Jobs’ life-long envy of “what it could have been” has just been put to sleep: Apple has become Microsoft. From the moment you start using the iPad, you become as aware of its wanders (the packaging, the minimalist interface, the user experience) as of its surgically removed potential, of its infuriating manipulated functional and hardware profile. It is cute, sleek and a pleasure to use. It’s also nothing like it could be, just a luke-warm projection of its potential.

But, what is it? Whatever it is, it stays away from threatening anything that Apple makes money on. Innovators are brave: the iPad is the creation of cowards.

As a phone, it fails because it doesn’t hold calls. As a media companion, the science-fiction thing that we all expected, it fails, because it excludes you from viewing 98% of all sites that hold that media, and it’s so obsessed with having you spend money in their store that its apps are manipulated as money grabs. As a computer, a 1980’s single-tasking OS will make you feel like if you were trying to type with boxing gloves on: another fail.

If you ask the castrati, I am sure they will love your assessment: the iPhone, the MacBooks, the iPods, can rest in their thrones, despite ever-shrinking innovation advantages. There, they can bask on the adoration of us, the fans, who have spent tens of thousands of dollars over the years on Apple. “A master move!” The castrati sing praises to each other, the app vendors take advantage of the confusion to ask for absurd prices (like $140 for the NYT for a year… would you please share the stuff you are smoking with us, the people?), the pundits congratulate each other.

Mmm… My assessment is that the castration is not only bad for innovation. I believe Apple is bleeding from it, and less and less people cares to see it go. Including us, the fans. I can give you many reasons why this is the death of the Apple we used to love, but let me just give you the two less controversial ones.

Good money after bad

Why protect business that are increasingly indefensible? Why protect an already inferior iPhone, or a mostly undifferentiated laptop business? To castrate the iPad just so that it does not cannibalize MacBook Pros is absurd in many fronts (except the castrati’s next quarter spreadsheet):

• Other players that are very eager to try the tablet business don’t have to protect anything. Thus, they can afford to create the tablet that could really be. Small companies such as Google. And no, the 140,000 apps will be no defense: they were when they costed $0.99 and you could whim your way through a few hundred ones. Not so when they cost several times more than desktop equivalents, if you price them by functionality delivered.
• Protective anti-innovation is what you do when you are Microsoft. Well, everybody knows that Jobs always wanted to be Gates, I guess he has succeeded.
• The businesses Apple is protecting deserve to die. No? You disagree? Ah, I see, you love to lug that laptop around… Or to have to wait two minutes for it to boot. Or carrying a car battery hanging from your left leg so that it doesn’t die in the middle of the movie. Come on! The laptop has been dead for years: we keep it alive through a battle of patents and… yes, protective moves. It takes you ten minutes using iPad to realize that not only the laptop is dead, but the tablet is its next evolutionary step. But wait, it can’t, because Apple has removed its balls. The device made by cowards…

About the iPhone, let’s face it, not even worth the ink to argue that it has fallen behind, is it? I never liked Google much (just another face of a common oligopoly), but I like them more and more because the Android beats the iPhone so many times over… coming from a company that never built a device!!! Can’t wait to see the second iteration: in the meanwhile my AT&T contract will expire… Can’t wait

The innovation cycle is working against Apple, not in its favor

Despite popular belief, Apple’s advantage in its markets has stopped being innovation a long time ago, and it has been packaging all along. Apple may not own the multi-touch interface, its OS may be a minor variant of BSD, the graphics advantage over other OS’s evaporated over ten years ago, and so on and so forth. But it doesn’t care, because its advantage is packaging of the right standard hardware and  functionality, at the right moment, with the correct marketing. Ounce per ounce, and dollar per dollar, a Sony Vaio or a Dell computer holds much more innovation than a Mac, and they do because they are much better at the margins game, not because they want to be good. But from the moment you open the box, “advantage Apple”.

How can Apple afford an integration-based advantage, when other companies can counterattack with lightening innovation cycles? Protective market manipulations is one way. Give you iPhone 3.0, which sucked really bad, until it couldn’t hold 4.0 (which sucked a little less) any longer, and then sold it back to you who has already paid for 3.0. By carefully manipulating its app marketplace (and the numbers: there is no such thing as even 70,000 apps if you remove the multiple apps instantiated through data segmentation – there is a soccer app that counts like 240 apps: because each soccer team has its own version– the apps that just don’t work, and those that flopped but obstinately remain around, and other tricks of the counting), Apple keeps the innovation trickle attractive, and leverages over and over our (the fans’) commitment.

Another way is mystique. What can I say, I hate to be censored by Apple, I hate to be milked over and over, by Apple and Friends alike, but what can I say, rather give Apple the money than give it to Microsoft… right? Well, not so right any more. Fans know they are being abused: even Jobs tells them so when he unwraps his gigantic ego in the next MacWorld and talks with zen (and medieval) zest about how the future is carefully planned and staged for them. The iPad may brake the balance for many of them. You mean that you don’t spend that extra 34 cents on a USB port just so that you can sell it to me for $29? Or that memory card reader, another awesome $0.65, so that … $29 AGAIN? You mean that I could REALLY work with this beauty, but you are going to wait to sell it to me as a non-upgradeable fix in the next version, and it will be just an OS multi-tasking unlock?

When fans feel abused, they start routing for the underdogs. Why do you think that the last SuperBowl was the most watched in history? Have you heard about the ultimate underdog, Google? Or ITC, who Apple is fending off through a miserable patent grinding lawsuit? Or that tiny company orders of magnitude larger than Apple called Nokia? These guys have no laptop to protect, no fans to abuse: they can only leverage their HUGE sizes and innovation pools…

Guess what: I can’t wait to see it happen. I wander what it would be like to be an ex-fan: it would be like leaving a disfunctional “family” once and for all, wouldn’t it?

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––  UPDATE (4/6/9)

I just read an article in Boing Boing that expresses my feelings about the iPad quite well, specially as they relate to how Apple assumes the user to be (a) slightly retarded and (b) happy to just consume. Highly recommended…

Kudos to Cory Doctorow

–––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– UPDATE (4/6/9)

Umar Haque (another great thinker of the Enterprise and Media 2.0 space), brings his great analytical skills to the fore in his analysis for HBR of how Apple is shooting itself on the iFace [sic] by trying to support the revolution of media as a service, *as well as* the financial benefits of last century’s product lock-in at the same time. Industrial revolution and services economy in the same drive… Great thinking from a very articulate and insightful observer.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

iPad: a timid, luke-warm, defensive move from an Apple with no gonads

The 1.1 in “enterprise 1.1″ is actually quite important. It’s not just an artifact of communication. I use it to reflect a very simple fact, it goes like this:

• First came Enterprise 1.0 – You know what it was about: control, secrecy (even amongst peers), need-to-know-basis, access-control, “business rules”, “process”, all that junk that business leaders learnt at all those very prestigious institutions where “business is war”, there is a thing called “guerrilla marketing”, social solidarity is abbreviated as “socialism”, where even selling you unneeded junk is called “market penetration” (guess why? ). Want to know what it feels like in Enterprise 1.0? Perhaps you do… Hypothetically, let’s say you worked at Ford Motors about ten years ago, when the Explorer was about to be released to great forecasts. While the car is being designed, a quick calculation in your Cad/Cam system shows that the vehicle will flip over under lateral pressures on its tires (e.g., turning a curve while breaking slightly). now, let’s say that, hypothetically always, you go to your boss with your findings. Here comes the test: what do you get?
  • If the answer is something like “A reprimand, severe admonitions, threats to shut the hell up… followed by a surprise promotion to a position far away organizationally from your last one, for which you need to sign a non-disclosure about your previous job that basically hands over your gonads and children to the company if you ever mention the incident again”, you already know what Enterprise 1.0 feels like. E1.0 is another term for “glacial, absolute and indisputable lack of movement and change”; what is, will be.
• Then, of course, Enterprise 1.1 showed up – What was it? Same crap, just marketing angles on top. A great example: SAS, cloud-based software, you may be old enough to even remember ASP. Whatever the case, this is the same old: same old control, same old secrecy, same old ideology, same old… but now you don’t even need to own the hardware. Why do I choose SAS, instead of many other categories? Well, because I consider SalesForce.com a perfect example of 1.1: “Change something that makes exercising control cheaper and you will create the illusion of movement”. What the software does is exactly what it did before; it’s just slightly cheaper (arguably) to operate. Slight of hand. E 1.1
• Enterprise 2.0 is now emergent – The pervasive Internet has made it possible for all of us to be heard (take this obscure blog as an example), but also to excite our network (something E1.0 and E1.1 would never let you do) around us, and in the process create conditions for many emergent phenomena: the same way that you can easily bring a freeway to its knees by synchronizing traffic across three lanes (usually right in front of me), you can now create a PR disaster for Ford (always hypothetically, of course), for killing hundreds of people in Explorers that turn over, over, and over, as soon as people turn corners and touch the brakes. Yes, you are that empowered, you just need to learn other rules of engagement (social networking 1.0.1), but you can do it, and Ford would have a very hard time sweeping you under the rug. You see, even as all those large companies have all this control-driven infrastructure, you, and your network, are not part of it: they can control their infrastructure, but it’s becoming too hard to control you: too many possible outlets for your voice… at least until this oxymoron called “social CRM” gets to “embrace you, the customer”. But that is another story, let’s go back to Reason #2.

The center of reason #2 is that E1.0, as well as E1.1, are paradigms driven by control, secrecy and exclusion; you “don’t need to know that the damn cars will turn over, that’s ‘proprietary’ information”, “you don’t need to know that your Internet 6 browser is exposing everything you do in the Internet to others –for the same reason”– and so on. We even have software and infrastructure to make sure  you don’t know. We call those pieces of software Content Management, Intranets, ERP, Back Office Apps, and oh, yes, CRM.

You see, CRM doesn’t let YOU the customer, see what the sales person knows about product defects. Nope. Neither does it empower to talk to many other customers on your terms, controlling the conversation yourself. What it does, is to make sure that the vendor controls the conversation, that no “proprietary information” is exchanged, that “business rules” are enforced. It’s role is to preserve the status quo, not to impact it. What is, will be.

Social business services, on the other hand, are all about you controlling conversation, relationships and interactions. It works because it lets you choose how to deposit your trust into individuals and companies, and it does so precisely by letting you control the terms of the conversation. As a result, “customer-managed relationships (CMR)” emerges. CMR is social, by definition and by its own merits; CRM, on the other hand, is the negation of social: it’s the total loss of control of the conversation by the customer.

So, why do these companies (mostly SalesForce.com) and pundits (too many to list) create the oxymoron?

• Good intentions by some pundits – If you believe customers should be empowered, or if you believe that they will be empowered regardless of what you say, “social CRM” is a good way to bring out the good in every one. That is cool, but it’s a contortion of an argument:
  • “Customers are increasingly empowered, they have too many channels, the channels are auto-emergent, and thus customers will take control of the conversation”. OK, I agree with that.
  • “Companies will need to adapt in order to sell to the new customer”. OK, I agree with that as well. As a matter of fact, when you look at the way the really big companies are selling these days, how they are creating “influencers” out of “soccer moms”, how there is a networked way of doing everything, even buying Clorox, how you can fart on Tweeter and have twenty companies who make perfume immediately pinging you, and all that, they are already doing that. Their answer is to deploy massive troops whose job is to sneak into your conversations. They adapted the same way China adapted to the Internet: growing their ability to sneak into the dialog.
  • “The software that will let them adapt is Social CRM”. Oops, fallacy alert! Yes, I know, Benioff needs something to energize his 1.1 company, and he is a brilliant marketer, and he can command the pundits and experts alike (who indirectly leave out of his crumbs), with a snap of the finger… but that’s just not what CRM does. CRM does not empower conversation… unless you are the salesperson; social CRM doesn’t change the nature of CRM, it’s just an attempt by the company to control your conversation… even as what “your conversation” mutates into a social discussion.
• Follow the leader intentions by the rest – Yeah, you already know all about this one
• Stale enterprise categories – Want boring? Want old? Want dinosaurs? Just look at ERP, CRM, CMS, all those enterprise software categories. Not only the tools are boring: the categories themselves are. How boring? Well, let me use an example from the CMS side: so boring that even a monolithic piece of architecture like SharePoint is called innovative… that at a time when everyone is moving to light weight ones. How boring? Have you ever used SalesForce.com, or Siebel, or …? If you have, I don’t need to tell you more. Where these vendors have already reached everyone that can be reached, Social Business Services vendors are just emerging, and are recognized as the best big thing. Wouldn’t you do the same? What, if I was in the business of selling horse-powered carriages, I would have changed my marketing too: I would be selling “SOCIAL carriages”. You bet!
• The failure of a model to evolve – You sell things that are all about control, manipulation, need-to-know, secrecy, walls and silos, “corporate controls”, and all of that. In other words, you sell CRM, or you sell CMS’s. You have a good business selling to the very old. The guy who buys from you wears suits and has trouble using even his Blackberry (yes, HIS). He is worried to see the conversation moving away… but you need to keep selling him. The irresolvable conflict between these two modalities is worth a separate post (where I will tell you, as an example, why “Social SharePoint” is another oxymoron, and yet for the same reasons), but its essence remains: CRM, ERP, CMS’s, they all excel at supporting all those structures of control and secrecy (I really mean it, they are EXCELLENT at it). I made a lot of money through my career supporting those mechanisms as well. It’s just that they are outdated: there is no slight coat of paint that will save them. Dinosaurs.

When you look at Chatter, for example, all there is there is a thin layer of social artifacts (the usual, discussions, posts, small groups of people, avatars, profiles) coming to the sales person rescue, helping him CONTROL the conversation a little longer; somewhere in there are you. You are now surrounded by other “influential customers” who are “just like you” (in prisons, they would call them snitches: you see, this “others like me” is not only a new type of social filter for information, it’s old enough to be built into your genes, it’s just that now even “they” know that); you are still the prisoner of the conversation (as determined by the asymmetry between the information YOU gain and control and the information THEY own and control). Does that sound like a new type of relationship to you?

What is that you just said? That it doesn’t matter because you, the user, don’t buy the software?

Yep, you are right… But notice that I didn’t say Benioff isn’t brilliant: on the contrary, he knows he will sell to ignorants as long as he steals a few concepts from that “other thing” called Social. Further, that reality is even OK with me: ignorance is its own narcissistic dictator, and, at the end of the game, everyone playing with it will succumb to it.

I just don’t think that Social CRM will buy SFC (and the ignorants) too much time, because in the meanwhile you are setting up your own social filters, your own BS traps, your own lie detectors, your own social smarts, much, much faster than SFC can spin this crap around. When that oxymoron  called “social CRM” shows up in your business transaction, you will recognize it for what it is: just another trap.

When you do, you will go back to the place where customers manage their relationships. It’s called social networks, and if companies are involved, it will be called Social Business Services. No need to contaminate it with the old dinosaur genes.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Reason No. 2 why Social CRM is an oxymoron

Remember MCi and AT&T calling you 100 times a day? That was CRM at its ‘best’.

People who care about CRM are people who could care less about you, the customer, being helped. It just matters to them if you are influential in Twitter. Are you? I am not.

Who puts “Social” and “CRM” in the same sentence? CRM vendors. Usually, SalesForce.com, trying to pimp Chatter. There you have a great social relationship: the sales person that has been ignoring you ever since you bought that lousy product from them. Now he wants to know more about you, what your opinion is about this and that, in the hope he can sell you “that”. That’s how “social” this is.

Why is SalesForce.com also doing it? Well, they market an alternative to traditional CRM, and do it very well. Which, considering the competition, is not really a big feat. But let’s face it, they are good at that. However, have you ever used SF? If you have, compare it with a good social enterprise platform like Jive.

Yep, now imagine that quality of experience coming from SF.Com. Nuff said: if you don’t get it you haven’t experienced true “Social”.

So, I understand that SFC wants to bring some glitter into their tired, exhausted, anything-but-interesting set of customer-ignoring products. I understand that anything “Social” today glitters like gold, and there are way many gold diggers out there needing a revamp. So, I DO understand why SFC is talking “Social CRM”. Unfortunately for SFC, it still doesn’t make any sense.

If you disagree, I ask you to just take your pundit hat off for a minute, and put on your customer hat (yep, the same “C” on the front). Now go ahead, look at this oxymoron called “social CRM”. Go ahead, smile.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Reason No.1 why Social CRM is an oxymoron

Further, after the young bush debacle, I thought I would never like them less. Let’s face it, this population was one that, having experienced what the latest mass murderer in the bush dinasty was about, helped him steal the Presidency nonetheless. Talk about the only animal that hits the same stone twice… in this particular case, hitting it with the head.

But never say never…  The latest developments at the Texas Board of Education/Lack-thereof are now saying that Texas is so proud to be ignorant, retrograde and superstitious that it is now trying to make sure that ignorance is passed down to future generations, and if possible, that it wants to be surrounded by an ignorant, arrogant and superstitious nation as well.

That should teach me to believe that human stupidity has limits. Can’t wait to never go there again…

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Don’t mess with Texas’ ignorance

I usually upgrade to first class, which means I get a meal. And there, neatly in the most visible spot of the tray, I always get a well printed card, with the image of skies, the Alaska logo, and … a fragment from a PSALM. Something like “I will be glad an rejoice in you… O most high”, or some other like it.All of them taken from the bible, all of them equally insulting to my intelligence.

I have asked the stewardesses to remove it from my tray. Some of them try. Others look at me like something is wrong with me. I feel insulted by the shuffling of somebody’s belief of what is “common sense” and “normal” up my nose. I could be a muslim. I could be a Buddhist. I could be atheist, or agnostic, or believe in Spaghetti Deities, or whatever the poison choice. Whatever the case, I would not push my personal opinions, superstitions or kinks unnecessarily on people. I wouldn’t do it even to somebody I do not respect, much less to a customer, who is choosing to spend her/his money with me.

First, I would think that my customer may feel invaded. I know that at least one out of twenty will. Am I saying that I don’t care about them?

Second, why do it? If I am in the airline business, my business is not to spread, support or in any way act on religion. My business is to fly people securely and comfortably, not to enter their privacy with such an intrusive, unnecessary gesture.

Then there is that “assumption of no big thing”. Like… “Aren’t you too picky? After all, it’s OK to be religious, America is a religious country”.

Mmmm…

NO

For me it’s NOT OK. For me religion is the excuse that has justified more killings than any other reason in history. It’s also the excuse used to censor, lie, torture, exclude, persecute, and much more. I don’t care if Alaska Airlines management feels secure and cozy in a homogeneous (bland?), mostly caucasian, judaic-christian group of decision makers. It’s still not OK for me, and for a lot of people like me. For us, America is great not because it is of ANY religion, but rather because it protects my right not to have your religion pushed on me. That’s why I am an American (in my case, it’s by choice, not accident of birth). And this later argument is the most precious of all: it really doesn’t matter what (if any) religion I consume (notice that I don’t even tell you that detail). What matters is that nobody should intrude into anybody else’s personal choice.

Luckily, you and I have a way to act on this. We can fly another airline. In my case, based on the average so far, more than $12,000 a year that can go to whomever cares about this. If you care about it too, think why would you spend thousands of dollars to anybody who thought “This may be offensive to some of my customers… Nah! There are just a few of them!”  This time, you may not be in the minority they are over-running (you may be a catholic, or variations thereof). But next time you may.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Alaska Airlines superstitious blunder

I am an Apple fan, and as a consumer probably in the 97 percentil when measured by reliance and expenditure on Apple for personal AND business computing devices. But I have started to be alarmed too, and despite all previous proclamations, have decided NOT to buy the iPad, and to seriously look at switching away from the iPhone.

When Apple decides to keep OUT of the iPad technology that has become ubiquitous, just to REDUCE and without arbitration curtail what I can do with the device, it goes too far.

It goes even further, waaaaaay too far, when it decides in a non-transparent way which apps I can buy or not. No, not apps that could drain batteries (miserable excuse to keep Adobe out of their devices). The decision is taken on CONTENT; in other words, a megalomaniac decides what I can see.

Not that I would use the iPhone to buy porn: the device screen is too small to enjoy it. But who the hell is Jobs to decide what I can do with a device I paid good money for, and which has as competitors wonderfully open devices? Fuck, I left my country of birth to leave authoritarian despots behind, I am not going to take it from Apple. It’s not a matter of motivation: whether the decision is taken to make more money on me or to control my thinking or whatever: it still SUCKS.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

Apple becoming Big Brother, censoring you and I as well

Neat idea, eh? It truly is. And an invaluable service if you have a small business, a cash-strapped non-for-profit, or a spreadout family that would love to chat as a group every so often.

Neat, that is, unless you use COX Cable Phone in Santa Barbara. There, COX Cable censors your calls, so that if you call a number provided by FreeConference.com, you get an ambiguous message that says “All circuits are busy. Call later”. Which is, of course, a lie. How do I know? All other participants, calling from any other town, or even from Santa Barbara but not on COX, get through without a problem. Go to another house with COX service, call any of those numbers and guess what… you get the same message.

I am, of course, looking for ways out of COX. In my case, because there is no previous phone line coming into my house, it may take a more expensive service to replace them. But even so, I will. These troglodytes that turned “customer service” into an oxymoron need to disappear, once and for all. Right now they play the monopoly (or oligopoly) games: you don’t bug me and my dirty practices, I won’t bug you and yours. But with increasingly social efficiencies brought about by the Social Internet, we can all help each other identify crooks like COX Cable, and get rid of them.

I may not be worth anything to them, but I have service with them in two properties (one of them in Santa Barbara). The way I see it, I can hurt them at the tune of approximately $6,000 a year, $60,000 in ten years. That’s really sweet.

Don;t take more abuse from COX: cancel your cable and phone. Yes, there will be other options. And by the way, next time somebody mentions net neutrality, remember it means that these crooks will not be able to select which numbers you call, which IP services you use, or which bytes are worth more to you than others. Companies like COX want to be in the extortion business.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

COX Cable censors the numbers you can call

You may have noticed that bombing is so common on Office Mac 2008 (running on G5 Quad-core, all versions up to 10.5.8 OS X) that the latest Mac version of Office enters into bomb-recovery-auto-save every 30-60 seconds? Well, if you know you will bomb, I guess wasting your users’ time is marginally better than actually bombing, isn’t it?

Well, the latest installment of the bombing masters is this virus Microsoft calls “Silverlight”… Take the latest version of the G5 (possibly the best debugged OS ever to run on a known platform); take Safari, one of the most robust browser available (not perfect, but robust).  Now, go to any Silverlight-heavy site (you can find them by searching for SharePoint Web Sites – every consultant in the SharePoint ecology is busy using Silverlight for everything that would be well served by CSS and basic JS).

In any case, let’s say that you still need to see what the stupid Silverlight control contains (you may be doing research for work), you’ll need to install the “plug-in”. Otherwise, when you get there you will find that there are blank boxes all over the place (put mildly, Silverlight doesn’t degrade too well, as other types of compost). The white boxes have that “Get Silverlight or f**k off” messages… Now, you will go through the installation (only version 1 of Silverf**k supports the G5 architecture). But don’t even think it will work… So far, trying it in three out of three G5-based Macs, when you find one of those sites plastered with Silverf**k, Safari will bomb in one of the nastiest ways it can (be ready to press that On/Off button).

While the machine bombs, and you are waiting for the reboot, it may be a good moment to meditate on why, considering that we have a well debugged, proven, multi-platform media delivery vehicle (called Flash), already installed in 98% of all personal computers worldwide, why do we need a buggy, surely bloated (just give it two months or so), almost certainly privacy insensitive and platform-paranoid piece of junk software… Um…

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

If you run Safari on a G5 Mac, avoid Silverlight

In other words, the decision to buy it is already there, I will just need to think of a valid justification. Further, the decision is there because I have a lot of speculative reasons to buy it, but still the purchase will be compulsive. Hats off to Apple for getting me in this unconditional purchase mode…

In my defense, I believe that whatever reason I would concoct at this point (and believe me, I have read books worth of postings and discussions about this issue), by the time I am using it and depending on it, I will discover that, all along, I was blind to the most powerful reason to get it, and that such reason was the “naked emperor in the room”.

So, I thought, let’s commit to this blog the reasons I can think of at this time. We’ll see how I do in a few months, when I already have it and depend on it:

1. CAPTIVE ENTERTAINMENT – I spend a large enough amount of time captive in planes, trains, and hotels; I also like reading, movies and music (almost as much as my iPhone games) a whole lot. One-plus-one equals $500;
2. A GREATER WAY TO USE EVERNOTE – Everybody who knows me knows that I am a fanatic of Evernote. I have written in this blog a couple of times how, being able to maximize my use of only Evernote is a pet project. Well, I see the iPad as more portable than my laptop and more comfortable to annotate on (in the extended sense of what is a note for Evernote). Yes, I know that I will miss the camera, but I also know that the second iteration of the iPad will have it, and in the meanwhile the iPhone will fill in;
3. I LOVE WRITING BY HAND – Yes, I am an old f#rt, I still love hand-writing, and I believe that the gap between ink and interpreted ASCII text is quickly going away. So much so, that I have bought every reasonably different implementation of tablets, all the way from the three Newton generations, to the Nokia tablet (so close, yet so far), to the frustrating Windows tablet (which, if Microsoft had not been so anti-innovation, would probably dominate the category today) to the iRex e-readers you can also write on (very badly implemented by iRex, but intriguing). They have all fallen short, and I have complete faith that Apple will crack that nut open;
4. CONFIDENCE IN APPLE – I have for months told everyone who asked me about the iPad that when it came out, it would prove that it was a market creator, like other legendary Apple products were. It would do so by finding an activity that is not only compelling, but also unthinkable of in other devices (like, say, listening to music in an iPod, or playing a game in an iPhone, or similar). I would’ve loved it for Apple to make that application obvious in the pre-release, but that hasn’t yet come through; yes, we already know that watching a movie in it, or using the Calendar for appointments, will be something else… but not a category-creating experience. I was hoping that Apple had found a killer social app that would justify the tablet (if something new is about to happen, almost certainly will be in this domain)… I still have confidence that a killer app exists or will emerge soon: either Apple knows, and is not talking yet, or the brilliance of the engineering in the iPad will be so compelling that somebody else, an app provider probably, will create a new category (like Aldus on the first Macs).

Can’t wait to comment on this post four months from now…

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

My iPad time capsule

As I reported before, Evernote started becoming ubiquitous on my machines (I happen to use several, on different OS’s, as part of my consulting job). Having an always auto-synchornized, always up-to-date record of ANYTHING I wrote or pictured or scribbled was enough to convert me. Add to that automatic scanning of all pictures and formidable character recognition, one of the best (nimble) interfaces I have seen, availability via browser, lightning-fast search, solid clipping and tagging functionality, (recent) sharing of notebooks with other users, and you can understand why an Evernote notebook is ALWAYS open on ANY computer I am using.

Slowly but surely, EverNote took over space and timethat had before been devoted to other applications:

• Bye bye stickies, notepads, etc., because an Evernote note is for ever (never needed to delete one), and ubiquitous, and available wherever I am because I always have with me one of the devices that can be used to take “notes”, even if it’s by snapping a picture;
• Bye bye outlining and hierarchical notepads; outlines and hierarchies quickly grow out of manageability, and as a result become beautifully engineered but heavy maintenance structures. To make it worse, reality (or my understanding of it) drastically changes with time, and when it does the hierarchy I built does not represent it any more. At that point, I either need to spend a lot of my time to fix the structure, or throw it away. A simple indented list from EverNote is usually a good device, not only because it is intuitive to use, but also because it contains its own “recommended scope”: If the list becomes unwieldy to manage, I am over-complicating things, time to simplify. And, of course, it’s also (to all practical purposes) eternal and ubiquitous, and searchable and…
• Bye bye word processors. This one is a little unfair, because I have been trying to get rid of those ridiculously over-functional pieces of bloatware for a long time. Not that I have a problem using them, on the contrary, I am quite good with them, and have used them to write content pieces much larger and sophisticated than they were designed for. I despise them because they are huge, create false dependencies with form and presentation, are used as lock-in by Microsoft, tend to hog my computer’s resources, and make me write very, very long sentences justifying why I hate them. In any case, Evernote strikes the right balance of formatting by sticking to what you can format in a basic Web editor, which is a good balance for me. I am happy to say that I have not used MS Word for creative purposes for over a year: I only use it when I am locked in by someone else (i.e., needing to collaborate on somebody else’s file). Even if I do oblige (particularly with customers), I make sure the other person understands that I consider her choice of format a major pain. I wish more people did the same…
• Bye bye OmniFlow, iGTD, tiddlywiki and the other GTD applications that I have used through the years: I started using Evernote plus a simple system of specialized tags (@TAG for contexts, +NAME for people, and *PROJECT for projects), made those tags sub-tags of higher-order ones (@CONTEXT, +PEOPLE and *PROJECTS), and used them as instant synthesizers. I ended up with a GTD system that is not only first-class (it supports all key ideas of the GTD system) but also requires MINIMUM BEHAVIOR CHANGES in order to use, much less than using any of the other implementations
• Bye bye creating a separate content collaboration space with each customer (Usually done in Drupal): a shared notebook keeps us always up to speed, and the rest is overhead. This is an area where I believe Evernote could become a killer social application for knowledge workers, and the recent addition of sharing may mean that the very smart people behind it are looking into that. There is so little to add to the current functionality that I really hope they do.

Increasing encroachment is also taking place in my blog writing (this posting, as many others in other blogs, are at least drafted in Evernote, sometimes completely written in it) and other social writing.

Am I saying that Evernote is all of those things in one? Absolutely not. I am saying that, IF you are a minimalist like me, and value computer-independence, tagging, web-level formatting, and usability, Evernote has all that it needs to replace the minimum set of features in all of those applications, and then some more (like taking a picture of a business card and having Evernote turning it into a searchable contact record, or a library of all web clippings that really matter to you, and more).

How can you go wrong? Release registry and disk space, gain complete and constant (and searchable, and semantically taggable, and actionable, and web-publish-able) access to everything you write, avoid bloatware, and release meaningless time devoted to unneeded form to be used instead for creating…

Why am I writing then “a note is a note is … my brain”? Because “note taking” is a narrowly constructed phrase that deceives you about Evernote. “Note taking” is something you do while boring professors, bosses, clients and collaborators talk in the background, something you do as a quick solution until you get to a “real writing device and metaphor”, something you do it in whatever paper you have on hand (or my favorite 3×5 cards) but you know you’ll have to re-process, it’s always a means to a presumably higher goal. That’s deceiving.

When you know that every note you take will be always available, that it will integrate into your life in front of the computer, the phone, the PDA, the laptop with ZERO effort on your part, that you won’t have to remember it because tags and search will bring it to you, a note is not only a note and a task and a project and a document and a blog post and … A note is what happens when you write. Period. Any simplifictions you need to do to leverage them is justified and well worth it!

Because for me writing, speaking and thinking are inextricably linked, my note repository is starting to look like my mind’s mirror (Except the reflection remembers much better than the real one). I always tell people to whom I show Evernote that if the computer had been invented before steel, the first typewriter would have looked exactly like Evernote.

It’s actually ironic that a few applications before captured my imagination as potentially being capable to contain all my activities (Are you old enough to remember MORE on the Mac?). Many of them started as a “PIM”, other as outliners, others as databases, and then started layering layer upon layer of functionality on those “standards”. And now, here comes Evernote and makes me realize that a core of very well thought functionality, Web 2.0 and a truly minimalist approach were the right ingredients.

Post from: Online shared intelligence; copyright © 2008 Carlos Caballero. All rights reserved.

A note is a note is … my brain