Technology – Page 159

Palm fears (first appeared in InfoWorld)

I fear for Palm.

No, I’m not predicting victory for Microsoft in the PDA wars. For that matter, there’s no reason to predict that only one product will survive. This isn’t Highlander, where in the end there can be only one. Any product that can sync with all of the popular e-mail clients, calendar management systems, and contact databases will be viable.

This isn’t really a big worry for you right now, unless you’re trying to establish and enforce a PDA standard in your company, and that would be a very bad idea. You’re far better off letting users choose whatever they want. There just isn’t that much downside to it. In the end there will be only two, anyway: Palm (and its cousin from Handspring) and the PocketPC (or three if someone digs deep enough to discover the Psion).

But I fear for Palm.

Sure, Microsoft blew it big time with the first two versions of Windows CE. They flopped, and many of the hardware vendors who backed versions one and two are off the bandwagon for awhile.

Sure, Palm has the inside track, in the form of a large, loyal customer base, many of whom really want Microsoft to fail.

Sure, the PocketPC has a mountain to climb in the form of the huge, third-party-created catalog of applications available for the Palm.

But …

I fear for Palm, because Palm is displaying the kind of lethargic arrogance that inevitably ends up dBasing a company in the marketplace. When was the last time Palm innovated?

Okay, it has color (and a backgammon game!) on the 3c, and it stuck an antenna on the Palm VII. Whee! Now I can do remote e-mail, so long as pure ASCII will do the job. But even here Palm missed the obvious, like a microphone so you can record thoughts while you drive, coupled with an Internet speech recognition service so you don’t have to transcribe your recordings when you get to your office. That would make the antenna truly useful.

Oh, darn … I probably could have received a patent for that.

In theory, Microsoft has positioned the PocketPC as a consumer device to make an end-run around the Palm’s business focus. In reality, it’s positioned for business travelers. Being able to listen to music, read electronic books, or play video games will be big with road warriors wanting distraction from the long delays and lack of food endemic to modern air travel. And with music and games, can a plug-in DVD player for personal in-flight movies be far behind?

Meanwhile, Palm relies on third party software developers for innovation. The platform itself is moribund. Palm reminds me of nothing so much as Ashton-Tate in the mid-80s. Not only isn’t it providing any technological leadership, it isn’t even mimicking the leadership of others.

So don’t set a standard right now. The impact on IS will be small … making sure your Help Desk can help users whose PDAs won’t sync anymore.

Professional landscape architects don’t plan the sidewalks when they design campuses anymore. They wait until everyone on campus has done a lot of walking. Then they pave the paths that happen naturally.

Make this your PDA strategy – let your users choose the path for you. You can pave it once you know where it should go.

Because I fear for Palm.

Punishment that fits the crime (first appeared in InfoWorld)

Can you imagine if Lance Ito had been the judge?

By the time this column appears, the verdict itself (for the Microsoft trial, of course … have there been any others?) will be old news. The obligatory snap judgments will all have been printed, so you’ve read that (a) Judge Penfield Jackson was right and should throw the book at Microsoft; (b) he may have been right in theory, but technology has passed the whole issue by so the penalty should be light; (c) the whole trial should never have taken place because antitrust laws are bad for bidness.

The fact is that in the eyes of the law, Microsoft did harm and is guilty. The question now is finding a suitable punishment. What strikes me about this subject is the dreary sameness of the proposed solutions. Every one involves either breaking up the company, expropriating its intellectual property (read “Windows”), and/or supervising it closely while telling it to stop being so naughty.

Sadly, not one of these punishments stands up to the most basic of ethical tests: The punishment should fit the crime. The worst is breaking up the company, because in the wacky world of Wall Street a broken-up Microsoft would probably exceed a unified Microsoft in total market capitalization.

The goal of punishment is not to enrich the guilty.

Here’s one punishment that doesn’t enrich the guilty, and does fit Microsoft’s crime of abusing its Windows’ monopoly by bundling and dumping other, non-monopoly products, with it. What would be a suitable punishment? Prevent dumping, require the bundling of competing products, and break the monopoly.

Resolving the bundling and dumping issue is relatively easy: If Microsoft bundles a product, it must bundle the three leading competitors as well, and can only give away a product when at least one competitor already does so.

Breaking the monopoly is the more interesting challenge. Here’s one way: Require Microsoft to do what it should do anyway: Both publish and respect the operating system interface.

In other words, put the Windows API in the public domain. Not Windows itself, just its API. The court would enjoin Microsoft from either hiding any APIs or changing its specifications once published.

This would create near-instant competition in the form of Windows clones. Without hidden or changing APIs, clone-makers would be limited only by their ability to write code that works.

Enforcing this penalty is where the fun starts: The court should establish a bounty, paid by Microsoft’s own self to the first person or company uncovering a hidden or changed API. Make it $50 million or so per API, and I figure the average delay between infraction and detection would be measured in minutes.

Here’s the best part: Internet Explorer is part of the operating system, so its API, along with the API for the rest of Windows … all versions … will now be in the public domain. So will the APIs for any other applications Microsoft declares to be integral to the OS. Wham! Microsoft suddenly has a strong incentive to respect the distinction between OS and application.

That’s my solution. Even if you don’t like it, at least it’s different from the same old stuff.

If, on the other hand, you do like it and are pals with Judge Jackson, feel free to mention it to him. Or, mention it to a pal of a pal.

Six degrees of separation should get it there.