Software

To the Moon, Alyce!

September 27, 2007 on 8:00 pm | In | Comments Off

In the upper left corner of this page, you'll find the PBS logo, which for reasons known only to antiquity is uniformly referred to at PBS intergalactic HQ as "the P-head." Well I intend to put the P-head on the Moon.

Two weeks ago, when Google and the X Prize Foundation announced the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize contest for the first private group to land a remote-controlled rover on the moon and complete a set of mission goals, I knew I had to try to win. There was no choice: this was my destiny. Heck, I have space flight in my genes (my big brother helped design the Skylab toilet). I have an unquenchable sense of adventure. I need the money.

This is the big announcement I alluded to last week, the one I said even my 83-year-old mother would pay attention to. Not wanting to shock Mom when the news came out, I contacted her a few days ago and explained my plan.

"You are going to the Moon?" she asked.

"Not personally," I replied. "I'm sending a remote-controlled car."

"Well that's okay," she said with a certain sense of relief.

She knows me, that woman, and she knows I am capable of such extraordinary acts of boneheaded courage and poor judgment that I just might fly to the Moon myself. I'll take that as a compliment.

Sending a rover to the Moon is not an easy job, of course, especially if it is going to be done in something of a traffic jam. The X Prize Foundation tells me they have so far received requests for information from more than 100 groups. A group from Carnegie Mellon University, for example, this week announced its intention to compete by issuing a press release. If only I had thought of that.

What I loved about the Carnegie Mellon announcement, which came from its robotics lab where the university has long built robots and rovers for clients including NASA, is that it was all about robots and never mentioned how they intended to get the little bugger up there in the first place.

In my view (in poker they would call this a "tell" -- a signal of my honest intent). GETTING to the Moon and landing the sucker there intact are the hard parts. Yes, you still need a radiation-hardened rover, but that part is fairly well understood.

I am 100 percent sure that Carnegie Mellon will build a better rover than Team Cringely (like the name?), but I am just as certain that my team will beat their team to the Moon.

How can I be so certain? Well, I have a few advantages, among which are irrational optimism and the ability to suspend my own disbelief, if not that of others. And then I have my REAL advantages -- other members of Team Cringely who actually know what they are doing. I'll be revealing these team members as the effort progresses, but among my partners in crime are several senior space scientists from Russia who have already landed and driven rovers on the Moon.

It helps to have done this before.

There's still the problem, of course, that while I may have Russian buddies who are experienced, we don't have Russian space resources, by which I mean big booster rockets that might have been lying around or even free access to a launch facility. My friends may know what they are doing but we still have to build everything pretty much from scratch like everyone else.

Many Google Lunar X contestants are expected to rely on PayPal veteran and X Prize Foundation trustee Elon Musk's offer of discounted launch prices on SpaceX Falcon rockets, but Team Cringely will build its own rocket, thanks, and being too poor to afford real estate, we'll launch ours from an airplane.

Without revealing too much of my hand, Team Cringely has at least two other advantages. For one, we're willing to push the pace. The Google Lunar X Prize gives until 2012 for contestants to get to the Moon and drive around, but I intend to win or fail in 18 months. I would actually prefer to get it over with in a couple weeks, but that darned reality thing keeps getting in the way, so 18 months is what I'm told it will take. This eagerness for a short contest is probably because I get bored easily and because I now live in the former Confederacy, which was never well suited to wars of attrition. Team Cringely prefers cavalry charges.

And what a charge it will be! Team Cringely's third advantage that I can reveal is our gleeful willingness to fail over and over again on our way to succeeding. We plan to build and launch as many as 20 spacecraft in order to be sure that one succeeds. I'm sure no other team will waste so much iron.

But seriously, folks, this is one of the grand adventures of our century and I feel like I am in exactly the right place to achieve this milestone in private space flight. I hope it will be an inspiration to my kids and to kids like them around the world.

But I can't do it without your help. I'm not looking for money (actually I AM, but that would be unseemly here). What I need more than money are clever playmates with relevant experience or at least a lot of enthusiasm. Please get in touch if you think you can help. We'll build and launch a bunch of rockets and rovers, document every moment of it on a huge educational website, in blogs, and ultimately on PBS, probably with an episode of NOVA. And at some point there's a fair chance that we'll split a huge jackpot, taking Google's money.

I will reveal more details about Team Cringely in the weeks to come, but all other competitors should understand these three things: 1) we're coming to learn; 2) we're coming to have fun, and; 3) we're coming to win.

I Report, You Decide

September 21, 2007 on 6:56 pm | In | Comments Off

It has been a long time since I worked at a newspaper, but in the old days reporters were supposed to cover beats, develop sources, and really bring a perspective to the stories they covered. It wasn't necessarily a personal perspective (Lord knows we have enough of that now with blogging) but more of a factual perspective: reporters were supposed to know what was actually happening on their beats and to not be fooled by spinmeisters. Well this week there has been a heck of a lot of spinning going on having to do with a story I broke years ago and have followed off and on ever since -- the trials of little Burst.com -- and even the revered New York Times (and nearly everyone else) this time got it shamefully wrong.

In case you have forgotten, Burst.com is a three-person company based in Santa Rosa, CA, where I used to live before moving to Charleston, South Carolina. Burst, which was started with a seed investment from the Irish rock band U2, has many issued patents on ways of sending digital video and audio over electronic networks. In 2000 it looked like Burst was about to become a huge success, but then a succession of Microsoft dirty tricks put the company on the ropes and today -- despite a $60 million settlement from Microsoft -- the company is still trying to pick itself up and resume licensing its technology. Burst's current adversary is Apple and in this case Apple sued Burst rather than the other way around, trying to invalidate Burst's patents following months of license negotiations.

This week Apple lawyers filed a motion to have Burst's countersuit thrown out of court and Burst's 30+ patents invalidated as obvious, not novel, and certainly not the basis for Apple's iPod, iTunes, or QuickTime, no sir. This motion and some colorful Apple lawyerspeak was dutifully reported by more than 100 news outlets, including the New York Times, most of them picking up what appears to have been a Bloomberg line that stated Apple, which has sold 100 million iPods, was trying to have thrown out a case from little Burst, which lost $500,000+ last year, claiming that the success of iPod, iTunes, and QuickTime were all based on infringing Burst patents. The implication in these stories was clear that Burst, as a tiny company from a small city, can hardly stand up to mighty Apple. This was made even more clear in an especially deplorable story in Ars Technica, which should have known better. You'll find that story among this week's links.

There is both a lot at stake in this case and a very fundamental underlying issue. What's at stake is about $500 million, which is what Burst feels it is owed by Apple for patent infringement to date. That's a lot more than the $60 million Burst got from Microsoft and for a good reason: Microsoft generally gave away the technology they stole from Burst while Apple sells it. Those six billion iTunes song downloads, for example, are claimed by Burst to infringe its patents. The underlying issue here is whether only big companies should get to benefit from owning patents.

The context nearly every article on this topic was missing this week starts with the fact that to this point Burst has been pretty much wiping the court floor with Apple. Most significantly a Markman claims construction ruling earlier this year, which defines the actual words in the Burst patents -- what those words do and don't mean and what they do and don't cover -- went very much in Burst's favor. The judge in the case, Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was the one who issued that claims construction ruling and she seemed quite surprised this week in court that Apple was even moving to have the case dismissed, probably given that most intelligent observers would see that Apple was losing, not winning.

The other bit of context that the stories were generally missing was a correct sense of the David-and-Goliath basis of this legal and technical matchup. Yes, Burst has three employees and almost no sales. Yes, Apple has sold 100 million iPods and six billion songs. But what the stories generally missed for lack of simple effort was that Burst's technology was developed over a period of 20 years by far more than three people at a cost in excess of $66 million. That's more than Apple spent to develop the original iPod, more than they spent to develop iTunes, and probably more than Apple spent to develop QuickTime, itself. The implication in many of these stories is that Burst cobbled together some dubious patents and tried to coerce real companies into taking licenses, that they are so-called "patent trolls."

Trolls don't spend 20 years and $66 million building the bridges they defend.

What's especially odd about this is that back in 1999-2000, Burst's technology was hailed as groundbreaking by many companies, including Intel. Nobody was claiming it was derivative or obvious, yet that is exactly what Apple claimed this week in court. Maybe that's just what lawyers do.

I met with Apple to discuss this very issue several years ago and their position at that time was that Microsoft would likely invalidate the Burst patents and, if they didn't, then Apple would probably buy a license. There was no "we already invented that," or "our technology is superior." Apple was clearly infringing, knew it, but didn't want to buy a license if Microsoft was going to destroy Burst. I had an almost identical conversation, by the way, with RealNetworks, another possible infringer. Well Microsoft didn't destroy Burst and never came close to invalidating the patents, so here we are.

There are evidently a lot of lazy or -- more likely -- overworked reporters, but there is another, probably more important, issue playing in this week's little legal drama and that is patent reform, which is under consideration now in the U.S. Senate. Earlier this year the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would change the way patents are issued and adjudicated in such a way that big companies will be helped and little companies will be hurt. Switching to a "first-to-file" patent system as exists in most of the rest of the world and taking from inventors the right to force infringers to stop using patented technologies takes the teeth out of the U.S. patent system and places most power with whomever has the largest legal budget. Big companies with big legal departments tend to support the proposed law, though there are exceptions: the CEO of Corning recently called the bill a "license to infringe." Independent inventors including, ironically, QuickTime and WebTV inventor Steve Perlman, are of course outraged. So should we all.

Not to beat up on Apple too much this week, but a number of stories have appeared since my item last week about problems with the new iPod classic. This time independent testers are finding the new iPods have lower audio quality than the iPods that preceded them. Perhaps this stems from Apple's switch from PortalPlayer to Samsung as the source of its iPod chipsets.

American readers may also have seen stories this week about NBC starting next month allowing viewers to download free ad-supported episodes of its top programs. Though the stories never mention it, the NBC service is based on technology from an Israeli company called Hiro Media that was revealed for the first time in this column back in April.

And speaking of clever inventions, I want to give fair warning that next week I will make an announcement in this space so astounding that even my 83-year-old mother may pay attention. I intend to change the world a little bit and -- as always -- will need your help if I am to be successful.

Editor's Note: The MP3 file originally posted with this column was incorrect and has been updated. You can download the correct file here.

The Power of Six

September 14, 2007 on 2:46 pm | In | Comments Off

I wrote a few weeks ago about Google’s attempt to influence the rules for redeployment of the 700-MHz radio band in the U.S. for voice and data applications. Google said it would agree to pony up the $4.6 billion auction reserve price if only the FCC would first guarantee to force any eventual winner to keep the frequencies open in a variety of Google-defined ways — ways that were decidedly unpopular with incumbent U.S. mobile operators. It seemed to me to be lunacy for Google to deliberately po the mobile carriers if it wasn’t going to spend the big bucks to actually WIN the auction. But what if Google DOES plan to spend the big bucks and win the 700-MHz auction? What would they do with it? I now think I know.

Google didn’t get what it asked for from the FCC, which opted for a different definition of “open,” promoted by the FCC commissioner. The commissioner’s definition of “open” was also opposed by the incumbent carriers and, in fact, Verizon is apparently taking the issue to court, but I think they doth protest too much. The carriers can probably live with the existing auction rules. Fighting them in court is intended as much to signal Verizon’s determination to win the auction as it is to actually overturn the auction rules. The last thing Verizon wants is for Google to enter the auction AT ALL, because doing so can have only two consequences, neither of them good from the perspective of the telcos: 1) Google might actually win the auction and impose the very rules it tried earlier to get with the FCC, and; 2) the mobile carriers might still win the auction but Google’s involvement would cause them to bid much more for the spectrum than they otherwise might.

Google could make it VERY expensive to hold together the existing U.S. mobile phone oligarchy.

Remember that none of the existing U.S. mobile phone companies is currently lacking in bandwidth. They would love to own the 700-MHz band if they can do so cheaply, but they don’t apparently have any real intention to USE it, which would mean building out a whole new infrastructure at the cost of several billion dollars. They just want to bank the spectrum and keep it away from Google.

It seemed to me that the greatest impediment to Google actually spending the big bucks to win the auction (they could clearly afford it) is that the mobile phone and data businesses aren’t as profitable as Google’s own search and advertising businesses, which means making such a move would hurt Google’s earnings and be a drag on the price of its shares. This seemed to be the difference between Google posturing and Google actually doing something.

But then this week Apple began to bluster about entering the 700-MHz auction, which makes even less sense. Could this have something to do with Google? Like a lot of other pundits, I keep facing the fact that Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on the Apple board and expecting that association to manifest itself eventually in some form of product or service alliance, but that has yet to happen. Could this finally be the time? Apple AND Google have together more money than anyone except God, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Could the two companies be intending a joint bid of such grand proportions as to guarantee a win? And if they did, what way could they find to use the spectrum that wouldn’t be a drag on Google’s earnings after all?

So I thought and I thought and I came up with what you are about to read. As usual this is just guessing on my part, but I’m a pretty good guesser.

To start, I don’t think Apple will actually bid with Google or even against Google in the 700-MHz auction. It would overcomplicate the five-year iPhone deal between Apple and AT&T - a deal that is already strained by the rise in third-party iPhone unlocking tools. (What was the chance Apple didn’t see those coming? Zero.) While it is possible that Apple would deliberately go against AT&T because Apple is, well, Apple and likes to stir things up, I think there are limits to how much Hell Steve Jobs is willing to raise in the wireless space given the string of global iPhone deals he is still putting together. And Steve is cheap, too, meaning that he might not see this as a good use for Apple’s free cash.

Besides, Apple has enough trouble on its hands with the new iPod classic, which doesn’t work very well at all and is going to shortly create some PR problems for Apple. Rather than actually being a legacy device as the name implies, the iPod classic uses new innards and the software is creating headaches for early users.

The complaints I am hearing about the new iPods classics are (in no particular order):

• VERY Slow menu switching response
• Display of clock rather than song info when “Now Playing”
• Inability to use existing AUTHORIZED 3rd party dock products (including Apple-advertised)
• Audio skipping during operation
• Slow connection to Macs and PCs
• Inability to disable “split-screen” menus
• Lagging and unresponsive Click Wheel
• Camera connector not working
• Inability to use EQ settings without skipping and distortion

This product was clearly shipped before it was ready, so we can expect a significant firmware upgrade Real Soon Now, especially since the iPod classic is now Apple’s ONLY solution for users who want to store more than 16 gigabytes worth of songs, pictures, TV shows, and movies.

So Apple will have its corporate hands full between now and Christmas, which is yet another reason why I seriously doubt the company will be involved in 700-MHz auction action. Apple’s current rumblings about the 700-MHz band are more likely Jobs helping Schmidt. If the mobile carriers interested in the 700-MHz band think that it might cost them $16 billion rather than $6 billion to win the auction, they might not bid at all, allowing Google to get the property for less than it might have had to pay in a contested auction. At some price the deal becomes uneconomic for the mobile carriers and, given their small minds and squinty eyes, they’ll see it as uneconomic for Google, too. “Let Google take the fall,” they’ll think.

But Google won’t be falling.

The huge expense of buying the 700-MHz band and building out the infrastructure could be made a lot less huge if Google didn’t have to build out the infrastructure. No traditional mobile company could get away with this, but I think Google could.

I have written about nearly all the individual parts of this before and even wrote a column putting it all together, though as my idea, not Google’s. Maybe they have been reading me after all.

First let’s start by looking at the infrastructure Google has already built or committed to building — the largest fiber backbone in the world and the largest and most widely distributed data center build-out in the world. Both are FAR in excess of Google’s current or even future requirements UNLESS they are also intended to work with a massive 700-MHz wireless network.

Imagine a hybrid wireless broadband mesh network using 700-MHz connections for backhaul and some truly mobile links and WiFi for local service. Google has enough experience with WiFi in Mountain View to know that it isn’t, by itself, a good solution for wide area networks. The key failing of metro WiFi networks is backhaul to the Internet backbone. But if Google used its 700 MHz band for that AND implemented it as a true mesh network, there would easily be enough capacity to serve almost any size network given a suitable number of backbone connections.

You can find my old column about just such a network in this week’s links.

Google has experience, too, with hybrid wireless networks. Every Google employee has the chance to take a company bus to work and every Google bus has an EVDO-to-WiFi bridge so Googlers can surf the net on their way to work.

It would be really cool if this Google hybrid network was truly flat and could be maintained entirely within a single address space like, for example, the 76 billion billion billion IPv6 addresses Google already owns. The sudden existence of a massive IPv6 network would throw other ISPs into a tizzy and quickly drag the rest of the net into the 21st century, something else I could see as a Google ambition.

Finally, what links all of this together is something else I wrote about long ago — the Google Cube. This is an access device that contains 700-MHz and WiFi radios, a tiny Linux or Linux-likeserver, and a few gigs of flash RAM memory cache. It’s these Google Cubes that will mesh together, acting as both WiFi access points and 700 MHz mesh backhaul devices. Throw in some local caching, video preloading, and truly local DNS service and suddenly you have a pretty substantial network infrastructure that is not only massive and self-healing, IT IS ENTIRELY PAID FOR BY CUSTOMERS. All Google needs to provide are several thousand points-of-presence (cell towers) to connect the local mesh to the Internet backbone.

Google couldn’t do this with WiFi alone, but with 700-MHz meshing and backhaul they could make it work fairly easily and the entire network could be deployed in a couple months.

For those who can’t think past search, imagine this also as Google’s key to dominating local- and location-based search.

Forget about net neutrality and forget about making nice-nice with broadband ISPs OR phone companies. Google would overnight become the largest U.S. ISP with direct and very high-performance access to its customers, including those using the new Google Phone or any other phone that supports WiFi connections, like the iPhone and many others. Google becomes the biggest and lowest-cost ISP and potentially the biggest and lowest-cost mobile phone company in the bargain.

Heck of a deal.

The Puppet Master

September 7, 2007 on 4:29 am | In | Comments Off

I have never before quoted myself at length in a column, but this week’s Apple iPhone pricing fiasco calls for it, so here is the beginning of a column I wrote back in January 2002:

In 1999, I was commissioned by Vanity Fair magazine to write a story about the relationship between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. While I know both men, I know them separately, not together, and I just wanted to better understand how they got along. The only hint I had was from a joint interview they did several years ago for Fortune magazine in which Gates said that when they were together, Jobs bossed him around. It is very hard to imagine anyone bossing around Bill Gates. I had to know more.

So I contacted Steve and asked for some time with him to talk solely about his relationship with Bill. Steve’s first response was to call the editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair to discuss the story. This gives some insight into Jobs: I predict that whenever his children have trouble at school Steve doesn’t call the teacher, he calls the Superintendent of Schools, and that’s only if the Secretary of Education is out of town. A short negotiation followed in which Steve agreed to do the interview, but only if I talked to Bill first.

Neither Bill Gates nor Steve Jobs is anywhere close to what one might define as “normal,” but in these procedural things, Gates is a lot more normal than Jobs. It took a month or so to arrange, but I eventually had an hour with Bill, during which we spoke only about his relationship with Steve. I still have a tape of that interview, which was VERY interesting, but I promised I wouldn’t use it for any other project, so it remains inside my fireproof safe.

The promised interview with Jobs never happened. His excuse was that the antitrust case against Microsoft had reached a point where it would have been imprudent for Jobs to comment on Gates. Come back when the case is over (or Hell freezes, whichever comes first).

While I suppose there may have been some legal reason not to talk, I really doubt that was the issue. Rather, Steve Jobs just liked snubbing the world’s richest man. It was classic Jobs, and I should have seen it coming. We both should have. So the Vanity Fair story never happened.

One thing that Gates told me in that interview was he didn’t understand why Jobs had gone back to Apple at all. “Why would he do that?” Bill asked. “He has to know that he can never win.”

Okay, we’re back in 2007, eight years after that interview with Bill Gates and the subsequent snub by Jobs and the question being asked about Jobs is still the same: "Why did he do that?" And the answer is still the same: "Because he can."

This week’s iPhone pricing story, in which Apple punished its most loyal users by dropping the price of an 8-gig iPhone from $599 to $399 less than three months after the product’s introduction, is classic Steve Jobs. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a thoughtless mistake. It was a calculated and tightly scripted exercise in marketing and ego gratification. In the mind of Steve Jobs the entire incident had no downside, none at all, which is yet another reason why he is not like you or me.

Let’s deconstruct the incident. Apple announced a variety of new and kinda-new iPods dominated by the iPod Touch (iPhone minus the phone) and an iPod Nano with video (great for watching miniseries). At the very end of the presentation, Jobs announced the iPhone price cut. Why did he wait until the very end? Because he knew the news would be disruptive and might have obscured his presentation of the new products. He KNEW there was going to be controversy. So much for the “Steve is simply out of touch with the world” theory.

So why did he do it? Why did he cut the price? I have no inside information here, but it seems pretty obvious to me: Apple introduced the iPhone at $599 to milk the early adopters and somewhat limit demand then dropped the price to $399 (the REAL price) to stimulate demand now that the product is a critical success and relatively bug-free. At least 500,000 iPhones went out at the old price, which means Apple made $100 million in extra profit.

Had nobody complained, Apple would have left it at that. But Jobs expected complaints and had an answer waiting — the $100 Apple store credit. This was no knee-jerk reaction, either. It was already there just waiting if needed. Apple keeps an undeserved $50 million and customers get $50 million back. Or do they? Some customers will never use their store credit. Those who do use it will nearly all buy something that costs more than $100. And, most importantly, those who bought their iPhones at an AT&T store will have to make what might be their first of many visits to an Apple Store. That is alone worth the $50 per customer this escapade will eventually cost Apple, taking into account unused credits and Apple Store wholesale costs.

So Apple still comes out $75 million ahead, which is important to Steve Jobs.

Steve has a love-hate relationship with, well, everyone. Customers buy Apple products and they appreciate Steve’s design and market sense, but they also have opinions and NEEDS — two characteristics Jobs (and for that matter almost any CEO) would like to do without.

So Steve slapped his customers around a bit and what happened? Apple got free publicity worth tens of millions and the iPhone, which was already the top-selling smartphone in the world, will now sell two million units by the end of the year, up from an estimated one million. And Steve, having deliberately alienated his best customers, now gets a chance to woo them back. He has finally placed millions of people in the role of every key Apple employee — being alternately seduced and tormented. In this case the torment is over and the seduction will come next month when Apple ships OS X 10.5 (Leopard) — the company’s last chance to position its products for Christmas. Look for 1-2 very un-Leopard surprises at that event — surprises intended to get us all dreamy-eyed over Steve Jobs again.

So Steve does things like this because he can. It reaffirms his iron grip over both Apple and Apple’s customers. It’s a lot about ego and a little about business, though with Steve Jobs they are hard to differentiate.

Here is something very important to remember about Steve Jobs (and probably the only part of this column that will bother him in the least): most of his business moves are still in reaction to having been fired by Apple back in 1985.

Back then Steve was a willful and profligate creator of new products but not very interested in profits. When he put himself up against John Sculley, wanting the Apple board to fire Sculley and make Jobs the CEO, what killed Jobs’ chance for the position was the board’s belief that he wouldn’t deliver the numbers. And they were correct. The Steve Jobs of 1985 was a terrible manager. The board was wrong, however, in believing that Sculley could provide an acceptable substitute for Jobs’ technology vision.

In the 22 years since that humiliation, Jobs has devoted himself to proving: 1) that he can deliver the numbers (and does he — Apple is the best-managed computer company on Earth), and; 2) that he is a better marketer than Sculley, the supposed marketing genius. The product vision part is easy. Not only does Jobs push these products out without apparent effort, he couldn’t make himself not do it if he tried. It’s an obsession. So he puts the real sweat into managing and marketing and occasionally beating up on anyone who gets too close.

And that 1999 quote from Bill Gates about Jobs: “He has to know that he can never win.”

I don’t think Steve knows that at all.