Do You Own That Apple Laptop?

It took only 60 seconds for Regis McKenna and Ridley Scott to cement the vision of Apple Computer as destroyer of evil empires with its 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh commercial.

Judging by the drumbeats on the blogosphere, Apple may be within a few internet seconds of being unmasked as a member of the very Legion of Evil it sought to vanquish. Logging browser URLs into its servers? Storing your text documents on the cloud? Without your knowledge? Tracking your every move with its IoT apps?

Before we start tossing out the finger pointing apologetics for reading every last word of all Terms of Service agreements we come across, let us ask this: do I agree to some hidden TOS when I buy a piece of Apple hardware?

Using software these days is a Faustian Bargain. The creators of the software assume that they can never be recoup what it cost to build (a vanity thing, I imagine), so a little trade is arranged to help even the score: you give up the right to privacy in exchange for using the software- even if your bought it. Pride goeth before a fall.

We assumed that hardware did not fall into thisBargain and we may have been wrong. Apple seems to have now separated the user experience from the hardware itself and justified the data collection there with a Stalinesque argument about it being for our own good. Sound familiar?

Apple Computer never seemed to miss an opportunity to lambast IBM Corporation for its corporate persona and reputation. IBM's history of having complete control over its installed equipment base and how it would be used made them an easy target for poking and prodding in media campaigns. IBM knew what the customer needed and provided it for their own good. Freedom! Democracy of data! Independence! Privacy! Apple!

Look at Apple now: operating a walled garden ecosystem that becomes more difficult to leave with each passing day. Is this another opportunity for another rebel to stand up against an evil empire? Only this time, rebel may be the people themselves. For our own good.

#apple   #security   #walledgarden   #ibm  #ridleyscott   #regismckenna   #privacy  

Can Tesla Build 'em Like Hamtramck?

Tesla gets a lot of press for their electric vehicles, but are they really a car company?

Before we get too carried away with this company, let's consider what Tesla has not yet done:

• Has not built autos at the rate of hundreds per hour, 24 hours a day.
• Has not yet defended itself against any wrongful death lawsuits from users of their products.
• Has not managed a federally-mandated safety recall of its vehicles.
• Has not established a clear parts and repairs implementation model.
• Has not yet addressed a significant warranty claims program.
• Has not responded to and recovered from a sudden, unexpected drops in car sales.
• Has not met my finicky neighbor, Ed 'Stay Out of My Yard' Postelwhaite.

In short, Tesla is not really in the car business yet. 

Building cars on an assembly stand in NASCAR fashion certainly offers a charmed existence for a manufacturer but that is hardly a way to service market demand that looms large in the near future. 

Dealing with the 360 degree customer experience requires factories; not guildhouses as Tesla will soon find out.

#tesla   #electriccars   #warranty   #autoparts  #autoservice   #guilds   #manufacturing   #automobile 

Forrest Gumping OneNote

I have been to a number of rodeos in this IT business over the years and most of them weren't very pretty or particularly useful over time. Or, liking OneNote a lot!

Yes, necessity is the mother of invention and I tilted at my share of windmills trying to make software tools work in ways never intended.  No, Lotus Symphony 2.0 didn't turn me into an early road warrior as I had dreamed it would. And Lotus Notes could have been the killer app had the internet not come around.

After ten years in the Mac world, I moved back to Windows and discovered a different Microsoft than I remembered and OneNote.

I decided to give OneNote a real try and set up a Notebook for syncing. Expectations were low but I soon became the information age equivalent ofHoarders meets Extreme Couponing.  Clipping, copying, linking and syncing! I was doing it all on multiple devices.

During my Mac adventure, I recall no face-clamping wow moment over any tool I discovered there. MS Office for Mac was, well, MS Office.

But, here is OneNote offering to become the portal for virtually every facet of my business endeavors. Unstructured data and information goes in for consideration and organization and is immediately available to all the team members, wherever they are located. I was sold.

It’s not often that I go to the rodeo and actually like what I find. Borrowing from Forrest Gump, life is a bunch of corn dogs and you pick the tool that works!

#onenote   #microsoft   #lotusnotes   #lotussymphony  #forrestgump  

The Internet of Things is a Bad Thing

 internet of things is a terribly bad idea. It's fun prognosticating about the shapes of things to come and the excitement level rises when we describe that democratic world where all devices and all people are connect, as one.

There is one major problem with this IOT concept: the internet. Much as we love the reach and appearance of democratization on this global network, it's security is frail, sieve-like and mostly broken.

Before the internet, distributed systems in the corporate world were robust, impenetrable and secure. And expensive. The deep layered security model of Ray Ozzie's Lotus Notes comes to mind.

Enter the internet circus. Purchase internet access from a service provider in somebody's basement and the flower shop downtown could be as connected and present as the largest corporation. We lowered the deep security models and raised up beacons daring people to exploit us.

Now we come to that IOT thing which offers to connect mostly devices built with simplistic architecture- they are bit and clock aware to the extreme- that offers little or no security. Who would want to hack a stove? Unless one is designing life critical devices such as heart pacemakers, security is not there.

Connecting insecure devices opens the door to exploitation and invasions privacy which will surpass anything we have experienced to date. 

If we want to prognosticate about the shapes of things to come, let us imagine a world where one's heart pacemaker or one's electrical distribution system can be ransomed to the highest bidder. This is not going to work out well for us.

#security   #internet   #internetofthings   #lotusnotes  #securitymodel   #embeddedsystems   #devices  

Apple: Chipped and Shopworn?

This has been a rough couple of weeks for Apple with iCloud security breaches, bend it like Gumby iPhones,it's now a brick iPhones, tax woes with the European Union- oh, where does it end?

As a kid, I went to a carnival once prepared to denounce my citizenship in Mrs. Smith's fourth grade class to become a roustabout.

I was really smitten with the lights, polished brass, the unusual people and that sense of excitement surrounding the whole carnival adventure. I was ready to set out on a new career.

I arrived just ahead of opening time and sneaked in somehow. The place was still quiet as I threaded my way through the maze of motionless rides and shuttered sideshows looking for the boss's office. 

Padding quietly, I began to notice that the folks who were so interesting the night before were pretty average looking in the daylight. And, the vivid colors that shimmered in the wake of flashing colored lights at night were pretty much dirty, chipped and shopworn.

I never made it to the boss's office that day. But I left with a stronger sense of how reality can be subverted- even distorted- into something it is not.

We may have arrived at daylight for a slightly chipped and somewhat shopworn Apple.

#apple   #iphone6   #iphonebending