Tech churn 2010: How do you share a family file?

Twenty years ago we knew how to share files on a Mac. You created users and groups. When you accessed a share you entered a username and password. You could save a shortcut to the desktop and MacOS would store the credentials.Things weren't that much harder with Windows 95 a few years later.

That was then. In the bright shiny world of 1990's tomorrow a share/permissions bug in the combination of 10.6 + 10.5 + wireless networking put 45,000 zero length files with numerically iterating names in our "parents only" shared folder.

It's not the first time I've run into architectural issues with OS X's post-obsolete permissions framework; although 10.6 is exceptionally bad things have been more or less downhill since 10.3.Back at the corporation we have Microsoft SharePoint - or whatever it's called now. Microsoft keeps rebranding it to hide the bad news. SharePoint makes OS X 2010 look relatively benign.

I don't know how well things work with home Windows 7 network shares. I suspect it's better than OS X, but I don't think the Windows home file share appliance market is doing well.

I'm getting that old King Canute and the unstoppable tide feeling. I'm using something that's completely broken, but the ether isn't filled with the screams of fellow geeks. The path I'm on has clearly been abandoned; the days of being able to share files with one's wife, but not the kids, on a home machine have passed.

Unfortunately, there's no clear alternative. We're in tech churn -- the turbulent white water between technology transitions. We could do all our home file sharing using Google Docs, but, frankly, gDrive sucks and backup is a pain. We could use a drive hanging off the Time Capsule perhaps, but I doubt that's much better and, ironically, you can't easily back up a drive hanging off a Time Capsule. We could use MobileMe, but ... sigh. I could buy a Windows machine to use as an SMB share, but that's a maintenance pain. Everything I read about OS X Server tells me not to go there.

Maybe Apple will deliver a home file share appliance this year with integrated backup. I'm not holding my breath though.The bottom line is that there's no good solution for home-based group file sharing in 2010 on OS X, and probably not any platform. It's a tech regression - we're stuck until something better emerges. That will probably take years.

Vanguard - Adobe Reader required to access tax forms

Once upon a time Vanguard provided documents and tax forms ask PDF files. You could view them in any PDF reader, including Apple's built in product. There was no need to infest a Mac with Adobe's thrice-cursed bug infested reader and it's malign updater.

Now Adobe Reader is obligatory. If you access Vanguard without Reader installed you download the markup for their 'servlet' file.

Vanguard doesn't mail out tax forms any more. This is how you're supposed to get them.

I've been a Vanguard customer for a long time. I liked them when Bogle was in power and stayed after he was booted out. Now I'm looking for a different place to park our money.

Smart move Vanguard.

Anyone know a good mutual fund company?

Minneapolis St Paul bicycle maps: Google and More

After a long stream of disappointing Google news, it's a relief to learn that they've added a map layer for bicycle directions (maps.google.com/biking). A commute by bike announcement references a user map I didn't know about - James Nordgaard's Twin Cities bike map. (I hadn't visited the map gadgets page for a while, it's worth a look.)

Google also offers a "biking directions gadget" that can be embedded in a web page.

Independently, the MSP Cyclopath.org GeoWiki has been developing very nicely over the past year and now has excellent coverage. I'm hopeful Google will be able to harvest that work even as the GeoWiki benefits from the Google maps.

I've long said that if you had only one question to ask about a community to live in, you should ask about the quality of the local bicycle paths. Minneapolis St. Paul does very well with that question.

Now we need to work on a map that shows what bicycle paths are suitable for inline skating!

See also: Google Maps ‘Bike There’ | Submit your bike data to Google.

PS. I’ve had to repost this several times, the Blogger in Draft editor bugs struck again. I think I’ve repaired it this time.

Reimagining realtime focalcast communication – Buzz and Twitter 2.0

Google, and Buzz, are flailing. Facebook is evil. Twitter is annoyingly limited [1].

We need to reimagine focalcast realtime communication [1].

As a first pass we can think of a realtime communication message channel as having two key properties: Audience and (primary) Purpose.

Audience is the set of permitted subscribers. Example: “Family” or “Public”.

Purpose is a single sentence definition of what the the channel is used for. Example: “Location sharing” or “Political opinions” or “Mate attraction”.

The resemblance of Audience and Purpose to century old definitions of printed media marketing is not accidental.

To be truly useful Buzz or Twitter 2.0 need to allow any message (not length limited) to be characterized by Audience and Purpose [2]. We can imagine these as two metadata elements [3] represented in a user interface as “drop down” or select boxes.

On the client side users subscribe to a channel defined by Author and Purpose for which they have access rights (Audience).

Since some Audience-Purpose pairs are far more common than others (“Location sharing”+”Family” or “Location sharing”+”Mate attraction”) combining these in a user interface would increase usability.

A single “identity” or “account” should own the definitions of Audience and Purpose, though it may be useful to associate Audience-Purpose pairs with a “persona” [4]

When I see a solution emerging that uses open data standards without data lock (Buzz API?) and that supports Audience and Purpose in a useable way, I’ll know it’s time for me to fully engage. Until then, I’m just playing.

[1] Geezers will remember email lists as the original focalcast medium. Since list communication was not realtime messages resembled postal letters; they often resembled exchanged essays. Twitter’s accidental length limit (determined by the quirks of the text (SMS) message hack) makes Twitter exchanges either staccato status updates or metadata pointing to discussions held elsewhere. Neither realtime length limited Twitter nor slowtime unlimited length email are adequate focalcast communication technologies.

[2] A third attribute of “archive” would cause the communication to become the equivalent of a blog post, but that’s a nice-to-have. Author is an implied attribute; it’s used by subscribers.

[3] Ontology strictly optional, though many will emerge.

[4] As of a few weeks ago I thought that persona management was a key component of Buzz/Twitter 2.0, but now I think the combination of Audience/Purpose pairs makes persona management less critical. One could handle other persona issues through separate accounts (identities).

See also

• The Buzz profile problem- I am Legion
• Why Twitter
• My latest take on Twitter
• Google's latest inadequate Buzz patch - Profile deletion
• How I discover people to follow - on Google Reader
• I am 113810027503326386174. And 578762461. At least
• The best about Twitter essay
• What can I do with Twitter, and is it CB Radio redux-
• Twitter and Facebook - because feed readers didn't make it
• Explaining twitter, facebook and myspace to gomer geeks
• Facebook has the eBay disease - the Farmville story
• Responding to Facebook’s lions- Stop friends using the apps

Book Review: Three Steps to Yes - Sales for Poets

My Amazon review on Three Steps to Yes: The Gentle Art of Getting Your Way (9780609807194) by Gene Bedell:

Part way through his short and readable book I decided Gene Bedell was just the sort of cheerfully cynical sales gunner I've been looking to learn from - albeit not to imitate. That was when he wrote of meeting his Prospect's "personal needs" by "arranging for him to make the keynote speech at an important industry meeting".

Or, you could, you know, slip your Prospect a thousand dollar bill. It's just a matter of degree.

By the time I was done though, Bedell had persuaded me that he's not nearly as amoral as I first thought. Yeah, he really has to win -- but he likes his Prospects to win as well. Including the Prospects reading his book.

Amoral gunner or admirable entrepreneur, or maybe a bit of both, he's written the sales book for me. In Bedell's words I'm a Poet, I ain't got a sales gene in my body. I'm so bad my specialty is covert persuasion, by which my ideas and proposals are delivered by indirect and untraceable paths.

After reading Bedell's "Sales for Poets" book though, I can see about a dozen ways to change what I do. Even if I can't execute on all 21 of his key recommendations at once, I can surely double my persuasiveness by just getting to average on 3-4 of 'em. I intend to work on a different 3-4 each month over the next year.

I wouldn't have wanted to read this book 10 years ago, but if I had my life would have been different (not necessarily better of course, but certainly different). It's a powerful paeon to persuasion, and, as the title suggests, a good complement to the classic book on negotiation "Getting to Yes".

Google translate 2010 - a marker

This is the Feb 2010 Google Translate output from a Chinese language original ...

天涯周立波

... Perpetual motion machine needs rotor, the rotor is Zhao Benshan and Guo Degang. Zhou Libo positioning themselves with the middle-class waiter, while a decorated themselves with the middle class, followed by a run did not forget about Zhao Benshan. Said Zhao Benshan services for farmers, location of China's rural areas. With that, make up an "In fact, I always have great respect for Old Zhao" and then express their hair a period of "cultural pluralism", the Old Zhao has also stepped on, their body position also climbed up. The results we all know that Old Zhao's fans will feel that "feelings were seriously damaged," the rotor to turn up...

Some of it can be understood, other bits read like receptive aphasia word salad. Amusing, but not terribly informative.

I'm keeping this example as a baseline for the translation results of 2011.

Update 3/21/2010: A NYT OpEd by a translator makes light of Google's efforts.

... Google Translate is a statistical machine translation system, which means that it doesn’t try to unpick or understand anything. Instead of taking a sentence to pieces and then rebuilding it in the “target” tongue as the older machine translators do, Google Translate looks for similar sentences in already translated texts somewhere out there on the Web. Having found the most likely existing match through an incredibly clever and speedy statistical reckoning device, Google Translate coughs it up, raw or, if necessary, lightly cooked....

The approach seems to work well for English/French, but it fails miserably for English/Chinese. The sentences translated from Chinese seem individually meaningful, but the paragraphs are nonsensical.

The critic sounds frightened to me -- and he should be. Google translator works quite well for similar languages. On the other hand, they have another great leap to take if they're going to bridge the Chinese to English gulf.

See also: Using Computing Might, Google Improves Translation Tool - NYTimes.com.
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Google car goes where angels fear to tread?

When I opened this image I thought Google's camera bearing street view car took a picture mid-way across the Hudson-Oka ice bridge over the Ottawa River above Montreal ...

Alas, I think the street view icon in the midst of the river is a UI artifact of viewing Panoramio images in Google maps.

It would be cool to include the ice bridge in a future street view however.

Climate change, trees and your sinking home

If the Earth were warming smoothly everywhere, then we would expect to see the gradual migration of ecosystems. Iowa would migrate into Minnesota, and the Arctic would migrate into outer space.

Of course the Earth is not warming smoothly everywhere. It's warming on the average, but on the human level things will be messy. If greenhouse gases, particulates and other side-effects of humanity stabilize (a big if, unfortunately) then we might eventually return to the relatively predictable weather cycles of recent millenia. During the next century, however, the weather-cycles are likely to be turbulent.

What does turbulence and year-to-year micro-climate unpredictability mean to ecosystems? I've not read anything on this topic, and a quick gSearch found only some 2009 conference proceedings on marine ecosystems. I'm guessing we'll start reading about this over the next year, so this is your prologue.

As an uninformed guess, I presume this weather/climate turbulence will favor organisms that adapt rapidly to change. That would normally include humans, but we saturate most every ecosystem and, given our weaponry and limited judgment, we're likely to react to turbulence with devastating warfare.

Humans and their canine parasites/symbiotes aside, one would expect organisms with high mutation rates and short life cycles to do well. So that would include insects, bacteria, grasses, fungi and so on - including many things we consider "pests". On the other hand, we might expect trees to do quite badly in the near term. They could do fine in the post-turbulent future, but they don't seem likely to respond well to unpredictability.

Which brings us to your soon to be sinking home. If you were to look down at my neighborhood in St Paul Minnesota in July of 1999 you would have had a hard time seeing the houses. All you'd have seen would be trees. That's not so now. Pests and fungi have devastated our canopy. (This is not entirely due to climate change -- the emerald ash borer's range extension was assisted by human transportation. So our treescape is a premonition of what climate change may bring, even though we have assumed Iowa's old climate.)

How does losing trees impact your home? Well, we ain't called the "land of 10,000 lakes" for nothing. Twin Cities water lies close to the top of our clay soils. In this setting losing trees can have unanticipated consequences (emphases mine) ...

Shifting Soil Is Threat to a House’s Foundation - NYTimes.com

... Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association indicates that since the 1990s there has been an accelerating trend nationwide toward more extended dry periods followed by downpours. Whether due to random climate patterns or global warming, the swings between hot and dry weather and severe rain or snow have profoundly affected soil underneath buildings.

Clay soils, like those beneath the houses of Mr. Derse and Ms. Wilson, shrink during droughts and swell during floods, causing structures to bob. And because sandier soil loses its adhesive properties in dry conditions, it pulls away from foundations. Heavy rains cause it to shift or just collapse beneath structures. With both kinds of soil, such sinking, called subsidence, usually happens gradually, said Randall Orndorff, a geologist with the United States Geologic Survey. But, he said, “swinging from very wet to extremely dry weather like we’ve been seeing lately in many parts of the country may be accelerating the effect.”...

... Subsidence is not covered by most homeowners’ insurance policies in the United States, unlike in Britain, where the increasing number of homeowners’ claims due to foundation failure prompted the Charter Insurance Institute, an industry trade group, to issue a dire warning about the financial drain in its 2009 report, “Coping with Climate Change: Risks and Opportunities for Insurers.”

“The question we need to ask is, are we building to cope with the enhanced weather events related to climate change,” said Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group advocating science-based solutions to environmental and health issues. “It’s obvious that we need to look at changing building codes worldwide to deal with this.”...

... Fixing a failed foundation usually involves hiring a foundation repair company to install cement or steel piers around the perimeter of the house’s slab or near its existing piers if it is a pier and beam foundation. Once in place, hydraulic jacks lift and level the house and transfer its weight to the new supports. The cost depends on the severity of the problem but generally runs about $1,000 to $2,000 per pier, which should include a lifetime transferable warranty.

“It’s amazing to watch your house get jacked up like that,” said Miguel Rivera, a designer of heating and air-conditioning systems, who had to pay $13,000 to have his 60-year-old house in West Orange, N.J., shored up in January. “It’s just immediate. You’re like, whoa, up it goes.”

His dining room began separating from the rest of his house about five years ago after repeated heavy rains shifted the earth beneath it. The problem was made worse when he removed a nearby tree, which was probably siphoning off excess water and providing structure to the soil beneath his house.

“It often happens that you upset the moisture and structural balance when you knock down or tear out trees,” said Mr. Lourie, the geotechnical engineer, adding that planting trees too close to the house can be harmful. “Plant them at least half their mature height away from the house.”

Landscaping should, as a rule, be installed so that water slopes away from the house and gutters should discharge at least five feet from the house to avoid oversaturating the soil. During droughts, experts recommend placing soaker hoses around the perimeter of the house and turning them on for 30 minutes a day. “The idea is to maintain a constant amount of moisture in the soil,” said Tom Witherspoon, a foundation engineer in Dallas. “If you can do that, your house will never move.”...

... Engineering and structural-repair professionals say it is relatively easy to spot foundation problems in structures that are more than 10 years old. If you are considering buying a house, look for patched-over cracks in brick or drywall and doors that have been planed. Also notice if there are cracks in sidewalks and streets in the neighborhood.

... problematic areas like the Southeast, Southwest, Midwest and coastal states...

I like the last sentence. Why don't they just tell us what state doesn't have a problem? New Mexico?

So what should those of living in "the Southeast, Southwest, Midwest and coastal states" do? Many will have to budget for serious foundation work, and foundation/soil assessments will change property values (and thus property taxes). I'm most interested in whether we can use tree planting to manage a high and fungible water table. What trees do best at pulling up moisture in wet times, yet are likely to be pest resistant (assuming we provide the water in dry summers -- in Minnesota this is feasible)? How well does this work in reality?

I expect we'll learn a lot more on this topic over the next two years.

Update 4/7/2010: Some real science to complement my tree speculations ...

Tree-mendous - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com

... being a tree has challenges ... longevity itself creates difficulties. In the course of centuries, situations change: droughts and fires may come and go, soil may erode, water tables may rise and fall. Worse, other organisms — especially enemies — can evolve far faster, because they can go through hundreds of generations during the tree’s life. How can trees avoid succumbing to diseases? Especially as they don’t have an immune system like ours: you can graft tissue from one tree to that of another (think apples and olives) without the kind of rejection that a mammal would experience. Part of the answer may be that many trees have evolved associations with other, fast-evolving organisms, like fungi and ants, that can protect them to some extent.

Google's problem is their corporate philosophy

As a Google customer, I'm not happy with this approach ...

Two keys to Google’s success: “paranoia” and “relentless brutality” | Good Morning Silicon Valley

.... So how does Google maintain its pace and sense of urgency? Through a Shiva-like dance of constant creation and destruction performed with “relentless brutality and execution,” said Herlihy...

… We seek ubiquity and then pray for luck. We learn from bad decisions. If something is wrong, we kill it as soon as possible, take everybody out and move onto a different project as soon as possible.” And the process of regular and rigorous reviews extends to people as well as projects. “We measure people every 90 days,” Herlihy said. “We get 360-degree feedback on people every 180 days and that feedback is published to the whole company. People want reality. Ninety percent of the rewards end up going to 10 percent of the people...

Since 90% of the rewards go to 10% of the people and non-hit products "die" (or are abandoned) young, engineers leading products that are not quickly successful must leave the company, or abandon a slow project as quickly as possible, or stay and become demoralized.

The result I see is a profusion of half-build services that start well, then stall then are abandoned, and, years later, are killed. As someone who's used most of what Google has built, I'm not happy with their management style. Of course I'm not a typical user, but I can say that many of the companies I've disliked are dead now - or are living dead.

Fire Eric Schmidt. Now.

Google Video Chat: getting to the new world slowly

It's been a year since I wrote about Video Chat for elder parents over OS X and 17 months since I started using Google Video Chat. It's been a mixed experience since due to poor reliability and spectacularly poor usability.

Google has updated the video engine recently, and we've updated our home machines, so during a visit to my parents I retested a link between my mother and I in Montreal and Emily and Ben in St Paul.

I used the superb Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro at both ends -- it's a vast improvement over the built-in iSight cameras on my MacBook and our home i5 iMac.

My mother's home has only a 128 kpbs uplink and a 1 mbps downlink (videotron basic - it tests out near the marketed rates). I suspect our image was pretty degraded by the slow uplink, but the quality of Emily and Ben's image and voice was superb. It was a promise of things to come.

The usability remains execrably bad. Either Google is intentionally slowing adoption or they should start randomly selecting San Francisco tourists to do their user interface design. We'll know Google is serious, or has found a good tourist, when a user can save a named shortcut to their desktop, click on it, and connect to a remote client.

We're getting to the new world of high quality realtime video/voice connectivity, but it's darned slow. At the current rate we'll be there around 2012.

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Reflections on my personal bacterial companions

I stopped a puck the other day.

With my leg. That's what comes with playing against these dad-gum college kids. They don't know their own strength.

The hematoma became infected, and since antibiotics aren't what they used to be my personal physician/spouse recommended diligent attention. So now the infection is mostly better.

This gave me the opportunity to wonder about three things:

1. Who creates the tough sealant (scab) atop the wound? I used to think my body did that, but, really, it's a stupid response. I need the sucker to drain, not seal. Maybe the scab is built by the bacteria?
2. Why don't infected wounds hurt more? I whack my finger and it sure hurts, but my body doesn't complain much about infections. Seems illogical ... unless the bacteria are turning off pain signals.
3. We know Toxoplasma makes rats dumb and happy - the better for cats to munch 'em and spread the infection. We think it does something similar to humans. So shouldn't bacterial infections make us feel kind of laissez-faire, less prone to aggressively treat the infection?

That was yesterday. I was inspired in part by a gruesome science fiction story of some years back about emergent sentience in bacteria (can't remember author, but I don't think it was Greg Bear).

I don't think these are original ideas, but I didn't expect to see a Carl Zimmer essay on the topic today!

I For One Welcome Our Microbial Overlords | The Loom | Carl Zimmer | Discover Magazine

.... Very often, the parasites cause hosts to do things that help the parasites, instead of themselves. For example, a protozoan called Toxoplasma needs to get from rats to cats, and to help the process along, it makes rats lose their fear of cats. Parasites can also change the diet of their host as well as the way in which their hosts digest their food....

I was reminded of this sinister manipulation by a paper that was published in Science today by Rob Knight and his colleagues. They built on previous research that revealed that mice genetically engineered to be obese have different kinds of microbial diversity in their guts than normal mice...

... Knight and his colleagues discovered a different–and more disturbing–way that microbes can make mice fat....

... Mice with a genetic make-up that alters the diversity of their gut microbes get hungry, and that hunger makes them eat more. They get obese and suffer lots of other symptoms. Get rid of that particular set of microbes, and the mice lose their hunger and start to recover. And that distinctive diversity of microbes can, on its own, make genetically normal mice hungry–and thus obese, diabetic, and so on.

When I first learned of this work, I asked Knight–with a mix of dread and delight–whether the microbes were manipulating their hosts, driving them to change their diet for the benefit of the microbes. He said he thinks the answer is yes...

If gut bacteria can change diet, then skin bacteria could make people with chronic skin infections apathetic -- the better to discourage treatment of the thriving bacterial colonies ...

Update 3/24/2010 - See also a 2006 post on viruses changing dietary behaviors ... Why would a virus fatten an animal?

The disappearing signature

I've never had a very consistent signature, but today Emily noted that it's become a genuine scrawl.

Of course this could be a sign of early Parkinsons disease, but there's a more benign explanation.

I very rarely sign my name.

Forty years ago we signed our names a lot. We wrote checks, we deposited things, some of us did it as a part of our work. In the modern world we enter passwords instead. I haven't written a check in over a year.

Signatures are going the way of the wrist watch. My children may never develop a signature.

YouTube needs a pay-per-view solution

I've not had much use for YouTube, but I do have a son who does better with video than with text. I figured I'd collect selected educational videos for him to study from, using a family video learning blog.

That was when I began to learn that YouTube sucks.

Yes, there's lots of stuff there, and some of it is well done. There's Monty Python, for example. When it comes to education in general, and science in particular, however, it's really lousy. Most of the material is both very poor quality and very old.

The problem isn't a lack of good material. There's an enormous quantity of instructional science material owned by the BBC and by the television networks. That material could be sliced, diced and repackaged to create thousands of high quality educational videos from brief demonstrations to longer expositions.

The problem is money, or lack thereof. We need a way for people who own high quality material, or who are able to create it, to get paid.

I'd like to see YouTube offer up this material with a 10 cent/min 1 day rental fee. A five minute concept demonstration would cost 50 cents to rent until midnight. A 60 minute show would cost $6.

Maybe that wouldn't be enough to unlock the vaults of the BBC. It might be too easy to steal for example. It would, however, be enough to support independent production of short format well catalogued educational video material.

Stop being free YouTube, and start being valuable.

Update 3/5/2010: Per Janek Mann, in comments, YouTube debuted YouTube Rentals in beta about 7 weeks ago:

... Introducing the beta of YouTube Rentals, a pay-to-view model on YouTube. Providing content owners a new way to generate revenue on the site, YouTube Rentals allows partners greater flexibility to monetize a variety of videos, provides full control over their content, and allows content owners to tap into the world's largest online video community.

The YouTube Rentals beta is currently available only to content owners in the U.S.

Evidently they thought it was a good idea too, though, barring time travel, they've probably been planning this for years. Obviously I'm a fan!

We need translation on Google Reader for Mobile!

After a hiatus when Google Reader social was broken, I'm back to following shares and blogs that alternate English with Chinese and other languages.

This would be a killer feature for Google Reader desktop, except that GR desktop has already killed all the feed reader competition. On a bigger scale though, embedded translation is one of the reasons that Google will (sadly) crush Apple and, over the next 20 years, machine translation will transform human civilization.

Yeah, I meant that. I've even added a new GR "label" (post tag) today called "translation".

Problem is Google Reader for Mobile doesn't do translation! Argghh. My non-English feed items (blogs, shares, etc) are unreadable on my iPhone. It's been over a year since GR desktop added translation services, and Mobile is still unilingual.

Sigh. I am 95% sure Google work on this will include the iPhone, and 5% worried it won't. If they do omit the iPhone, I may have to move to the gPhone sooner than I'd expected. That's how big this feature is. The GR Mobile translation story is just one more telling illustration of why Apple will lose its war with Google.

So, Google, for your user's sake and to encourage Apple to sue for peace sooner, please do get on this.

See also:

• 2009 will be the year of machine translation
• Google reader: now with translation services (Nov 2008!)
• Reading my writing translated
• Joy of the global web -- what's 101 mean?
• Do I make more sense in Greek?
• Gordon's stuff, now in 35 languages

Why Apple will lose the Google-Apple war

The were rumbles about Latitude, but the battle of Google Voice made the Google-Apple war public. Now it's a cliche ...

How Apple and Google's Romance Turned To Hate - Apple - Gizmodo

.. They happily worked in the iPhone's 2007 launch. Google gave Apple their maps, their search, and their mail, and Apple gave Google the best spot in their new shiny device. Apple put YouTube into the iPhone and Google made YouTube to work nicely with QuickTime, moving all videos to the h.264 standard (so Apple could avoid that nasty Flash kid). Google even optimized their web apps for the iPhone, and Apple smiled....

I like the prospect of Google-Apple competition, but this is too much. It won't end well for Apple.

Apple has brought me some very good things over the past few years, but Google makes me smarter. There is a major economic and productivity advantage for working with Google. In the medium term, on a global scale, this means Google will win.

If the iPhone doesn't have full access to Google's productivity boosting powers it will lose. No, web apps are not the answer -- the Google Voice web app is pathetic (partly this is because Google is only marginally competent at building client software -- they need to buy Palm for the engineers).

Maybe Jobs will step down. Certainly Eric Schmidt needs to go. One way or another, I hope this war ends soon.

Update 3/13/10: The NYT coverage makes it seem personal - particularly between Schmidt and Jobs. Both have enormous egos, but Schmidt is completely and trivially replaceable. The world would be better off if Schmidt were to retire.
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