Root causes: The elusiveness of low cost videoconferencing

Over the past 10 years or so I've been trying to make low cost webcam based business video-conferencing work. That's almost as long as I've been trying to unify my family, corporate and personal calendars.

In both cases I've come close to the proverbial brass ring several times, only to see it recede from my gasp. I thought we were close with iChatAV and the firewire iSight webcam, but then Apple discontinued the iSight and lost interest in iChat. [1]

Now we're on another go-round. Over in Gordon's Tech I'm updating a brief state of the art summary. Once again the ring feels close, but I'm not willing to say it's a sure thing.

So what makes low cost business videoconferencing so hard. Haven't we had the basic technology for about 10 years?

Here's my current list. Comments are most welcome:

1. Affordable travel: Current videoconferencing solutions, maybe even teleprescence solutions, are a poor substitute for being there. As long as travel was affordable the market for teleprescence was limited.
2. Unlimited flat rate network access: I hate flat rate access. I want my ISP to want me to burn bits. Flat rate access means Comcast is incented to kill BitTorrent and videoconferencing is collateral damage.
3. Perverse customers: Recreational home p*rn was a major driver of 1990s webcam development software. They want blurry images and attract virus-infested software. Not good for business use.
4. Firewire licensing costs: Unwise Firewire patent holders set licensing costs too high. That meant CPU-sucking wimpy voltage USB took over. Uncompressed 800x600 images at 15 fps uses bandwidth that's no problem for Firwire, but seems not to work so well with USB. In theory USB 2 should have more than enought capacity, but firewire camcorders (Canon's for example) and the firewire iSight delivered much better images. I've long wondered if the USB 2 chipsets of years past were really up to the job, or whether there were issues with older CPUs supporting persistently high volume non-bursty USB transactions. I admit I seem to be alone in this suspicion.
5. Limited uplink speeds and limited reliability of many internet connections: It's not only the historically poor uplink speeds, but many net connections aren't reliable. Video conferencing software is pretty demanding.
6. We need h.264 compression and its variants to make this scale, they're pretty new and demand a lot of CPU (or a dedicated chip).

Any other explanations of why we're still not quite there yet?
--
[1] Apple ties their product (ex. iChat) improvements to major OS releases. This doesn't work for me. I think this policy is a strategic blunder.

Do you help a customer hurt themselves? Spolsky speaks.

Customers can be their own worst enemies.

It's obviously true that vendors often fail to deliver what customer's want. It also true that vendors often fail to deliver what customer's need.

It's less obvious that "need" and "want" are sometimes only loosely related, and that, on occasion, wants can be opposed to needs. Ok, so that's obvious for you and I, but it's also true of businesses.

Sometimes vendors, by virtue of hard experience, know that what a customer wants will hurt them. But what do you do when they really insist?

Joel Spolsky, a justly famed software entrepreneur, gives us an example ...

Joel on Software

Mysteriously, about a week ago, Dan, the program manager designing most of the new features in FogBugz 7, came to ask me what features I thought should go in the timesheet reporting plug-in...

... We have a theory, here, that this is a bad idea. Using timesheets as a performance metric can lead to only one thing: bad data in timesheets.

The first time your boss comes into your office and gives you grief because it looks like you only did 7 hours of work yesterday, you’re going to make sure that never happens again. And then, suddenly, behold, the timesheets show everyone working 12 hour days, and all the data in the timesheets becomes instantly bogus. And EBS, our statistical technique for predicting ship dates, suddenly stops working, because you’re feeding it data that is meant to get your boss to stop bugging you, not accurate data.

Now, this theory may be completely off the wall, but it is our theory, and until we hear something better, that’s the one we’re going with.

So our policy has been that if you want to get the timesheet data, well, yes, you can, we’ll give you a way to get it in CSV format or XML format or something and then you can abuse it all you want... go ahead, hang yourself, but we’re sure as heck not going to make it easy for you with a pretty report all tied up with a bow that you might click on by accident, as you browse around, because thou shalt not put a stumbling block before the blind...

... Apparently nice people email us and ask for that exact feature and offer to give us little green rectangular things that can be exchanged for other goods and services if we do the feature...

In my own vastly smaller way, I used to lean towards Joel's former position. Don't indulge the customer's self-destructive tendencies. It might boost sales, but in the medium-run the customer will be unhappy. That will translate to lesser sales.

Nowadays I lean towards trying hard to understand if there's an underlying problem that could be solved another way. If all else fails I'll accede to the customer's request, while trying to make their learning period as short as possible -- and to provide an alternative better path when they're ready.

It's like raising kids. Sometimes you just have to ride the train over the cliff.

Besides, things can be more complicated than they seem. Bogus numbers may seem worthless, but what if the project is capitalized? Maybe errors in ship dates will harm one part of the business, but better capitalization numbers will help another part of the business.

It's a messy world. It's nice to know even Spolsky struggles at least sometimes.

Funny. Detroit's new ad

Brilliant (jpg). Worth of The Onion, really.

Why the iPhone calendar may stay locked away

If we add Steve Job's undeniable passion for corporate secrecy to this thesis, and add in the current received wisdom that the future of software profit is in bundled services, then we end up with the conclusion that Apple will never allow 3rd parties to work with the iPhone calendar.

I need to research how Google is approaching the work/home calendar issue. If Google has a solution more to my taste that alone would push me off the iPhone and off AT&T.

Apple's MobileMe transition - worse than we realize

In retrospect, it's shocking how badly Apple bungled their .Mac (dotMac) to MobileMe transition.

Today I ran across one more reminder of how screwed up the entire migration strategy was. From Apple's current iChat documentation (emphasis mine) ...

Mac 101: iChat

...To use iChat, all you need is access to the Internet and one of the following: A .Mac account or a free AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) account. Here's how to set up and use iChat...

Ok, except .Mac accounts don't exist any more. (And AOL is going down, but that's another story.)

The page was last revised "November 21, 2008". Four months after MobileMess.

.Mac was deeply embedded in Apple's operations. It's distributed throughout the OS, it's everywhere in their documentation, it was integral to their identity management and thus their DRM (Apple's identity and account system was still screwed-up a few weeks ago -- thanks to the migration).

The .Mac to MobileMe transition wasn't a routine "we're-off-by-a-month" screw-up. It was a titanic "we're-off-by-a-year" screw-up.

A disaster on this scale should have led to a top-to-bottom internal post-mortem, but I suspect Apple has simply executed a scapegoat or two. This was too big to be one executive's error, and it suggests Apple's shakier than most of us think.

Root causes: Why you can't sync your work and home calendars to your phone

Tales of the Audrey have put me in a reflective mood. I've been thinking about my calendar sync wars.

I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to get an integrated view of my work, personal, and other assorted calendars -- without putting all my personal life on the corporate server.

Ten years ago the answer seemed at hand. I could sync my Palm with Outlook at work, and with Palm desktop at hand. Alas, sync bugs did me in. The brass ring slipped from my fingers.

I settled for synchronizing KeySuite at work, and DateBk4/5 at home. So I had two calendars on one device, but they had nothing to do with one another. It really wasn't a great solution, but there was still hope.

Now I have an iPhone, but in many ways it's a step back from the Palm III. Heck, it's even regressing from iPhone 1.0; Apple recently pulled corporate Outlook support from its Windows MobileMe control panel. (A wikipedia article claims this is by design; the function won't be restored.)

All the solutions that now work for an iPhone either require extensive corporate support and wipe out your personal calendar (Exchange) [1], or they require synchronizing corporate calendars to an Internet service [3].

Corporations don't like sending corporate data to the net. With good reason. Imagine a billion dollar acquisition going down the tubes because someone left their phone on the bus, or accidentally made their net calendar public.

So why do corporations tolerate Blackberries? Because of a killer feature of the Blackberry (or is it an ActiveSync feature?) that Apple has emulated. If an iPhone is lost, it can be sent a remote instruction to wipe its Exchange server records. That's not possible if you sync Outlook to MobileMe, which is probably why Apple removed that feature.

So we see clearly now. We understand why something that's merely hard to do has become impossible Your work calendar, and your work contacts, don't belong to you -- even if you're the CEO. They belong to your corporation. Indisputably. Your corporation, who doesn't want to risk losing that data.

I could live with that if, say, work ran from 9-5 every day and we didn't have business travel.

Problem is, work and life aren't set like that any more. Today I started work at 9:30 and finished at 7:00 -- by choice. As long as I don't miss my meetings nobody cares too much when and where I work.

The downside of this flexibility is that work and family calendars mix all over the place. I need to have access to both ... all the time.

Oh, and like most oddball R&D types I don't fit the corporate rules for a Blackberry, so I can't even carry a BB for work and an iTouch for home.

This data ownership and life/work overlap problem is why, ten years after the Palm, we're moving backwards. We used to be able to "sneak" corporate calendars onto our Palms and MobileMe via Outlook and USB/serial data cables, but those options have gone away.

There's only one option now, the Exchange server option and over-the-air sync. That requires your corporate IT department's support, and if you go this route the only option for a personal calendar on the iPhone is MobileMess.

Or you can give up, embrace the public self, and put all your personal and family data on the work calendar -- but then you can't share that with your spouse and children. It becomes locked to the corporation.

I think the only plausible way forward is to push corporations to support iPhones with Exchange server (very hard) while also pushing Apple (much harder) to either fix MobileMe or give other vendors MobileMe's magic power to coexist with Exchange synchronized data.

I wonder what the gPhone does?

-- footnotes --

[1] Unless you also pay for a MobileMe account, but MobileMe doesn't support CalDAV or even iCal publication/subscription.
[3] Apple won't give 3rd party vendors access to the physical cable -- probably to protect their FairPlay franchise. So, unlike the Palm days, vendors can't create products to sync Outlook/Exchange data over the cable.

Update 12/23/08: See an earlier post with a similar theme.

Update 1/31/09: "Democratic Republics" never are. The same logic that can be applied to Citrix's "Project Independence". If we're going to have work/home calendar integration it will be entirely on the terms of the corporate IS department.

The 3Com (Palm) Audrey

I'd almost forgotten the Audrey, the high water mark of the Palm PDA platform ...

An Apple in your kitchen - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

... 'Welcome to Audrey.' With those three words, I experienced my first Internet appliance. 3Com's Audrey was meant to deliver lightweight 'internet snacking' from a user's kitchen, and offered email and internet access, a calendar and contacts database, plus synchronization of up to two Palm devices. It had a touch-sensitive screen, wireless keyboard and a clear plastic stylus that would glow green when new mail arrived....

This was a time when 3Com imagined that everyone would have a Palm device. They'd all beam appointments and contacts and even software (peer-to-peer IR-based viral app distribution) back and forth.

Families would sync to Audrey, and view the family calendar.

Sigh. Those were the glory days. Back then Palms used Graffiti One, not the evil spawn-of-Jot that came before Palm's long fall. Palm devices were going to be wallet, key, planner, memory manager, aide and more.

It was a noble vision. Maybe the gPhone will get us there some day. In the meantime, the Audrey deserves a special place in the museum of extinct computers, an alternative reality artifact.

So how bad are the rest of the governors?

Maybe Blagojevich is the worst of the worst. He comes from a bad place ....

Rod Blagojevich's bad hair day | Salon

... Three of his last six predecessors -- Otto Kerner, Dan Walker and George Ryan -- have gone to prison. Ryan, who as secretary of state sold drivers' licenses for bribes, is languishing in a federal pen in Wisconsin, pining for a Christmas pardon from President Bush...

Even if he's the worst though, there's a lot of darkness between Blagojevich and merely adequate. He makes Palin look good, but we know Palin abused her power as Governor to settle a family feud.

So how bad are the rest of the governors? Is there a rogue's gallery ranking somewhere? How does our current level of political corruption compare to the past forty years?

Oh, and what the hell is wrong with Illinois?

Shoot, this guy makes Jesse Ventura look like the pinnacle of good government.

Krugman's rules for research

From Paul Krugman's Nobel prize lecture slides:

nobelslides.pdf (application/pdf Object)

My rules for research:

1. Listen to the Gentiles
2. Question the question
3. Dare to be silly
4. Simplify, simplify

Unfortunately, I have only the vaguest idea of what he means be any of these. I'm not getting up at 2am CT to hear him explain, but I suspect there will be a transcript somewhere.

Mumbai's Muslim patriots carry signs in English?

NYT journalists observing a demonstration of patriotism by Mumbai's Muslim community quote some banners ...

Muslims in India Put Aside Grievances to Repudiate Terrorism - NYTimes.com

... The cluster of banners all around him, held aloft by marchers, seemed to bear out his point. Some read “Our Country’s Enemies are Our Enemies,” others, “Killers of Innocents are Enemies of Islam.” A few declared, in uncertain grammar, “Pakistan Be Declared Terrorist State.”..

The journalists don't seem to find it remarkable that the signs are written in English (note grammar comment), and use English acronyms. I'm guessing that's not unusual.

This Mumbai tourist site provides some linguistic context ...

... Marathi is recognized as the official language of the Mumbai city of India. It is the most widely spoken language in the city. Apart from Marathi, there are many other languages that are spoken and understood in Bombay. Mumbaiya or Bambaiya Hindi is the slang language of Mumbaikars. This colloquial speech is a blend of Marathi, Hindi and English. Mumbaiya Hindi is extensively used on the streets of this Island city. The literacy rate in the city is above 86%, subsequently people have flair of education and culture.

Hindi, English and Marathi are counted amongst the major languages in Mumbai, spoken by the common masses. Hindi, being the national language, forms the dialect of 30% of the people. English, nevertheless, enjoys an associate status and is used for national, political as well as commercial communication. English is largely spoken by the people. Infact, it is the major language of the professional and managerial personnel in the city...

Wikipedia has a great overview of Marathi, but it doesn't tell us if there are religious/ethnic determinants of which Mumbaikars speak Marathi. (A friend of mine is a Mumbai native; I'll ask her and update this post).

Given the many languages and language blends of Mumbai, and the likely cultural implications of using one or the other, it seems plausiable that written English could be the universal language of protest signs.

Of all the places I visited in my well spent but callow youth, I though India was the most fascinating and complex. Still do.

Update 12/16/08: My friend explained this to me, but I'm not sure I've got it right. Elite Mumbaikars commonly speak 4 languages - Hindi, Marathi, English and Gujarati (sp?). Marathi is the regional language and would be used by both Muslims and Hindus. Muslims prefer not to use Hindi. English is neutral ground. The signs could have been written in the script form of Marathi though, so the English was probably for foreign consumption as well as local use. Although Hindi, Marathi and Gujarati are different languages they are structurally quite similar.

Obama's addiction is a problem

Obama has been unable to break his cigarette addiction.

Obama Noncommittal on Caroline Kennedy, and Smoking

...On another matter, Mr. Brokaw tried to clarify whether Mr. Obama has actually quit smoking, as he suggested.

The president-elect admitted to having “fallen off the wagon.”...

So he's sending money to Satan. This should please Philip Morris, maybe they'll send Obama some freebies.

He's not the first president with a substance problem of course, but at least Bush had put his aside.

I hope he finds a way to do better. It won't be the last of his clay feet of course, anyone insane enough to run for President has more problems than addiction.

This particular addiction, however, does make him a crappy role model for our kids. We'll need to reduce Obama's prominence in our household conversations.

PS. Although I think claims of liberal media bias are overrated, the careful skirting of Obama's cigarette problem does support a bias claim. Of course I didn't mention anything prior to the election, but I don't pretend to be unbiased.

Lower travel costs with VOIP, and is GrandCentral going to go live?

There are many ways to use VOIP, some leveraging Google's pre-beta GrandCentral service. It's taken about 14 years longer than expected, but we're finally moving to non-metered worldwide voice communication.

I've been using Google's GrandCentral with my iPhone's GrandDialer to phone my parents in Montreal. The call quality has improved dramatically in the past months, and the (still) free services is paying for my data plan.

The recent call quality improvements in GrandCentral suggest Google is going to stop using GrandCentral to cow the phone companies, and actually bring it to market. That won't help AT&T's numbers, and it might be the death blow for Sprint.

The unreliability of email - Apple MobileMe and Spamcop.net

Apple's been secretly blocking MobileMe email sent to spamcop.net.

So that desperate email for help your daughter sent you? She doesn't know you didn't get it.

Since Spamcop is a prime generator of anti-spam blacklists, Apple may be doing this for fear a MobileMe account bot will put me.com on a blacklist. If the covert block is policy rather than a bug, it's one more reason to despise Apple and pray for the success of the gPhone.

Other than the reinforcing the folly of trusting Apple, this (again) teaches us that email is an unreliable message stream. Adding silent outgoing mail blocks to false positive spam blocks is a straw tossed atop an already broken camel. Snail mail is significantly more reliable.

For my part, I've had a spamcop.net address for at least six years, but even before this happened I'd decided I needed to deprecate it. In a year or two I'll discontinue the account.

I'm deprecating my spamcop email in an effort to decrease the complexity, and thus increase the reliability of my email stream. The details are too tedious to describe here, but briefly I've decided I need a multi-mode signed sending address from a 900 pound gorilla domain (gmail.com basically), a single personal blacklist to maintain, a strong identity tie to email, and to eliminate redirects of incoming email. It helps that after a very long, hard, development path, Gmail's spam filtering is now very good.

Antidote to The Great Recession: A national small business generation service

Robert Reich's asks "Shall We Call it a Depression Now?" Brad DeLong says ... not yet.

It is looking rather bad though (Glurk! by DeLong):.

Rex Nutting of Marketwatch:

Payrolls plunge by stunning 533,000 in November: U.S. nonfarm payrolls plunged by an astonishing 533,000 in November, the worst job loss in 34 years, the Labor Department reported Friday. It's only the fourth time in the past 58 years that payrolls have fallen by more than 500,000 in a month. Since the recession began 11 months ago, a total of 1.9 million jobs have been lost. The unemployment rate rose from 6.5% in October to 6.7% in November, the highest jobless rate since October 1993...

Everytime I remark to Barry Eichengreen about the disjunction between the intensity of the financial crisis and its limited transmission to the real economy, he says "just wait." I guess we can stop waiting.

So call it the Great Recession for the moment.

In the Great Depression the solution to economic stall was World War II. That's like treating pneumonia with malignant melanoma. Let's not try World War III.

So we can do all the things that have been tried here or elsewhere, depending on how cooperative the rump of the GOP is.

That's good, but maybe we should try a few new things too.

Imagine a national small business generator. A web site built around a knowledge-base of tens of thousands of business plans. Plans for franchise businesses, plans for manufacturing, plans for service businesses. Plans for businesses that need a lot of startup money. Plans for businesses that need a credit card and a mega-Kiva (it's the US, not Uganda) microloan. Plans for all the things people need in bad times, and plans for the good times to come. Plans for business that write the business plans that go into the knowledge-base.

The plans are organized by pre-requisites. Some are tagged for special skills, others for grinding hard work. They come with packaged loans, like the ones the Small Business Administration already offers - and maybe with grants as well. They come with packaged legal infrastructure, and an expedited incorporation package that greatly simplifies current law - a kind of augmented LLC with simplified tax filing. IP protection, the whole nine yards.

Add an option to invest. So would-be investors can browse these small business startups, and choose which to invest in. Optional online skills based training, or sign up with the people who've just launched, you know, teaching businesses.

Most importantly, the plans are tied to a federal health insurance program, modeled after the Minnesota small-business plans available to any two people starting a business.

It's a web site of course.

So one day you're out of work.

Take a day off. Then go to the knowledge-base.

Login. Browse. Search. Compare some plans. Get some advice. Pick on, click, click, sign.

You're in business now. A grant to start. Health insurance. A loan.

It's not new. Similar programs have been very successful in developing nations. It's just a bit bigger.

It could be done.

The Guardian's bad advertising moment

I've been reading the Guardian ever since they went to full content on many of their feeds. Terrific paper, great innovation.

Unfortunately, the ads associated with feed adwords can be problematic.

For example, the feed for today's article on the illness of Thailand's King Bhumidol's illness in the midst of a grave national crisis was accompanied by this ad, just beneath the paragraph about the very popular Crown Princess ...



Big ouch.

Did I ever mention I once lived in the Bangkok's old Pradu Nam (water market)?

I wonder if there's a way to specify that some adword topics should be advertising free. So no ads for posts on Thailand, for example.