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

A quick scan of enterprise feeds is enough to convince us that any company in the Web 2.0 space is about to shut down because of SharePoint’s presumably unstoppable momentum. And yet:

• Half of SharePoint users use it just as a file manager, not surprising, considering that that is the only part of SharePoint that users get for “free” with Windows Server;
• For SharePoint, social enterprise seems to be all about having wikis, blogs and a MySite page for each user (which can be expected to be the focus of SharePoint 2010), whereas most social enterprise leaders like Jive are already moving into what Kathleen Reidy of the 451 group calls “use cases, not tools” which in other words means real solutions for innovation, brand management, customer relationships, and more, as opposed to the possibilities opened by tool kits;
• Talk to any SharePoint implementation partner, and you find that by far most of the money spent in SharePoint projects is going into basic content management functionality, from extending search to be able to manage run amok SharePoint 2003 silos to getting workflow to work, and not into all the things that supposedly make SharePoint so “dangerous for E2.0 vendors”;
• The fact that most crucial business workflows are already managed by incumbent CMS’s like Documentum and IBM FileNet (and woven into it very strong content dependencies) is not frequently discussed, which is dangerous, because the most attractive bells and whistles in SharePoint only shine when SharePoint has omnipotent control of all content.

I suspect that such a gap between reality and KoolAid sweetness will take a few years to settle (Microsoft is putting s lot of fans into creating the dust storm). When that dust settles, I suspect the landscape will look like this:

• A content management layer where SharePoint will coexist tightly with other multiple Content Management silos;
• A basic team collaboration set of services, perhaps complemented with equally basic expertise location and small scale social snippets (and yes, very squarish and SilverLight-ribbon-heavy MySites);
• A thin coat of partner paint, delivering supplementary web parts (the same ones that Microsoft will deliver as “good enough” web parts in the next release) and trying to stay away from the proverbial elephant;
• A thriving layer of social, enterprise 2.0, solution oriented innovators that use all of the above as a source of content to feed interactions, activities, semantic knowledge, innovation management, brand management and many other Enterprise 2.0 functions;

I am sure there will be companies that implement the whole thing using Microsoft’s stack (who doesn’t like to be featured  in every Microsoft brochure and presentation, after all?) but the business transformation that Enterprise 2.0 requires will not be built like that: business just can’t wait for Microsoft…

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

The SharePoint buzz

The presentation got me thinking further… Let’s face it, with all its fanfare and massive adoption, SharePoint is still used mostly as a very basic content manager. The reasons behind this massive adoption, and the corresponding adoption pattern, have already been discussed to death, with my favorite interpretation being that Microsoft just leveled a Content Management space that could not bear the weight of heavy, slow but entrenched “enterprise players”, who brought very little innovation or standardization to a mature market, while keeping outrageous licensing margins. Add to that unrealistic market players behavior the reality of corporate IT groups starved for real web talent (easy to generalize to talent in general) and fearing that power will slip out of their hands as the cloud and SaaS makes most of their services equally irrelevant and unsustainable, and a the “bottom-feeding” picture starts to emerge.

The presentation in question was interesting because of some of its key messages, articulated in very clear terms, such as:

1. 52% of developers involved with your corporate web sites are millennials (said in the same tone as you would say “terrorists”, or “idiots”). “Do YOU want those guys to ‘control YOUR brand’ and ‘manage YOUR content?” If George Carlin had been in the conference he would probably at that point refloat the idea of massive asilum states where to send all the violent criminals, with the milennials added to the hilarious list;
2. “After all, the role of your web sites is not to entertain, it’s just to INFORM your visitors”. Thanks, we can now forget everything we learnt in the years after 1998 and go back to being young and stupid.

At a time when Web 2.0 and wonderful technologies such as Flash, Air, AJAX, social business, innovation hubs, user-centric workspaces, and much, much more, are making the web into the creative fertile ground of a small, but quickly growing garden, with engaging and absorbing delivery strategies combining and evolving, always testing the future, here come the bottom-feeders (?). SharePoint the platform of the future? It surely is being touted as a thing of the past…

It may be a consistent strategy (few people expect Microsoft to innovate these days), but it’s a real pity. Come October 19, at the SharePoint Conference, when Microsoft unleashes yet another bag of glass beads,  other valuable categories will probably be fed to the bottom:

1. Social – “After all, all you need to be social is to have wikis and blogs that don’t totally suck, unified tagging and a zillion web parts that you can pepper through your pages. Right? If it looks like a Facebook, it doesn’t matter what it smells like: it’s a Facebook!”
2. Usability – “Yes, we have a universal delivery client called Flash, and AJAX, and AIR, and soon Waves, and yes, those millennials use them to create things that are fun and engaging, but you know, you need to think, and compete with young talent without the privileges of holding the IT keys in order to develop them! Let’s introduce another bloated and unneeded technology, Silverlight, so that now we can have obnoxious ribbons all over the place, not only in Office bloatware, but now YOU can develop them as well! After a while, you won’t even notice that you see everything as a list! Let’s make every site look like a PowerPoint presentation!”
3. Web Branding – “Just make sure you use your logo, which now YOU WILL BE ABLE TO CHANGE YOURSELF on your web sites, and just keep informing the hell out of your visitors. That’s all  that branding is, after all…”

I know, the tone is too acidic… But the worry is sincere: Microsoft IS the bull in the china shop; I didn’t care much about seeing the bloated Content Management players be the china that Microsoft threw around, but I really believe that social business and Web 2.0 technologies are a garden, not a stale china shop. I’d hate to see the bull poop all over it…

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

Is Microsoft marketing SharePoint as the “bottom-feeder” alternative?

• The MiFi is the killer enabler for netbooks-like computers;
• The netbooks have miniaturized to the point where they are becoming to use a keyboard and/or a good screen at the same time
• The Windows tablet is horrible, but an Apple one, with an iPod / iPhone interface would be awesome
• The iBlet (like the name?) is the drooling dream of anybody using iPods, iPhones, Macs, and quite a few Win-zealots

If it happens before September, send me a cookie. If it’s called iBlet, send me an email and I will send YOU the cookie.

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

Is there an Apple tablet in the way?

The fact is, I need to enable sudden, serendipitous posting, or this blog won’t get anywhere. Because I have twenty things to write about each day, but I just don’t stay put too long behind a desk (and when I do, I have a zillion work obligations to wrap-up). In Airports, traveling in the car (my wife drives most of the time), in coffee stores… that’s were I need to have access to the blog (Otherwise, I will just write a note in a piece of paper and NEVER write it on the computer).

The phone? Nope, too small, too hard to type. The computer? Yes, sometimes, if I have access and am comfortable (as right now, traveling north along the California coast, my wife driving and Satie’s music cranking). The Nokia N810 tablet? MOST certainly, all I need is access (the N810 and the wireless portable keyboard fit in a large pocket – and at 265 pounds of weight, believe me, my pockets are already huge). So, all I need is access. Not any more: I got a MiFi today.

In a nutshell:

• The size of three credit cards glued together back-to-back
• A wireless hot spot that goes with you wherever you go (like now, on the 405 in Ventura, many miles away from any place where I have ever connected from, in the car, at 80 mph)
• Up to five computers or PDA’s at a time can connect to it by just sharing a password
• Speed? I would say 5 or 6 times faster than an iPod connecting via 3G.
• Cost? Verizon service, barebones $40/Month, beefed-up $60/Month, no more than 5 GB a month, 5 cents the extra MB

Nuf’ said. This thing is awesome. Without even thinking, I was looking just for ubiquitous connection for my laptop, and in the process I made an iPod killer from my old Nokia N810 (bigger screen, more memory and processor, better –and free– apps). The only thing missing (THE PHONE!) is now in thanks to the MiFi connection and Skype or any other VoIP running on top of it     Haven’t tried it yet, so let me go off and try it. See you in my next post!

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

Back thanks to the MiFi?