Financial crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more

Schwartz’s decision to announce his departure in the form of a short, Japanese lyric was, perhaps, a veiled jab at Sun’s new boss, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, a noted Japanophile who has spent years building a $200 million house, in the wealthy Silicon Valley suburb of Woodside, that’s said to be a replica of a 16th-century Japanese emperor’s castle. It’s likely that the hard-charging, Samurai-inspired Ellison has no particular love for the pony-tailed, Java-loving Schwartz, who bet the farm on an open-source strategy that didn’t pan out and brought Sun’s share price from a split-adjusted peak of $250 to a recent low of $3.49, making its acquisition by Oracle easy. Now Ellison has started cleaning house, slashing back-office personnel and shaking things up in an effort to return Sun to the kind of profitability it once enjoyed.

It’s not the first time that technology and haiku have collided, and in fact, open-source computer geeks seem to have a real affinity for the form. In the early 2000s, spam-filtering service provider Habeas inserted a copyrighted haiku into the header of every authenticated e-mail message; the idea was that if the bad guys tried to spoof the header, they’d be committing a prosecutable copyright violation. Impish programmers have often inserted haiku error messages into the systems they manage, geeks have been collecting spam haiku since the earliest days of the Web, and there’s even an open-source operating system named Haiku (it’s based on the now-defunct BeOS).

With Schwartz showing the way, will other CEOs turn to haiku when they get pushed out? Probably not. They would do well, though, to consider the brevity of life and the futility of their ambitions. As the 17th century haiku master Basho wrote:

Ah, summer grasses!
All that remains
Of the warriors’ dreams.

(Translation: R.H. Blyth)

Disclaimer: The author has long-standing haiku blog, tinywords, which has nothing at all to do with technology.

(Originally published on Wired.com’s Epicenter blog)

But I can’t believe that Steve Jobs is going to stop there.

Brian X. Chen and I predicted on Tuesday evening that Apple’s big announcement would go beyond the iPad, and include the announcement of a major, multi-platform content store centered on iTunes.

We were wrong. Wednesday’s announcement was all about the iPad, and nothing else.

But the door is still open for Apple to make a broader content play, and here’s why it makes sense — and why it may be inevitable.

Apple already sells apps, music, video and podcasts through iTunes. Already, iTunes includes fairly robust support for sharing the content you download with other computers on your home network, and of course you can play music, video and podcast on your iPhone or iPod touch as well as your computer. In other words, iTunes is a pretty good media delivery system. In many ways, it’s broken, and it needs to be fixed, but it works.

Apple will shortly begin selling e-books. They’re in the EPUB format, which is fairly rudimentary and doesn’t include much support for formatting or layout, but it’s a start. Also, it’s unclear whether those books will be readable on anything except the iPad. Let’s assume that even if they are iPad-only to start, Apple quickly comes up with some way of reading those books via iTunes on your computer and on your iPhone, because it needs to do that to remain competitive with Amazon’s Kindle.

Apart from those formats — AAC/MP3, Quicktime video, EPUB books and iPhone/iPad apps — iTunes doesn’t offer much support to content producers.

But there’s an end-run around iTunes, for app developers who are frustrated with Apple’s slow and arbitrary-seeming approval process. It’s call web development, and it’s why Apple will soon have to expand the iTunes menu.

Ambitious web developers are discovering that they can create web-centric apps using HTML5 and JavaScript that have surprising speed and interactivity. Check out the Google Voice web app for a clear illustration of this principle. It looks and feels more like a native app than anything I’ve seen recently.

The more developers start going this route, the more money Apple is going to be leaving on the table, because those web apps won’t be sold through iTunes. They’ll be given away or sold through a variety of other payment mechanisms, none of which give a cut to Apple.

Eventually, Apple’s going to offer a way for web app developers to sell subscriptions or one-off access to their web apps via iTunes.

It won’t be mandatory, because there’s no way for Apple to close off the independent web developers completely without messing with the web standards they seem clearly to be supporting. But there will be a powerful incentive for developers, which is that they can take advantage of a built-in micropayment system and the installed base of 125 million iTunes users.

When that happens, it will be a subtle but powerful shift in the economics of the web. App producers will then have the option of creating iPad/iPhone native apps in Objective C, or of producing web apps using HTML5, JavaScript and H.264.

If they go the latter route, they’ll have the option of deploying content on the public web, and collecting money however they can.

Or they will be able to deploy HTML content and web apps via iTunes, letting Apple take care of billing and settlement in return for a 30% cut.

There will be cries that Apple is creating a walled garden, or splitting the web into pieces. And they’ll be right, to a point. But the fact is, there’s no reason that all web content has to be delivered via HTTP from a public, free web server. It could be delivered, page by page and web app by web app, via iTunes.

If I were a web developer or a content producer, I’d be looking at ways of creating rich, immersive experiences using web technologies. Because even if my prediction is wrong and you can’t at some point sell those through iTunes, the iPad is going to make experiences like that compelling enough that you will be able to sell them, through one channel or another.

This article also subsequently appeared on wired.com.

In fact, the amount people read tripled from 1980 to 2008. That’s amazing considering it had previously been undergoing decades of steady decline. Suddenly people stopped watching so much television, and started reading again.

They’re just reading on the screen instead of on paper.

Two of the tools that I’ve found most helpful for reading are Instapaper and Readability. Both of them reformat web pages, stripping out everything except the core text, making them far easier to read.

Arc90’s Readability offers instant gratification — it transforms the page immediately, right in your browser — and you can choose from several different formatting options.

Marco Arment’s Instapaper saves the reformatted pages for later, so you can read them at your leisure, either on the Instapaper web site or (my preference) in the Instapaper iPhone app.

Both tools are free, though Arment offers a premium version of the Instapaper app for $5 that adds some nice features, like automatic updates and tilt-scrolling.

Both tools tell me a couple of things about the web:

One, modern web design is way too complicated and cluttered. Ads, banners, navigation bars, sidebars, and a million other things make most web pages an aesthetic and usability disaster. Readability and Instapaper fix this, giving the content back to the readers. Some forward-thinking web designers, like Laura Brunow Miner’s Pictory Magazine, have followed this trend, by creating stripped-down, content-centric web designs that let the reader focus on what really matters. I’ve tried to follow this trend by simplifying the design of this site as well as the haiku and micropoetry site I edit, and I know others who have done the same.

Two, web standards work. The reason Readability and Instapaper work is because most web pages are structured in fairly predictable ways, with a well-accepted markup language that is widely and (usually) consistently deployed. This gives readers the flexibility to enjoy published content in the way the reader chooses: On its original web page, in an RSS reader, on an iPhone, or through the filter of a reformatting tool. Readers can also easily reblog content on their own sites, which contributes to conversation and community formation, and makes it easier for other people to find the content.

When publishers consider nonstandard web publishing platforms, they should keep this in mind. Something that’s published as a PDF, Zinio mag, Adobe app, Flash file or iPhone app is by default outside the circle of web standards. Unless the designers of those platforms include tools for reformatting, reblogging and sharing content, they’ll risk taking themselves out of the broader collective conversation altogether.

That goes for the exciting new e-magazine apps under development by my employer and other publishers, too.

From my own experience, and the experience of friends who had spent months to years to a lifetime devoted to little magazines and small presses, I knew in my bones that tinywords had become overwhelming. This stuff eats you alive. But I also knew, it’s damn hard to let go once you made your mark. There’s that little voice that keeps calling you back.

From a long interview about tinywords, between me and poet and publisher Norbert Blei.

I spent a few minutes on CNBC Asia talking about Wired’s picks for the hottest (and most unusual) gadgets of 2009. Most of these came from Wired’s awesome Wish List 2009, a roundup of 100 amazing gadgets.

“I know,” some B&N exec must have said. “Let’s pull an Apple move on their sorry asses!” The result: a nearly buttonless e-book reader that has a color LCD touchscreen where the Kindle has a broad, ugly QWERTY.

The Barnes & Noble Nook is, in fact, a handsome device, close to the Kindle in size but with far cleaner lines and a less cluttered look.

But that’s where the Nook’s radical innovation ends. For the most part, the rest of the device is a Kindle clone with a few minor, but thoughtful, improvements.

The Nook is slightly shorter and narrower than the Amazon Kindle 2, although it’s thicker. Both e-book readers use the same E Ink technology for their main screen: a pale gray, matte surface that looks a bit like an Etch A Sketch but displays text (and monochrome images, with 16 levels of gray) in far more readable fashion than an LCD, thanks to its paperlike opacity. Instead of staring into the glowing eye of a LCD screen, you’re reading light reflected off the surface of the screen, just as you do with paper, and that’s much more comfortable. E Ink also uses less power, so battery life is long (about a week of ordinary use, B&N claims). Both the Kindle and the Nook have small, 6-inch, 600 x 800-pixel screens — only a little bigger than a 3×5 index card — but they seem bigger, thanks to the crispness of the text.

The Nook’s secondary LCD screen adds a splash of color to the reader’s face. This little screen (just 3.5 x 1 inches, with 480 x 144 pixels) displays the Nook’s menus and controls, and it’s where a virtual keyboard pops up whenever you need to type (when searching for a book). It’s not multitouch, but you won’t miss that feature on such a small screen: It’s all about tapping on virtual buttons or swiping menus back and forth.

Like the Kindle, the Nook lets you browse, purchase and download books via AT&T’s 3G wireless network. Most books cost about $10, or less than half what they’d cost as new hardcovers — but twice what they’d cost as used paperbacks. The Nook also has Wi-Fi support, although it’s perplexingly limited to B&N’s in-store networks, where you can use it to download books as well as special, location-specific offers (like free cookies).

There’s a built-in MP3 player and a headphone jack, which works for playing music while you read, or for playing audiobooks. You can load the Nook with e-books, PDF files, images and MP3 files via a USB connection simply by dragging and dropping, just as you can with the Kindle.

The Nook has some nice touches that the Kindle lacks. When shopping for books or browsing your library, you can swipe through color representations of their covers on the lower screen. While reading, the display lets you pick between 5 font sizes and two or three different font faces, depending on the title — so if you really like reading text in Helvetica Neue, go for it. And the Nook supports e-book lending for some titles, depending on the publishers’ preferences. If lending is enabled for a title, you can send to a friend, who can then download and read it on their Nook (or, soon, on Nook applications for the PC and iPhone). While they’ve borrowed the book, you can’t read it, but it automatically returns to your library after 14 days. Some people have also reported success getting the Nook to work with library e-books and audiobooks, via software called Overdrive.

Unfortunately, the Nook is marred by a frustrating interface and persistent slowness. Switching between the lower and upper screens is sometimes confusing, and the lower screen’s “back” button sometimes takes you all the way back to the top menu, clearing out whatever was on the upper screen. Occasionally the lower screen takes a few seconds to respond to a tap, so you impatiently tap again, accidentally triggering something you didn’t expect. The upper, E Ink screen is slightly slower to refresh than the Kindle’s — it takes about a second, instead of about half a second — which means these kinds of interface glitches quickly get very frustrating.

It seems reasonable to expect that the Nook’s software engineers will iron out these glitches in the next few months, and they’ve promised to deliver software updates wirelessly, with the first, minor update rolling out next week. When they finally get the kinks worked out, the Nook will be an elegant, customizable, competitive alternative to Amazon’s Kindle. Until then, it’s a slightly awkward runner-up.

WIRED Attractive, well-designed hardware. Color LCD makes menus and covers look pretty. Ability to switch fonts is a welcome change. Book-lending works with friends and with libraries. Easy reading experience. Expandable via MicroSD slot. User-replaceable battery.

TIRED E Ink screen is noticeably more sluggish than the Kindle’s. Occasionally poky interface on the touchscreen. Annoying interface glitches keep tripping up the browsing experience. $260 plus $10 per book might be cheap if you’re used to buying dozens of hardcovers a year — but it’s expensive for those accustomed to buying used paperbacks or visiting the library.

Originally published, with lots more gorgeous photos by Jonathan Snyder, on Wired.com

When the zombie apocalypse hits, you’ll want to have a copy of Wikipedia with you. And you’ll want to make sure it works even if the power is out, cellphone and internet connections are nonexistent, and you’re hunkered down in a remote cave. That way, you’ll be able to consult the sum of all human knowledge to figure out if that mushroom you’re looking at is a healthy and nutritious snack, or a fatally neurotoxic toadstool.

Yes, what you need is the WikiReader, a simple, $100 touchscreen device that contains a cached version of Wikipedia.

Even if you’re not planning on a zombie apocalypse, WikiReader is handy because it doesn’t require (or have) an internet connection. That’s useful if you’re traveling, on a train, hiking or just too lazy to get up and reboot the Wi-Fi router. It’s small, so it’s easy to carry with you, and it runs on readily-available AAA batteries. And it has a minimalist and subtly asymmetric design that I find kind of cute (albeit cute in the way that those ugly dogs with smushed noses are cute).

The 3.5-inch touchscreen doesn’t have iPhone-like sensitivity, but it gets the job done, with a pop-up virtual keyboard for typing text into a search box. There’s also a “random” button which could be useful for diverting party games, or if you’re having trouble coming up with a name for your band.

WikiReader does have its limitations. The screen is merely functional, with low resolution, very low contrast, a nasty gray-green background and no backlight. It needs to be in bright light to be very readable. There’s no color here — not that you need it, since there are no images in this version of Wikipedia. (Better hope that the mushroom’s textual description in Wikipedia is detailed — and accurate.)

And of course, since it’s a completely offline reader, the information is only as up-to-date as when you bought the device. It’s possible to update the WikiReader by popping out a little microSD card inside the battery compartment. You can either pay $30 for a subscription service (the company will snail-mail a new card to you twice a year) or download a 4-GB file and update the card yourself (though you’ll also need a microSD card reader, or an adapter for your SD card reader).

Is it worth $100 to carry an offline Wikipedia in your pocket? That depends on how addicted you are to reading the encyclopedia — or how convinced you are that the end times are coming. Just make sure to pick up a few extra AAAs.

WIRED Massive, crowdsourced encyclopedia in a portable package. Simple search interface. Requires no internet connection. No monthly fees. Runs for months on two AAA batteries.

TIRED Dim, low-contrast screen. No graphics in encyclopedia entries. No easy way to jump from heading to heading within articles. Updating requires a subscription, or a microSD card reader.

Originally published on Wired.com

A couple of weeks ago I took part in a discussion about press embargoes, with Tom Foremski, Damon Darlin and Mark Glaser, skillfully moderated by Sam Whitmore. Also in the audience, and contributing worthy comments, were Rafe Needleman, Paul Boutin, and other members of the press and PR corps.

I kicked things off (and got a cheap laugh) with the comment that I thought the word “embargo” derived from a Latin phrase meaning “Fuck you.” It was a joke, but I meant it, in a way: I don’t like embargoes, and when I agree to one it’s because I realize the value of the news to my readers outweighs the value of the independence I would retain by saying no. In other words, the PR person has me over a barrel, and she knows it. If I want the news, I have to agree to the terms — terms which include tying my hands.

What’s more annoying, I’ve had several cases recently at Wired.com where we were put at a serious disadvantage by embargoes that we’d agreed to, in good faith. Either through machinations by the PR firm, cluelessness on the part of their clients, or ruthlessness on the part of other journalists, the news got leaked — early — by other news outlets, leaving Wired high and dry. This has happened more in the past year than in the whole previous decade, leading me to think that yes, there is something of a crisis here.

It’s this awkwardness, bad faith, and outright attempt to control the press that makes many journalists, including Glaser, feel that we should just refuse to accept embargoes. Indeed, some news outlets, if they have enough clout, can get away with this as a general policy: the Wall Street Journal is the shining example.

But most news outlets aren’t in that position, and most journalists aren’t likely to be able to refuse embargoes long for a simple reason: In product-driven journalism and indeed in much business journalism, PR people hold most of the cards, during the news announcement cycle anyway. (Product reviews, analyses and more scoopy stories are a different matter.) If you want the news, there’s only one source: The company that’s making it.

Besides, as I asked that night, what journalist would ever refuse an exclusive? What about an exclusive offered only to you, the New York Times, and the WSJ? What about an exclusive offered to you and just 25 other news outlets? In the last case, it’s not totally exclusive, but the news is still worth something — and it’s something that hundreds of other journalists and bloggers don’t have. So in other words, the embargo is on a continuum with exclusives, making it unavoidable.

This even though embargoed stories are almost never our biggest ones. The big stories — those that garner huge pageviews — are almost always the ones where we’ve done original reporting, broken a new story on our own, provided unique analysis, or delivered perspectives you couldn’t get elsewhere. But the embargoed stories are the ones the readers (and the boss) would miss, if you didn’t cover them, so you have to cover them, even if you know they’re not likely to be hits.

That said, I recognize that embargoes are a fact of life in my field and I take a pragmatic, and I hope honorable, approach to them. My rules are simple:

• If I agree to an embargo, it has to have a specific expiration date and time (with the time zone specified).
• Once I agree to an embargo, I will honor its terms.
• If a few details are leaked by other sources, I will report on those leaks without recourse to the embargoed information I may hold.
• But if the whole story breaks early somewhere else, it’s fair game: The embargo is off.
• And if the PR person values their relationship with me and with Wired, they will call me as soon as possible to let me know that the news has broken and that I’m free of the embargo.

Also, and this bears repeating: It comes down to trust. I think the reason that embargoes have gotten such a bad rap in the past year or two is that both journalists and PR people are struggling with massive upheavals in the way news is published and distributed. There’s a lot of turnover. Everyone is overworked. As a result, there are fewer of the personal, human-to-human connections between flacks and hacks that used to make the embargo system (and indeed, the whole PR-press relationship) work. So mistakes get made, either by naive or unprincipled journalists, or by new and untrained PR people, or by either one, when someone figures that the value of the news opportunity exceeds the value of the (nonexistent) relationship.

So really, I’m much more likely to agree to an embargo if I know you and have worked with you before and I trust you. And likewise, you’re much more likely to offer me an embargo if you know and trust me.

More coverage of the embargo panel (the stories I could find, anyway):

Internetnews.com: Tech Reporters Talk Tough (David Needle)

Bay Newser: Hacks and Flacks Talks Embargoes (E.B. Boyd of MediaBistro)

To Embargo or Not to Embargo (Bobbie Peyton, Burson-Marsteller)

Persuasive Marketing: Is It Time to Place an Embargo on PR Embargoes? (Robert Mullins)

The Future of the Embargo (Brian Solis)

The Death of the Embargo: We Won’t Care (Stowe Boyd)

And it looks like Waggener-Edstrom, which hosted the event, has posted video of the Embargo 2010 discussion. It’s about an hour long.

Also, see my earlier post: Journalism and PR in the new media age.

But even though I’m eager to ditch my iPhone and eighty-six AT&T, I’m not going to switch to Verizon for the Droid.

Don’t get me wrong: I am very impressed with what Motorola has built. In my mind, the Droid and the iPhone are the two best smartphones on the market today. The Droid can compete with the iPhone in almost every respect.

In some features, such as the screen, it comes out way ahead: The Droid’s vivid, high-resolution 854 x 440 pixel display blows away the iPhone’s 480 x 320 screen. It’s simply crisper, clearer, and easier to read. (Note: The photo above does not do it justice.)

Voice-call quality is much better than on the iPhone. Callers sounded crisp and clear. And I was able to set up Google Voice to work with both incoming and outgoing calls and SMS messages — something you cannot do with the iPhone.

For that matter, since all of my contacts, calendars and e-mails are hosted by Google now, setting up the Droid to work with my information took me less than five minutes. Because I have more than 3,000 contacts it took the Droid nearly an hour to sync them all to the phone over the 3G network (and during that time, the phone got alarmingly warm), but I never had to install desktop software or even plug in any cables.

It was hands-down the easiest and fastest setup process of any phone I’ve used, and when it was done, the phone had everything I needed. (By contrast, getting the iPhone to sync with Google was a tricky and time-consuming process — and you need to install iTunes and connect your iPhone to your computer by USB in any event.)

The Droid also uses Verizon’s 3G network, which in my ad hoc testing came out ahead of AT&T’s. Downloads seemed faster, and the data connections were generally more reliable. It still dropped one of my calls, as I was riding the commuter train, in almost exactly the same spot where AT&T inevitably drops my iPhone calls. Without further side-by-side testing I can’t definitively state whether the Droid on Verizon’s network trumps the iPhone on AT&T’s, but my sense is that it generally does.

In terms of interface and features, the Droid is the first phone that’s truly comparable to the iPhone in terms of power and ease of use. There are interface differences, but for the most part they’re not better or worse, just different.

Multitouch is the most glaring omission, which means you can’t pinch to zoom the screen. But, like the iPhone, you can double-tap to zoom in, and the Droid is similarly smart about sizing the screen to fit whatever column of text you want to read.

Its onscreen keyboard works almost exactly like the iPhone’s, and is even superior in that you can choose among multiple type-ahead suggestions rather than just waiting for the phone to suggest the one you really want.

And while there are only about 10,000 Android apps, compared with the iPhone’s 100,000, there seems to be plenty of selection. The Android Market should be more than enough to keep me happy, with a couple of exceptions.

The reason I’m not switching to the Droid is twofold. First, the hardware keyboard troubles me. It’s not especially good, and I worry that the slide-out mechanism could be prone to failure. There’s no way to confirm that other than heavy use for three to six months, but it’s a risk I’m not quite ready to take — especially because the onscreen, virtual keyboard is so good.

With such a good virtual keyboard, the hardware keyboard seems like an unnecessary and even dangerous, trouble-prone appendage, like an appendix or a vestigial tail: It can only cause problems.

Plus, it adds weight; the Droid, at 6 ounces, is about 2 ounces heavier than the iPhone. So I’d rather wait for a lighter, keyboard-less version of the Droid.

The second big reason is that I’ve grown dependent on two iPhone apps: Instapaper Pro and Tweetie. I also occasionally use RunKeeper, Stanza, Pandora and a handful of games, but Instapaper and Tweetie are the killer apps. They’re the things that, together with e-mail capability, make the iPhone useful to me.

Tweetie I could probably learn to live without: There are plenty of Twitter apps for Android, and the most popular one, Twidroid, seems to work fine, even if it lacks Tweetie’s elegance and speed. But Instapaper’s ability to collect, reformat and display news articles and blog posts I want to read — even if I’m offline — has made it an indispensable commuter and downtime companion. I would sorely miss it.

So while I’m no fan of AT&T or Apple, I’ll be sticking with the iPhone now. It’s one of the two best smartphones on the market, and it’s the only one that has the apps I depend on.

Originally published on Wired.com