that change cannot come by transferring public assets to the Bells.

Thank you.

Alex Neihaus