*michael parekh on IT*

ON APPLE'S MOBILEME MESS

BUMPS IN THE ROAD

Well, the critical reviews are coming in on Apple's MobileMe, the next version of it's long inadequate .Mac service (aka dotMac), and they're almost all negative.  Here's Walt Mossberg's review if you missed it, and here's the one by David Pogue. This PC Magazine review does a good job on the ins and outs of the service.

Think Pogue hits it on the head with this observation:

"Maybe it wasn’t such a hot idea for Apple to launch four enormously complex initiatives — the iPhone 3G, the App Store, the iPhone 2.0 software update and MobileMe — all on the same day."

And then ends ups the ante with this observation on Apple's inadequate reaction to a problem that potentially affects over 2 million subscribers:

"But the real problem is how Apple is responding. For a company that’s so brilliant at marketing, it seems to have absolutely no clue about crisis management..."

It’s amazing that Apple doesn’t recognize this situation. This is an airplane that’s stuck on the runway for hours with no food or working bathroom.

And the pilot doesn’t come on the P.A. system to tell the customers what the problem is, what’s being done to fix it, how much longer they might be stuck, and how he empathizes with their plight. Instead, he comes on once every three hours to repeat the same thing: “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

MobileMess, indeed."

Can't praise all things Apple, every day.

ON THE JOYS OF MUSIC ONLINE

REPEAT

As usual, Bob Lefsetz nails it about the state and fate of the music business, and the video business over time, as it relates to online:

"I'm not saying music SHOULD be free, just that it is. 
Record label saber-rattling has only resulted in driving music acquisition further underground, to the point where it's impossible to eradicate the free consumption of tunes.  Are you going to eliminate AIM transfers? RapidShare? 
How about outlawing P2P?  Well, now movies are being distributed legitimately via P2P, so that's no solution... 
The ONLY hope is to create a solution so enticing that people would rather pay than steal.  It's possible, after all, bottled water is being sold by the truckload even though water is essentially free from the tap and discarded empty bottles are anything but green.  But the public has been convinced they need their Fiji.  And the purveyor has even managed to mount a PR campaign saying THEY ARE green."

He and others have been making this point for a long time, but sometimes it just bears repeating.

Bob goes one better and describes the new way music geeks, and many ordinary mortals find joy in managing music got online:

"Turns out you can now buy a compilation on iTunes.  But I wasn't looking for it.  I haven't played my Fat Mattress album for nigh on forty years.  But today I saw it listed in this blog and I remembered, I had to download it.
Along with Thunderclap Newman's "Hollywood Dream", Ry Cooder's debut, a couple of Spirit albums...  Shit I didn't need, most of which I own on vinyl, but stuff that was worth adding to my digital collection.
And it used to be that you spent all afternoon alphabetizing your albums.  Now, it's aligning your iTunes library.  Are the titles correct?  I need to eliminate duplicates.  Let me check the timings... This is record collector fun.
And after deleting the 56k versions of Al Kooper's "You Never Know Who Your Friends Are" for their new, shiny 192k replacements, I started working on the Fat Mattress album.  There was one track that I absolutely loved...  What was it?  "Mr. Moonshine"?

And ends with this punchline:

"Music, when done right, cannot be described."

Amen, Brother.

ON OUR INTERESTS IN IRAQ

REAL IRAQI POLITICS

This passage from Thomas Friedman's latest op-ed on Iraq, McCain, and Obama resonated with me, in the wake of the clever Der Spiegel interview  by Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, timed around Obama's visit to Iraq:

"“Americans are looking forward to the post-Iraq phase of U.S. politics, and Iraqis are now looking forward to the post-American phase of Iraqi politics,” said Michael Mandelbaum, a foreign policy expert at Johns Hopkins University. That is the reality of post-surge Iraq and post-subprime America — and any leader in either country who ignores that reality does so at his or her peril.

Forget about our narrative on this war — how we “liberated Iraq.” Think about the Iraqi narrative. No one likes to be liberated or occupied by someone else. It is humiliating. France still hasn’t gotten over the fact that it had to be liberated by the Allies. What is important is how, with the help of the surge, Iraqis have finally started to liberate themselves — the Sunnis from their extremists and the Shiites from their extremists."

The last bit about France not liking being liberated by the Allies reminded me of how DeGaulle swooped in to the front of the line as the Allies finally liberated Paris from the Nazis.  This Wikipedia entry reminds us (image source):

"At the liberation of France following Operation Overlord, he quickly established the authority of the Free French Forces in France, avoiding an Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories.
He flew into France from the French colony of Algeria a few days before the liberation of Paris, and drove near the front of the liberating forces into the city alongside Allied officials. De Gaulle made a famous speech emphasizing the role of France's people in her liberation.  After his return to Paris, he moved back into his office at the War Ministry, thus proclaiming continuity of the Third Republic and denying the legitimacy of the Vichy regime."

The Iraqis are going through their own set of internal politics trying to figure out their political dynamics post the American presence in Iraq.  The recent Obama/McCain romp through the region is but a convenient prop to be cannily used by Iraqi politicians for their own domestic advantage.  DeGaulle is famous for his pithy observation once that:

"France has no friends, only interests."

We need to remember Iraq, along with Prime Minister Maliki's key Shia supporting partner Iran, has no friends as well...only interests.  And they've been focused on these interests for a long time, even as the U.S. public's interest in all things Iraq wanes going into the election.

We too need to be coldly focused on our long-term interests in the region, and not let the current, short-term Presidential campaign rhetoric on either side drive those interests.

ON ART LIKE TWITTER

HISTORY REPEATING

Thanks to some friends, I had a chance to attend an unusual art event in Laguna Beach California called the "Pageant of the Masters".  Understanding the concept behind this event at first was kind of like first encountering Twitter, the communication service that has enthralled most geeks everywhere.  It initially takes a little experiencing to get at the heart of what it's really about.

This Wikipedia entry explains the Pageant as follows (image source):

"The Pageant of the Masters is an annual festival held by the Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach, California. The event is known for its tableaux vivant or "living pictures" in which classical and contemporary works of art are recreated by real people who are made to look nearly identical to the originals through the clever application of costumes, makeup, headdresses, lighting, props, and backdrops.

The first Festival of Arts occurred in 1932, and the first presentation of the Pageant occurred in 1993. Since then, the two events have been held each summer, apart from a four year interruption caused by World War II. "

This year represents the 75th Anniversary of this unusual Art Festival.  Each staged piece is accompanied with live orchestral music from the period, and a narrator explaining the context of the piece for about 90 seconds.  It reminded me of the 140-character limit on putting up a message on Twitter.  You either get the piece in that short period or not.

It may help to view this 3:40 minute behind-the-scenes video of the Festival to get a better sense of what's special about the experience (embedded link not available unfortunately).

The whole thing is experienced in an outdoor amphitheater, with a live orchestra playing under the stars as various famous works of art through the ages are cleverly staged on the various outdoor stages (image source). 

The whole thing is about reliving something called the "tableaux vivant" experience, which as this other Wikpedia entry explains, was really how people got entertained for centuries, long before we were spoiled by radio, TV, and the internet.

"Before radio, film and television, tableaux vivants were popular forms of entertainment. Before the age of colour reproduction of images the tableau vivant (often abbreviated simply to tableau) was sometimes used to recreate paintings "on stage", based on an etching or sketch of the painting.

This could be done as an amateur venture in a drawing room, or as a more professionally produced series of tableaux presented on a theatre stage, one following another, usually to tell a story without requiring all the usual trappings of a "live" theatre performance. They thus 'educated' their audience to understand the form taken by later Victorian and Edwardian eramagic lantern shows, and perhaps also sequential narrative comic strips (which first appeared in modern form in the late 1890s)."

An amusing part of the history of this type of art involves Victorian censorship:

"Since English stage censorship often strictly forbade actresses to move when nude or semi-nude on stage, tableaux vivants also had a place in presenting risqué entertainment at special shows.

In the nineteenth century they took such titles as "Nymphs Bathing" and "Diana the Huntress" and were to be found at such places as The Hall of Rome in Great Windmill Street, London. Other notorious venues were the Coal Hole in the Strand and The Cyder Cellar in Maiden Lane. In the twentieth century London the Windmill Theatre (1932-64) provided erotic entertainment in the form of nude tableaux vivants on stage."

As long as the performers were perfectly still, but nude, the work was considered "Art", and was OK to be shown in public.  But the slightest physical twitch by a performer could get the actor and the producers thrown in jail for breaking the public decency laws.

And we thought our rules and rulings around "wardrobe malfunctions" were draconian.  History just keeps repeating itself.

ON WEB VIDEO'S ROAD TO THE BIG TIME

EVOLUTION

Interesting news on the mainstream media front, as NBC gets ready for transitioning it's venerable late-night "Tonight Show" from Jay Leno to Conan O'Brien next year.  More details from the New York Times:

"With a new round of shake-ups in late-night television set to begin next year, Lorne Michaels   has decided to try to get a jump on things by starting NBC’s next edition of “Late Night,” with its new host Jimmy Fallon, as a nightly entry on the Internet.

Mr. Fallon has been named as the replacement for Conan O’Brien when Mr. O’Brien takes over the “Tonight” show from Jay Leno next year, and Mr. Michaels, the long-time boss of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” who also serves as executive producer of “Late Night,” told television reporters here Sunday that he wants Mr. Fallon to work out as many of the rough spots in his presentation as possible in performances on a website.

Mr. Michaels said he did not know yet which site he will use to post the shows with Mr. Fallon, but he was sure of several of the plans:

The web performances will likely begin in the fall, long before the transition from Mr. Leno for Mr. O’Brien is set to take place. The entries will not constitute anything like an entire hour-long show. “I expect that we’ll do something like five or 10 minutes,” Mr. Michaels said.

But he said they most likely will be on every night, to try to establish the rhythm of a nightly show. And he said, “I’m going to post them at 12:30 every night, so people will begin to look for Jimmy at that time.”

So far, the news has been fairly well-received by web media, with this reaction from SIA being an example:

"This is the equivalent of a Broadway show opening out of town to work out the kinks, and it sounds like a great idea to us."

And this from VentureBeat:

"Plenty of other television shows have “webisodes,” short clips of original footage from a television series that play on the web, but this is the first time the web will be used as a minor leagues of sort for the big leagues of traditional television."

I agree it's a natural evolution of the video content on the web, from the chaotic, bubbling, organic soup of "user-generated content" (aka UGC), to more traditional media content, on web properties like YouTube.

But I can't help but ask the question in my mind...how long before a major "TV show" debuts on traditional media to "work the kinks out", before being released on the web, to the real global audience?

ON A BOTTOM IN BANKS?

FEAR AND GREED

Barron's continues to make contrary calls on it's cover this weekend, following last Saturday's cover story suggesting a bottom in Housing market woes.  This Saturday's cover focuses on the Banks, with a story titled:  "What to Bank On".  Here's an excerpt:

"AFTER A RECORD-SETTING RALLY LAST Wednesday, the brutal selloff in financial stocks -- the worst for any major industry group since the technology bubble burst in 2000 -- could be over.

Many financial companies face additional loan losses and credit-related write-downs in the coming quarters, particularly if the economy stays weak into 2009. Yet a slew of earnings reports last week from marquee banks like Wells Fargo and JPMorgan Chase suggests that most financial companies have sufficient earning power to offset a rising tide of bad loans and should be able to absorb further write-downs without having to seek significant amounts of additional capital.

Financial stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500 index are down 29% this year and off 43% in the past 12 months, even after a record-setting 13% gain Wednesday and a 6% rise Thursday. The group was up slightly Friday. Financials are the worst-performing group this year in the S&P, which is off 14%. And they've risen just 10% since the most recent bull market began in October 2002, against a 62% advance by the index. Financials are down to 14% of the S&P 500 from a high of 23% in late 2006 as more than $1 trillion of market value has vaporized, in part because of huge declines in such former mega-stocks as Citigroup (ticker: C) and American International Group (AIG).

U.S. financial stocks beckon because nearly every major company now trades for under 10 times projected 2009 profits. Though there is considerable uncertainty about '09 profits, considering the tough economic outlook, what is comforting is that many financials combine low forward P/Es with and low ratios of price-to-book value, derived by subtracting liabilities from assets and dividing by the company's outstanding shares. It historically has proven profitable to snap up major financials around book value because purchasers effectively are getting the ongoing businesses for nothing."

It's always tough to make a bullish case on anything in the throes of a raging bear market.  Fear gets overdone just as fiercely as greed does, especially where markets are concerned.  The Barron's article, regardless of one's view on this issue on going forward, is a solid, college try.

ON THE BLACKBERRY/iPHONE BATTLE

TRENCH WARFARE

Maybe it's the fickle gadget junkie in me, or maybe it's just me being jaded about my 3G iPhone after my problems with it the last few days.  But when I saw this picture of the coming new Blackberry Bold from RIMM in "bedside mode", my gadget gaze has now shifted to getting one on first opportunity (not that I haven't been focused on the upcoming Blackberry models). 

The picture is part of a post on Blackberry's recent annual shareholders meeting, by Jim Courtney of Skype Journal.  This application, though simple, is as cool as anything I've seen on the new iPhone.

Here's another tidbit from that post that I found interesting, especially for those with extensive music collections in iTunes:

"Blackberry's new Media Sync creates a direct connection between your iTunes music collection and the Blackberry. (and will also be made available to all Blackberry devices with a media card - Pearl, Curve, 88xx - through both a firmware and desktop software upgrade)."

For a long time now, I've carried both a Blackberry and an iPhone, with the former being my primary business phone and email device, and the latter being my primary web browsing and media device.

Being a primary device, I find that I still use my Blackberry more than the iPhone to take pictures, given that it has a better camera with flash, something even the new 3G iPhone still lacks.  But I have NO music on my Blackberry, something I turn to the iPhone for on a long flight.

There are many users like me, who compartmentalize their professional and personal lives in a similar fashion, and use separate devices for each life.  Or as Jim Courtney puts it in starker terms:

"The iPhone is left with two markets: younger generation consumers who want an expensive toy and Mac aficionados who can use the iPhone as an extension of their Mac experience."

Both RIMM and Apple have long-realized this and are increasingly beefing up their products and services, so that RIMM has more media, personal fun oriented features, and Apple has more business and professionally oriented features like "push" wireless syncing.

But it looks like for the next 12 to 18 months anyway, it's going to be a bit of a stalemate.  And both sides will have interesting enough features to keep their core users hooked on their upcoming offerings.  But neither will just yet have enough to make broad and deep inroads into the other camp's core functionality.

In the meantime, many of us gadget geeks will have to continue to carry around both devices.