It's a feature (SlyDial)

Well that's just great. SlyDial has turned AT&T's 8th most annoying problem and turned it into a feature -- calling someone without their phone ringing. If AT&T notices, they'll turn it into a feature, too, and make us poor suckers pay to turn it off, so that the phone sometimes rings.

Mobile Me(ss)

Apple's MobileMe doesn't support Microsoft Internet Explorer. Officially not much is said about why, but if you try to log in to MobileMe with IE, you get a panel prompting you to install Safari or FireFox. iPhone users who sign up for MobileMe will soon be adding to the growing stream of users fleeing IE for the brave new world of open web standards.

IE doesn't support open web standards very well. This was an intentional part of our strategy to extend our monopoly lock on the PC desktop to the Internet. We nearly succeded, and for a while it looked like a near inevitability.

It's starting to look now like Microsoft could be shut out of the next wave of Internet services, unless open standards are supported with the same diligence that we worked to undermine them.

Christmas in July, iPhone 3G with a lump of coal called AT&T

iPhone 3G coming soon, to billionaire and plebe alike. All the gadget geeks are giddy with anticipation. I'm stunned that Walt Mossberg was allowed to get one early, after dissing the MacBook Air like he did. Somebody probably had a little chat with him, first. They probably took it away from him when he was done writing the review, too.


The early reviews came out, and they are very positive.

For iPhone, the ‘New’ Is Relative

Newer, Faster, Cheaper iPhone 3G

Software and Online Store Will Widen Its Versatility, But There Are Hidden Costs

Apple's new iPhone 3G: Still not perfect, but really close

Santa's displaying a bit of ironic detachment this year, however, as he leaves in our stocking on July 11, a shiny new iPhone, along with a lump of coal.

The reviews don't mention the dark cloud behind the silver lining of the new iPhone 3G. There's really only one thing wrong with the iPhone,in the US market: It's still tied to AT&T. What a disaster of a phone company. None of them will talk to me about it, but I can see in their eyes that everyone at Apple, I mean everyone from el Jobso down to the janitor, is painfully aware that AT&T is holding them back in the US Market. Almost every iPhone user they talk to makes a point of mentioning it, and they are so weary of hearing it. Weary, like Americans traveling abroad are weary of hearing about what a tard our President is. Yeah, we Americans who travel abroad already know that. The perplexing 30% who manage to think Bushie is doing a great job don't seem to travel abroad, or if they do, they pretend to be Canadian, eh?

The only saving grace is that pretty much all cell phone companies in the US market suck, and people are beaten down so much by this fact that they wearily accept it.

Apple probably expected to comfortably exceed their stated goal of shipping 10 million iPhone by the end of 2008. They are likely to meet that goal, barring even worse economic news between now and December, but they won't exceed it by much. They had secretly hoped to sell nearly that many first generation units, but they sold 6 million. That's an amazing entrance for a device like this, nothing to sneeze at, but not quite as amazing as they wanted.

AT&T worked diligently day and night to counter balance the sky high customer satisfaction that people report with their iPhone. Everyone who has iPhone with AT&T tells their friends the same thing, "I love my iPhone, but AT&T is dreadful, and I will take my iPhone to another phone company the first day that I can do that, without jail breaking the phone." After giving them the benefit of doubt for a year, it now seems undeniable that the "new" AT&T is the same old AT&T, after all.

Obviously so many people were willing to jail break their phone to get away from AT&T that the registration process had to be changed to prevent people from buying a phone without the AT&T contract in the US market.

Their biggest complaints?

• Spotty service, dropped calls, "No Service" at all, for a few minutes at a time in areas that, moments before, had 5-Bar service. Oh, sure, this can happen with any cell phone, but with AT&T it happens in areas that ought to have stellar coverage, like right in the heart of the major cities that AT&T likes to service, while ignoring most of the country. It happens chronically. It happens to AT&T customers using any type of phone, not just the iPhone.
  
• Ignoring most of the country. There are several entire states where AT&T won't sell you a phone at all. There are ways to correct this, but AT&T doesn't appear to have any interest in actually providing nationwide service, only in claiming that they do so. Granted, this problem exists for certain other cell phone companies, too, but Verizon does a better job of providing service to non-urban areas of the US, by far.
  
• Bills are random. AT&T customers get sold a flat rate plan where the bill is so complex that AT&T can't explain it to you when you call them. Flat rate plans somehow result in bills that are different from month to month. Overcharges are common, but you can't get them refunded because AT&T can't explain the bill to you in such a way that you could actually spot them.
  
• AT&T rates are already Viking marauder "rape and pillage" rates, as compared to TMobile, Verizon, and other companies in the US. This one really bugs Apple. Apple's products are extraordinarily popular with young people, who today all have an iPod, and a cell phone -- a cell phone from any vendor other than AT&T because their rates are so much higher. The entry level iPhone plan is about twice as expensive as the rates paid by most of the under-thirty crowd that Apple dearly wants to use this phone. Apple's surveys show this as the number one barrier cited by potential under-thirty customers. They can't do anything about it yet, which is probably one of the reasons why iPhone 2.0 new features focus so clearly on the over-50-and-runs-a-company set, Enterprise CEO and other executives.
  

The best news for Apple is that they are getting iPhone into so many other countries that it doesn't really matter, this year, if AT&T continues to be the dinosaur that it has been. Apple will sell container loads of iPhones. Even in the US Market, iPhone has such a lead that it will continue to grow rapidly, despite the best efforts of AT&T to keep it down.

Get cracking AT&T. Listen to your customers. Listen to Apple. Fix your network. Stop trying to use a complicated billing system to generate revenue by cheating your loyal (e.g. locked in) customers. Think Different, and you could be the Apple of phone companies, loved, rather than hated by your customers. Your customers want to love you. Give them a chance.

Intel puts the squeeze on Microsoft

Some folks got all excited that Intel might be pondering a switch to the Macintosh for their corporate computing platform, after reading this article: Et Tu, Intel? Chip Giant Won’t Embrace Microsoft’s Windows Vista. That's not going to happen. Like most of the Fortune 500, Intel has got themselves so tightly wound around interlocking and ever changing Microsoft components, like almost-but-not-quite open directory servers, not-even-remotely-open Microsoft Office document formats, and compliant-with-open-standards-only-by-court-decree API that they can't leave us.

Intel is just putting the squeeze to us here at Microsoft. They essentially want us to give them Vista for free and beg them to upgrade.

No deal.

By Monday it will be them over there at Microsoft. I can hardly wait.

The Real Reason for Palladium

It never ceases to amaze me that people think Microsoft is trying to take over the world with Palladium. Sure, being able to charge you 25 cents every time you make a copy of your own files would be great for our bottom line. But that's just additional marginal income to us.

The real reason is to prevent leaks of internal documents, memos, and motivational videos, like this one. A parody of The Boss was probably just not a good idea, but hey, it was a better idea than Vista itself. We've got a sales force to motivate.

Paid Shill Blows His Cover: Reinitilize Chadwick? [Cancel] [Allow]

If you were a friend of Chadwick Matlin, you may have noticed that his cell phone doesn't ring to voicemail any more, and he doesn't answer it, he's not at home, nobody's seen him at work. I'll explain in a bit, but you won't ever see him again, and if you do, he'll deny having ever met you.

What an embarrassing opening sentence. Dude, like you bury the stuff you're not totally sure about down below the third paragraph, where nobody sees it.

Rock the CashBack
"If there's one thing that the Microsoft-Yahoo off-again, on-again love affair has laid bare, it's how badly Microsoft blundered its mid-'90s search and advertising advantage."

If there's one thing that your recent column in Slate has laid bare, it's that you were either on some haze-inducing medication when you wrote that column, or you have no awareness of what Microsoft was doing in the '90s. Search and advertising advantage. Ha. How exactly did we manage that, when we basically denied the fact that the internet even existed until about 1996?

Sure, after that we pretended like we invented the thing, and lots of chumps in charge of Fortune 500 IT budgets believed us, but we never had a search and advertising advantage. That market really didn't exist except in theory until Google figured out a few things that made it work.

Sigh. Chadwick, I know this is covered in the training. This is entirely too obvious, even for us. Don't attempt to entirely fabricate or otherwise re-write history unless it's a team effort. Everybody has to say it at once, or it blows your cover.

Now we'll have to get you some plastic surgery and create a shiny new fake background for you, but we should be able to place you as a Microsoft shill at CNet or some place like that. You'll need a little re-education, though. We wouldn't want you to blunder like this again and blow your new cover identity.

Don't feel too bad, though, it was only a matter of time. We already fired the moron who came up with your fake identity and decided "Chadwick" was a name your mother could have picked.

Bonobos, 81 percent, and the Crush on Obama Girl

Toward the end of Hillary! Stop the attacks! Love, Obama Girl, there is a brief shot, CNN virtual-discussion-panel-style with Obama on the left, and Obama Girl on the right wearing this t shirt which says "Bonobos". Surely this must be more than a product plug, or even a reference to Bonobos brand pants.



Perhaps she's referring intentionally to the chimpanzee species who employ a wide variety of sexual practices as conflict resolution techniques -- social lubricant, if you will. The daily lives of bonobos are fascinating because they are not entirely unlike people in some ways, including their many behaviors which undoubtedly shock and appall the religious right.

Amber Lee Ettinger, better known as "the 'I've got a crush on Obama' girl" must be aware of the connection. Bonobos are known for using sex, lots and lots of it, all manner of it, continually, to resolve social conflict.

Obama Girl's entire schtick is about that. Obama Girl is the personification of an idea, she's an actress supported by a creative team, so it might have been a group effort.

Her entire message is that Obama has a strong appeal to young women, to the point where she sings she has a crush on him, that lots and lots of people have a crush on him. Part of the driver behind the emotional response to Obama is undoubtedly due to his continually appearing to be "above the fray". Young women, in particular, but a certain segment of the population in general, tend to be alienated, if not outright repulsed, by politics, due to the stronger nature of their conflict-avoidance tendency, flight winning over fight.

Some people thrive on competition, conflict, and winning. The nature of the political process brings many, many more of those kinds of people into the political realm. In fact, it nearly excludes any other kind of person. Those people who thrive on competition and conflict win elections, because they are often willing to do whatever it takes.

Whatever it takes. Recently, that phrase has been been a regular part of the political banter about HIllary Clinton.

When "Uncle Duke," a fictional character in the Doonesbury cartoon, ran for president in the 2000 election, his campaign motto was "Whatever it Takes." Also more recently, Uncle Duke has been working for a K Street lobbying firm, attempting to reform the reputations of genocidal dictators, notably one from Berzerkistan.

There are a whole lot of people, in fact, perhaps something like 81%, in this country who are weary of the messes created by insider Washington politics. (81% in Poll Say Nation is Headed on Wrong Track) Hillary Clinton made the mistake of running as an insider.

Obama sensed the shifting mood of the country. And so did the Obama Girl.