Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Om Malik notes that Verizon's VoiceWing Unlimited VoIP plan may not be so unlimited after all. From the fine print:

Usage must be consistent with normal residential use for one household. Verizon reserves the right to monitor usage for possible abuse of service. For packages with unlimited calling, more than 5,000 minutes a month is considered beyond normal residential use and may be investigated, resulting in potential termination of service.

Wiktionary defines "unlimited" as "limitless or without bounds; unrestricted". Doesn't putting a limit on "unlimited" violate truth in advertising laws? Either there is a limit, or there isn't.

The latest excuse I've heard for increases in retail gasoline prices is that gas prices follow the daily wholesale price. Today gas prices declined:

October unleaded gas ended at $2.138 a gallon, down 5% Friday and for the month.

And just a day after the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released a report indicating that gouging was occuring already before the increase:

The study, released by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) on Thursday, concluded soaring gas prices have more to do with oil companies playing on consumer fears of a gas shortage than any real market forces.

"First of all, it ignores a foundational principle that Canada's energy policy is based on a notion that says commodity prices are set by the international market. Canada is a price taker. So whether it's crude oil or gasoline, we don't make markets," she told CTV's Canada AM.

When Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, about 10 per cent of the U.S. refining capacity was wiped out, she said.

"So you have a tremendous supply shock...The price on the international market, the wholesale price ratchets up."

What am I missing?

I've been searching for years for a company that can actually make use of my abilities; a company that will let me contribute as much as I want to. I've found a couple that were pretty close, but I find that most companies are mired in the world of job descriptions and salary bands, and can't deal with people who don't fit into narrow job categories.

What do you do if you have experience in everything from engineering and software development, through consulting and support, to marketing and sales, and you don't fit neatly into one category? What do you do if you're driven by a burning desire to do more every day?

Are there still any companies that are looking for people who are willing to do whatever it takes to make a difference?

Placeopedia links Wikipedia and Google Maps to show you the what and the where.

Tip of the hat to Rob Cottingham.

Canada has risen to 13th place on the Business Competitiveness Index released by the World Economic Forum:

In this year's ranking, the United States is No. 1, followed by Finland, Germany, Denmark and Singapore. The index is designed to measure the set of institutions, market structures and economic policies supportive of national prosperity.

On the Growth Competitiveness Index, which estimates the underlying prospects for growth over the next five to eight years, Canada also improved, rising one position to 14th.

In that ranking, Finland placed first, for the third year in a row, followed by the United States, Sweden, Denmark and Taiwan.

"In 1998, Canada stood sixth in (the business competitiveness) ranking and by last year we had fallen to 15th, so a move up two spots to 13th in 2005 may be the start of a turnaround," Martin said.

He noted, however, that Canada fell further behind the United States in important factors such as the intensity of local competition and the sophistication of customer buying processes.

It's now a full seven (7) days since I contacted Technorati Support about my in-process claim. The claim is still in-process, and I haven't heard a thing from Technorati.

A comment from a record company executive at the CTIA Telecomms Show panel titled 'Artists, Labels, Publishers: What Do License Holders Want':

"It's going to be difficult to get the consumer to stop thinking about owning music, and think about paying for participation instead."

From Mark Hurst at the Good Experience Blog:

The brand is what you tell your friends about afterwards.

The brand is the customer experience.

In introducing their new line of Dell XPS luxury computers, Dell fails to understand what Acura, Lexus, and Infiniti already know. Nobody will buy a luxury product from a discount brand.

Honda, Toyota, and Nissan were known for decent reasonably priced vehicles. In order to sell luxury automobiles, they created independent companies and premium brands Acura, Lexus, and Infiniti respectively, so that they could provide a different customer experience without offending an existing subset of those customers.

Though they claim to be following Toyota's model for creating Lexus, Dell instead is going to put pretty much the same stuff in shinier case under the Dell name and charge a whole lot more, so that you can get a support representative in half the time of the unwashed masses of average customers.

Sadly the New York Times points out that Dell extolls the virtues of faster support for luxury customers:

But Dell says the real feeling of luxury will come from its customer service. Buyers of the XPS laptops will be connected with a customer service representative within five minutes of calling, about half the time that regular Dell customers wait.

Of course a post about Dell wouldn't be complete without seeing what Jeff Jarvis has to say:

Dell announces a luxury line - its Lexus - with better computers and better service: ... Which is to say that all the rest of Dells customers get crappy customer service and long waits and that in its other models, it doesnt sell quality and only sells price.

I'm trying Google AdSense on my site, and it is doing a few weird things to my template, which is long overdue for a redesign anyway.

I guess I've gotten in the habit of only seeing it though an RSS newsreader. Hopefully I'll get around to prettying it up this weekend.

Jeremy is going to try web-only email for the next 30 days, comparing Gmail with the new Yahoo! mail.

I wish him luck, but I just couldn't do it. It isn't that I think that the tools aren't adequate. It's the state of net connectivity today.

I need access to my mail anytime, anywhere. But the current state of the net gives me access at home, at work, and at the occasional WiFi hotspot. This is by no means pervasive.

And even when I have a decent connection, it is far from a guaranteed service. Do I want to trust all of my email to my ISP, who may try to provide excellent service, but really has no backup plan there is a power outage, or a problem upstream from them.

I think that we have a little way to go before I feel comfortable switching to a web-obly service. It sure would make life simpler, but I just don't have the confidence yet.

Now the MPAA and RIAA are teaming up to control everything you see and hear with an even better (for them) Broadcast Flag:

This will be tricky, since the Broadcast Flag essentially demands government interference with every digital AV product on the market.

Ah, but how about -- no, that's far too sneaky. But...perhaps...

Listen. Suppose our sympatico politicos carve out a bunch of Digital TV provisions that, in fact, do have something to do with government finance? Suppose they stick those provisions in the Senate Commerce Committee's reconciliations bill (due October 26th), where they're practically untouchable?

But some key clauses on which these provisions depend will be omitted. Consequently, it will it be vitally important that Congress passes another Digital TV bill to fill the gaps.

That Digital TV bill will contain -- oh, look at that! -- the Broadcast Flag language. Oh, and the RIAA's Digital Radio Broadcast Flag, too, just for the sake of completeness.

Now our friendly politicians can tell their colleagues that the Digital TV Completion (née SOCPUPT) bill is an essential part of the reconciliation process, and must be passed as a matter of urgency before the compulsory reconciliations come into effect!

Oh, yes. That is good. Really, you've outdone yourself, major Hollywood conglomerate!

Your only remaining challenge: choosing language to put in to the reconciliations bill that actively requires a Broadcast Flag in the secondary bill.

So much for 20 years of technological advancement. In the US anyway, because I'm sure that China will just move ahead.

From PBS Nova:

How would 10 top physicists - two Nobel Prize winners among them - describe Einstein's equation to curious non-physicists?

hip & zen joke for the day:

Q: why doesn't buddha vacuum under the couch?
A: the buddha has no attachments.

Ed Zander, Motorola CEO, doesn't like the iPod Nano:

"Screw the nano. What the hell does the nano do? Who listens to 1,000 songs?" Zander said. People are going to want devices that do more than just play music, something that can be seen in many other countries with more advanced mobile phone networks and savvy users, he said.

I wonder how he would feel if Apple released their own phone? Let's recall that iPod customers pay full price for their products, rather than the heavily discounted prices for cell phones, many of which are often free when customers sign up for a plan.

The Motorola cell phones are pretty slick, but it looks like all handset manufacturers are riding a wave of increasing mobile phone sales. Motorola is doing a good job improving their fortunes though, and Mr. Zander certainly deserves some of the credit for that. I'm not sure that the phone going to be the be-all and end-all platform of the future, especially given the current nickel and dime mentality of North America operators.

Update: There's more at digg.

Robert is searching for the Toshiba Gigabeat music player and doesn't find the Toshiba site. He thinks this is a search engine relevancy problem.

I actually went to http://www.toshiba.com and http://www.toshiba.co.jp/worldwide. No mention of the Gigabeat. No search box. No user friendly way for me to even know the Gigabeat exists. In fact, I couldn't even find it there.

Search engines index web sites. If the manufacturer web site doesn't mention the product, then the search engine will never know about it.

Toshiba is a big company, and consumer devices make up only a small part of the product line. They aren't going to pay much attention to them. Apple on the other hand lives and breathes iPod. And the search engines have no problem finding Apple as the first hit when you search for "iPod".

Search engines can only find what is there. They can't yet make inferences. And that isn't a relevancy problem.

Though Robert is correct in saying that there is still room for improvement in search.

It seems that giving your software away, a la open source, is becoming a good way to get VCs to give money away to you:

Cornelius Willis, vice president of marketing at SourceLabs, admits that the market is hot, with the year-old company occasionally receiving unsolicited calls from venture capital firms.

"We have a healthy level of investor interest, but it doesn't feel like a bubble to me," said Willis, who led sales and marketing at Qpass during the Internet boom years. "In order for the lemmings to jump over the cliff, there has to be a lot of lemmings headed in the same direction. In Seattle, we just don't have that many lemmings."

Despite the worries of a bubble, venture capitalists say that the open source movement represents a huge opportunity. And some believe that creative business models are now being formed that resolve one of the biggest issues for the VCs. That is: How do you make money on something that is developed and distributed for free?

Andy Dale, a partner with Buerk Dale Victor in Seattle, said open source software companies such as SugarCRM and MySQL have demonstrated the power of dual licensing agreements where they bundle together proprietary and open source software. Other open source companies are encouraging free downloads, but then receive revenue from technical support contracts.

For Dale, those innovative ideas help resolve the money making question.

"What is so great about open source, from an investor and an intellectual viewpoint, is that it creates whole new ways of thinking about business models," Dale said. "We are still at the early stage of understanding what the potential is, but five years from now, we will look back and realize that there all different ways to do this."

So your kids aren't getting enough caffeine? That won't be a problem anymore when your pre-teen starts drinking Spark, which provides the same caffeine as a cup and half of coffee, without the nasty aftertaste. And a different formulation for teens provides twice the caffeine.

And some parents love it:

But Angela B. Foster, whose 12-year-old daughter, Taylor, is featured in another endorsement for AdvoCare products, said in a telephone interview that Spark was safe and helpful for not only Taylor, who practices 20 hours a week and is hoping for a college scholarship in gymnastics, but also for her 11-year-old brother, who plays soccer and runs track, and her 7-year-old sister. "We use Spark for all of them," Foster said.

The Foster children use the teenage and adult version, with 120 milligrams of caffeine, even though it is labeled as not for use by children. "They don't use the kids' stuff," Foster said. "They said it tastes too much like Kool-Aid."

In her endorsement for AdvoCare's children's products, Taylor said: "I have more energy and I like them a lot. I would suggest that anyone try them!"

Edgar Bronfman, CEO of Warner Music Group, and the man who can seemingly turn $1 billion into $1 million, wants his cut of iPod revenues:

Mr. Bronfman said the music industry should not have to use its content to promote the sale of digital music devices for Apple or anyone else, and not truly share in the profits.

“We are selling our songs through iPod, but we don’t have a share of iPod’s revenue,” he said. “We want to share in those revenue streams. We have to get out of the mindset that our content has promotional value only.

“We have to keep thinking how we are going to monetize our product for our shareholders,” added Mr.Bronfman. “We are the arms supplier in the device wars between Samsung, Sony, Apple, and others.”

iTunes has save the record companies' butts, and they are getting 65 cents per song for doing nothing, while Apple handles the sales and distribution.

The DVD business has taken off too, but Mr. Bronfman isn't asking for a share of DVD player revenue. And he isn't asking for a share of the iPod competitors' revenue either.

It sounds a lot more like iTunes is promoting the sale of content than the other way around. Perhaps Mr. Bronfman should just shut up and take the money before customers find an alternative.

Hat tip to Engadget.

The mantra of those who purport to care about the environment is that Americans should drive less. But what if you just can't?

The New York Times examines that thought today:

"People can't change where they live," said Richard Porter, an economics professor at the University of Michigan. "They can't change where they work, and there aren't any clear substitutes to gas. You can't run your car on much else. It's not like switching from oranges to grapefruits."

The hours and the location make it difficult to carpool, and I do not have the option of public transit. And most people in the same situation would have the option of reducing gas consumption at all.

We have built a society that is predicated on cars and roads. Wishing that away just isn't going to happen, and unless we are willing to more to mass telecommuting, or companies are willing to locate smaller offices in different cities, then we can't just suddenly change.

Cottonelle is changing its name to Cashmere.

ScotTowels is changing its name to SpongeTowels.

Tostitos has new blue packaging.

Why?

Why would you spend so much money to establish brand recognition, only to throw it all away and start from scratch? What idiot in Marketing thinks this is a good idea?

And don't even get me started on the value of five blades on my Gillette razor.

Apparently the benefit of science or actual proof are no longer required where global warming is concerned. It is now enough to just say that global warming is likely the cause of something:

The chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, Sir John Lawton, has called climate change deniers in the US "loonies", and says global warming is to blame for the increasingly strong hurricanes being spawned in the Atlantic.

In an interview with The Independent, Lawton said that global warming is "very likely" the cause of increasingly intense hurricanes, in line with computer simulations.

Lawton said that with two such large storms hitting the Gulf coast in such quick succession, the Bush administration should re-evaluate its position on climate change. He said if the "extreme sceptics" in the US could be persuaded to change their minds, that would be "a valuable outcome [of] a horrible mess".

"There are a group of people in various parts of the world ... who simply don't want to accept human activities can change climate and are changing the climate. I'd liken them to the people who denied that smoking causes lung cancer."

Indeed, in the same article, some climatologists have another view:

Some climatologists maintain that global warming is unlikely to have an impact on hurricanes. They argue that the increase in landfalls we are seeing now is due to a long term (50-70 years) cycle in Atlantic ocean temperatures, a phenomenon known as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

However, Sir John says that it is fair to conclude that an increasingly warm climate, caused at least in part by human activity, is also warming the oceans' surfaces, and increasing the violence of hurricanes.

"Increasingly it looks like a smoking gun," he said.

Two days ago I commented on my problems with Techorati and my attempts to get a response from support.

Today, two days later, I received an opt-in newsletter from them that I didn't opt in for. But no response from Technorati support.

I've said a fair bit about the pleasure of switching to a Mac lately. But Russell Beattie, who has used both for some time, lists his issues with OS X.

Hey it's always good to know both sides of the story, but we aren't switching back anytime soon.

Talking to BusinessWeek on the growth of Google in China , Mary Meeker thinks so:

One of the things that we think Google is working on is real-time language translation on the fly. That implies the ability to search for things in The New York Times or any newspaper and have it automatically translated into Chinese. It's the fight of efficiency vs. constraint -- and efficiency usually wins. But in China, it will undoubtedly take more time than in other markets because of government concerns.

So far this afternoon I've received two telemarketing calls from India; one for ADT Security, and one for Primus, a telecom provider.

The first caller introduced himself in a thick Indian accent as Jeff Carter, and was clearly reading from a prepared script, and didn't seem to hear me say three times that I was not interested.

It took two tries to convince the second caller that I wasn't interested, and I explained that I had asked to be taken off the Primus calling list, and had done so twice before. He told me that he had done it.

India seems to be the new call center headquarters. No insult intended folks, but I'm not buying from US telemarketers and I'm not buying from you either. So just take no for an answer and move on.

Russ at Cafe Hayek has a good post that explains that gas station owners and oil companies can raise prices because we have the right to shop elsewhere. He also suggests that it isn't gouging because it helps to maintain the supply of gasoline.

But what if that isn't the situation?

In Canada, the price of gasoline is $1.05 per liter ($4.20 per gallon) including about 30 cents of tax per liter. When Hurricane Katrina struck, that price jumped to $1.35 per liter ($5.40 per gallon). They came down again a little over a week later.

In Canada, the gas station owners do not set prices. The oil companies call them and tell them what to set the price at. And the prices move essentially in lock step - an increase at one company's stations will be reflected at all stations within the hour. But 15 government investigations have found no evidence of collusion or price fixing.

Also, Canada pumps and refines its own oil. They were unaffected by Hurricane Katrina, and there was no shortage of gasoline. In fact, the prices were increase even for gasoline already in the station tanks.

So Canadians do not have the choice of going elsewhere for their gas. And there are no gasoline supply problems.

Yesterday, in anticipation of Hurricane Rita, some stations raised their prices to $1.80 per liter ($7.20 per gallon).

So when is it gouging?

AlwaysOn has a great article by Guy Kawasaki, managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, on realizing your ideas, and Guy comments on presentations:

One of the things I learned about in the formative stages of my career was public speaking. I learned by watching lots of presentations, and one thing I figured out early on is that most CFO-level speakers—particularly CEOs, particularly male CEOs—really suck as speakers. They're boring; they're long; they wander around. I saw speech after speech, and I discovered that if there's anything worse than a speaker who sucks, it's a speaker who sucks and you have no idea how much longer he or she is going to suck. That's a horrible feeling.

To prevent you from getting that feeling, I've developed a Top 10 format. All of my speeches are in Top 10 format, because if you think I suck, I at least want you to be able to track my progress through the speech so that you know approximately know how much longer I'm going to suck.

Has outsourcing in India reached capacity?

India has now lack of talent to fulfill the low priced outsourcing jobs knocking the door of India from the West.

The talent pool of high quality is fully employed. The wage inflation is rampant in India. The BPO companies in India are now targeting smaller cities. However, they are finding that the talent pool in smaller cities lack the quality that made the Western companies interested in India.

According international think tanks, India may have topped out in its boom in outsourcing.

Tip of the hat to Recruiting.com.

Mark Evans sounds a little unconvinced about the Canadian government's support for national broadband infrastructure.

Canada often touts itself as being one of the most connected countries, but that isn't that hard to achieve when most of the population is grouped around the three or four largest cities in the country. Where I live currently, right in the city, I can get cable broadband but not DSL. Yet friends who live a couple of miles away "in the country" can only get dial up. Canada has essentially left it up to the operators to connect the country, and they are only going to do what makes economic sense.

And the other day, I was having a coffee beside one of the most well known engineering schools in Canada, the University of Waterloo, but I was unable to connect to WiFi offered by a provider called Maple Wireless, because their site wouldn't let me get to a price or credit card page, and kept throwing up errors. Closer to my house there is a coffee shop that offers free WiFi from another provider, and the Starbucks I frequent offers pay WiFi from yet another provider. So there are no economies of scale to be had from signing up for an account somewhere. And on the south side of town there is no WiFi service.

It is this kind of spotty service that will limit the adoption of technologies and drive connectedness down even further. At least in the US I can use my T-Mobile account at any Starbucks.

Tommi Kyyrä, of IFPI Finland supports a new copyright law that is being pushed by music industry representatives in Finland. When asked whether the copyright protection schemes would work on operating systems other than Windows, he had this answer:

"Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra priviledge. Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos", says Kyyrä and continues; "If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player."

Helping develop the legal conditions and the technologies for the recording industry to prosper in the digital era

Tip of the hat to Boing Boing.

Lt. Gen. Russel Honore's recent comment, "We're not stuck on stupid.", seems to have become the phrase du jour on the web.

Update: And now there is also a blog. Hat tip to Michelle Malkin.

The other day I commented about not being interested in Microsoft's new products because I'm still suffering with their existing ones.

Chris Pirillo has a slightly different take, pointing out that Outlook 2003 sucks, and he is sticking with Outlook 2000.

I wonder how Micrsoft's newer products would fare against their older equivalents.

I've been thinking about startups a lot lately, and the growth that comes with success. Of course there is also the inevitable decline that comes afterward. Even as the company grows, the fun seems to be gone.

A good friend of mine in the valley used to say that when you were at the point that you needed to hire an HR person, it was the beginning of the end. And when you actually created written job descriptions, the fun was gone.

Being a generalist with experience in a lot of areas, I look for companies that can use all of that talent. But I'm finding more and more closed minded companies who want to pidgeonhole their employees.

That takes all of the fun away.

While once this might have referred to Engineering Change Management, today we're talking about Enterprise Document Management:

Enterprise Content Management is the technologies, tools, and methods used to capture, manage, store, preserve, and deliver content across an enterprise. At the most basic level, ECM tools and strategies allow the management of an organization's unstructured information, wherever that information exists.

But the days of the multi-million dollar Documentum or Open Text software sale are numbered. With the advent of Microsoft Sharepoint and a web server, anybody can do enterprise content management.

I wish I were wrong here. Believe me, as a former Open Text employee and current shareholder, I would love to be wrong, but the signs are all there.

Now I'm not saying that Sharepoint is a good tool for ECM. Actually it's horrible, forcing you to give up most of the features a good tool would provide by default. But it's cheap, and Microsoft will improve it. And it will integrate with other Microsoft tools, and will soon offer things like workflow.

Documentum was smart and let themselves get swallowed up by EMC. Open Text on the other hand just keeps missing their numbers and lowering their guidance quarter after quarter.

The truth is, most companies have found out that they can do ECM on a shoestring. Of course they won't realize the mistake they've made until they actually need to get the information back. Then it will suddenly become clear that they spent too much time on the capture, manage, store, and preserve part, and not near enough on the find and retrieve part.

Out of curiosity, could you find that training report you paid a consultant to prepare six months ago? Wanna bet?

Tip of the hat to Alice at the Presto Vivace Blog.

Everyone laments urban sprawl. It's the thing everybody loves to hate these days, while concentrating on smart cities that are concentrated around a downtown core.

The problem is, there's a lot more revenue in development fees generated by that sprawl that there is from high density development in the core. And cities like Waterloo, where I currently live, like to talk about smart cities out of one side of the mouths, while approving huge new housing developments out of the other side, given their voracious appetite for more even increasing tax revenues.

Of course now, the only place to develop sits on top of the moraine, the water recharge area for the city. A city that already has acute water shortages in the summer. But don't worry, there's no problem forks. We can just keep on building.

Funny thing though. Waterloo and the cities around it are sort of the sprawl of the Greater Toronto Area.

Technorati just doesn't like my blogs. I've embedded my claim, I've pinged then, but they must not like me because they never seem to notice or care that I've updates my blog, which I do every day.

I notice they've removed the "this blog has not been updated in nn days" indicator, probably because it was embarrassing. Yet Google, which I don't even ping, has me up to date as of my last post a couple of hours ago.

Even though Technorati tells me to contact support if my claim persists for more that a day, it's been months and many emails, all of which have gone unresponded to.

I know it's a free service so I can't complain, I still can't help thinking that if you promise something, you'd better deliver on it. Or people will go elsewhere.

Maybe Technorati will notice this post and contact me. But only if they search using Google.

Text messaging isn't just for keeping in touch with your teenage friends. It's also handy for firing people.

Think how easy this would make layoffs. Don't expect to see that company-issued cellphone back in one piece though.

I have a resume on a couple of job search sites. I find the emails I get as a result quite interesting.

I do get the occasional interest from recruiters who are trying to fill a position. I don't think I've ever heard for an actual company that is hiring.

But my favorites are the financial companies and insurance companies who contact me offering high compensation, and excellent growth opportunities. It is clear that they don't actually read the resumes at all because other than sales experience I can't see why they would contact me. Clearly they are just spamming people.

I think the actual value of these job sites has been near zero for me anyway.

Last night my son mentioned that he had read about Google's fiber plans, and asked if I thought Google might provide a wireless service. I said they could possibly do that, but I expected that they were just going to provide broadband connections.

But this morning the Washington Post seems to confirms his thoughts:

Online search leader Google is preparing to launch its own wireless Internet service, Google WiFi, according to several pages found on the company's Web site on Tuesday.
A WiFi service, which offers a high-speed connection to the Internet, would take Google even further from its Internet search roots and move it into the fiercely competitive world of Internet access providers and telecommunications companies.

The Google Web site has several references to Google WiFi but provides few details. One page, http://wifi.google.com/faq.html, refers to a product called "Google Secure Access," which is designed to "establish a more secure connection while using Google WiFi."

A separate page, http://wifi.google.com/download.html, offers a free download of Google Secure Access, carrying the headline: "Your wireless connection is almost ready to use."

My son has been right in his presumptions a few times lately. Maybe I'll have to start listening to him.

Dan Gillmor's post on Google's hubris seems to highlight a particular latent jealousy, or envy, in the tech industry where Google is concerned:

...So far, that has been true. But some fairly powerful and nasty folks are waiting to pounce when Google misses a step.

A senior technology industry executive wondered aloud today how Google will react when it makes that inevitable misstep. Based on the unbounded hubris we've seen to date, I replied, expect a less-than-mature response.

Google has plenty of glory days ahead. But as the company goes out of its way to alienate people who once revered its promise and style, it all but guarantees that when the inevitable troubles do occur, it will have fewer friends than it needs.

It's as if they treat the whole thing as a game, a game with rules only they know, or perhaps no rules at all. And they have Microsoft, the biggest software company, and countless others, spinning like mad trying to keep up.

Of course people want them to fail. That goes without saying.Those powerful and nasty folks won't be happy until they do. Google is in good company. Lots of people would like to see Microsoft, Oracle, or Apple fail too. Actually, it seems that being hated is a sign of success in this business.

But let's suppose that Google tanked tomorrow. Heck, let's imagine that it closed its doors tomorrow. I expect they would just move on to the next big thing. Or the next small thing that they would make big.

If only all of our failures could be that sweet.

Tonight on the season opener of Arrested Development, George Bluth Sr. is supposed to be in prison, but he claims to be his twin brother Oscar. He calls himself imoscar.com.

And imoscar.com is indeed Oscar's blog:

By Oscar Bluth
Inmate #24601 Entry#41

It’s been a week since my last entry. I can explain. Last Thursday, I was counting ants in the prison yard and it was a scorcher but I remember, I started killing the ants with my feet, yelling “Die you little black bastards, die!”
I got stabbed – a whole lot.
When I woke up in the infirmary, I was surprised to find out that my stabber was the leader of an equal rights gang called: RAVIOLI or Rapists Against Violence Against Insects. When I went to apologize for killing the ants, I pointed out that ravioli doesn’t work as an acronym and they stabbed me again. Please God get me out of here! I think that’s blood on the keyboard. Yep, it is. I’m Oscar Bluth and I need medical attention!

The Business 2.0 blog notes that the Gap website has been down for all of September so far:

All of this downtime is costing the company nearly half-a-million dollars a day (which, admittedly, is chump change to the Gap. But the online absence is just bad marketing nonetheless).

Joel Fleming graciously pointed out that Google Local instead to find Second Cup locations, and that is an excellent suggestion. But in this day and age when many people turn first to the internet for information, what is one to make of the fact that these two companies are so unconcerned about their internet presence?

Is this perhaps a sign of a larger problem on their part?

I remember David Weinberger saying that Google was every company's home page. Now in some cases it seems to be replacing their websites entirely.

Mark Evans notes the increasing tendency of broadband service providers to use port blocking and filtering to "protect" their networks, and generally control how those networks are used, to their benefit of course.

This is analogous to the phone company blocking telemarketing calls from a competitve long distance provider based on the flimsy premise that their service is much better, even though they both use the same physical network. Or the phone company not allowing you to use a dialup connection to another ISP.

We wouldn't allow the phone company to control who is allowed to make a phone call, so why do we allow them to limit what we can do with the data pipe? This is clearly a case where the government should proactively step in to ensure free and fair competition, rather than having to undo the problem after the fact.

Or will government just sit back and watch as customers are inconvenienced and technological advances are hampered so the providers can make a few more bucks?

Service providers are always welcome to make more mony by providing increased services, but they shouldn't be able to blackmail us by controlling what we can do once we have paid them for those services.

Mack, whose blog I read and enjoy, commented on my post about Microsoft spending $100,000,000 to tell me how great their new software is:

So when Ford releases their new F-150 and calls it their best truck ever, do you think that your previous F-150 pickup was a waste of money? Certainly not. (Obviously the Ford is just an example here, I don't know if you own one.)

Why is Microsoft software any different? Especially Office, which pretty consistently gets the job done.

First of all I need to point out that Ford trucks wear out, as do all mechanical products. Yet there are a number of people still driving 10, even 20 year old F-150s. Software on the other hand does not wear out, but there is almost nobody still using a 5 year old operating system. Why? Because software companies have convinced you that you must upgrade, and they stop supporting them after a while. Software changes frequently, so that is probably reasonable. But imagine Ford saying that they know you love your 5 year old truck, but you will no longer be able to get any service or parts for it anywhere.

So let's use my laptop that died the other day as a basis for comparison. So basically my Ford truck has just stopped working, and a bunch of indicator lights are lit.

The laptop indicated that the system file was corrupt; that I should use the Windows XP CD to restore it. Ok, but I didn't get one with my PC, so now I had to buy a copy for $129. This is roughly equivalent to having four flat tires that are held on with locking lugnuts, but I don't have the key, and have to buy it. Actually it is more like having a broken radiator hose but being forced to buy a new engine instead of repairing the hose.

So I buy the CD, and I re-install XP, but I lose everything on my PC. So this is roughly equivalent to replacing my truck's engine, only to find out that the roll bar, the rims, the custom upholstery, the spoiler, the truck liner, and the body kit have all been replaced by stock parts. I can now reinstall everything if I want to. Oh and the CDs, the pictures of the family, the cash in the glove compartment, my laptop and briefcase are missing as well. Hope you had a backup.

I don't buy a new Ford pickup every two years, though of course some people may. But Ford doesn't force me to. And I know that when I get the Ford it will start, and run pretty well. If not, Ford will fix it for me, at least for the first 5 years. They won't tell me to reboot it, and they won't change me for the privilege of phoning them. I won't need a patch every month to ensure that somebody else can't use their key to drive it away. If someone tries to break into my truck the optional alarm will go off. The truck won't require almost a whole new engine after a year, though Windows XP needed SP2 to fix a bunch of the problems it shipped with.

And my truck won't start driving more slowly as the day goes on. Provided I get regular oil changes of course.

In short, nobody with an F-150 would put up with the kind of stupidity that we are forced to deal with everyday with Windows.

Most of all, a year after I buy an F-150, Ford may try to entice me with a new Ford based on more power, more features, or new body styling, just like Microsoft. But they won't tell me how stupid I am to have bought last year's model; that I'm a dinosaur because I'm not buying the newer model. In fact, Ford is proud of the fact that their cars are durable.

We've just been trained by computer companies to think that their buggy software isn't the problem. Instead they've convinced us that we are the problem for not buying the newest bloatware and putting money in their pocket. In other words, they want you to buy a new, loaded F-150 every year, even if you only drive it to church on Sundays. And if for some reason your F-150 breaks down, well they'll have a new model out anytime now.

I have my broadband internet service through Rogers, as is my cable television, and several cell phones. Every month my bill lists several phone numbers; one for account inquiries, another one for wireless, and another one for high speed internet technical support.

Here's the funny thing. All of those individual numbers ring though to the same painful voice response system, which uses speech recognition rather than an operator, and doesn't allow you to reach a live person.

Every time I am forced to use this system I get angrier. And the system always asks for my phone number. Then the first thing the live person always asks for is my phone number - again.

And they when I ask the operator about the numbers, they tell me they don't know why there are different numbers because they all ring to the same system. And they all tell me that everyone complains about the voice response system. But they'll take my comments into account.

I'm sure they've been successful in cutting down on call volume though. Because the system has become so painful that I only use it as a last possible resort. And if I really want to complain I can't call them, but I am welcome to send them a letter.

After all isn't that the goal? Make as many customers as unhappy as possible?