Why I May Have Been Unfair To Apple In Regards To Their Fight With Samsung

With a post title that long I'd better write more than a paragraph or two on this topic. That shouldn't be a challenge. Making those words interesting... Well, we'll see.

I've criticized Apple in the recent past for what I view as an excessive amount of litigation. I still feel they are over the top in their patent litigation but it turns out that I may agree with them in regards to at least some of their litigation against Samsung over the Galaxy tab. It turns out that part of the disagreement is over trademark issues. Specifically what is referred to as "Industrial Design Right". We covered this as part of my MBA but that was a few years back at this point and I'm not a Lawyer so hopefully I'll get the details right.

The basic idea is that you can trademark the non functional aspects of a design. So for instance while you couldn't trademark the fact that a hammer has a handle, you could trademark a particular handle design that was distinctive to your product. The basic idea is that you are not supposed to be able to prevent others from building similar devices but you are supposed to be able to prevent them from building ones that look exactly like yours. Here's a picture of the Galaxy Tab 10.1 that I found on the web. Look closely at the shape of the case at the corners and how it is rounded.

Here is a picture of the iPad 2. the angle is a bit different but you can see that there are significant similarities between the iPad 2 and the Galaxy Tab 10.1

So Apple's point essentially appears to be that Samsung has created a product that from a visual perspective looks too similar to their product. Given Apple's attention to detail we can be sure that they've filed the appropriate paperwork to register their rights to this design.

The question is, can competitors make competing products that have the same basic functionality without infringing on Apple's industrial design right? The fact that Apple isn't suing ASUS, HP or other tablet makers in regards to this matter tells me that the answer to that question is probably yes.

The design elements of an Apple product are a big part of their appeal. It's easy for me to understand why Apple would feel a need to defend themselves if they felt a competitor's product was imitating one of their designs too closely. Apple is obligated to defend those rights if they want to keep them and I don't think imitating Apple's design elements this closely can be justified as "innovation".

The basic idea of the industrial design right is that it shouldn't prevent companies other than Apple from making tablets but it should give Apple the specific right to protect the unique design elements of their tablet. Has Samsung stepped over the line? Several different courts around the world appear to think they have so the answer to that question may just be yes.

Related Articles:

• Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 banned from sale in Germany (news.cnet.com)
• Samsung Wipes Galaxy Tab 7.7 From Stand After Court Order (pcworld.com)

Yahoo, Great Name, Dark Future? (Short Take)

The big news recently in the tech world has mostly centered on Yahoo and their firing of CEO Carol Bartz and the subsequent "For Sale" sign Yahoo's board of directors put up. I wonder if Microsoft would still be interested? If they are I doubt they'll be offering $33 a share this time around.

Technology companies have a nasty habit of losing their way and becoming increasingly irrelevant. Companies like Commodore, DEC and Altavista all had their day in the sun but were eventually bought or liquidated by healthier competitors. If you're not nimble, flexible and agile you will be eliminated or adapt. It's really that simple.

Yahoo faces a fundamental problem in that they really don't have a game plan. Bartz trimmed a little fat and then basically seemed to go into a holding pattern. That wasn't what the company needed and the only real surprise here is it took Yahoo's board so long to get around to firing her.

If Yahoo does go the sale route I'm going to predict they'll break the company up into parts. Flikr is valuable and a lot of people still get their news and email from Yahoo.

One thing to keep in mind is that people like you and I are not Yahoo's customers. Their real customers are the companies that buy advertising. Any road Yahoo takes is going to have to acknowledge and address that fact. If they don't start doing a better job of providing for their customers they will continue to decline.

No situation is totally hopeless. Steve Jobs proved that when he returned to Apple. It is going to take a very special person to right this ship though or Yahoo is going to be broken up into parts and sold off to the highest bidders in the next few years.

Image by Thomas Hawk via Flickr

Related Articles:

• Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz Fired by Phone (seochat.com)
• With Carol Bartz Out, Is Yahoo a Takeover Target? (allthingsd.com)

Apple, The One Button Mouse And Gestures (Short Take)

One of the things that has always frustrated me about Apple is the one button mouse. There is no doubt that Steve Job's is a genius in many different ways but that particular decision has never made sense to me. Yes, it's simple to the first order but it leads to additional complexity quickly in the UI as you have to make that one button do a lot. It's analogous to the difference between entering text on a full keyboard versus the old non smart phone keypad methods. It can be done, but it's not going to be as fast unless you spend a LOT of time gaining proficiency.

This approach is replicated on the iPad as well, though at least you have gestures and multitouch there. On the iPad it took me for ever to discover that pushing the button twice gives a list of running apps. Yes, I probably should have read the documentation but it's an Apple product and I'm a veteran geek, why should I have to? (That last sentence is meant to be somewhat but not entirely tongue in cheek).

I always feel like I've had part of my brain removed when I have to use a mouse with less than three buttons. Part of this is the fact that I still use the X-Windows system native to Linux/Unix on a regular basis. X uses all three buttons. No middle button means the normal paste functionality doesn't work. This makes coding and pretty much anything else a lot more difficult.

The thing I really find ironic is the fact that for some reason Apple/Jobs decided that multitouch on touchscreens is totally cool. In fact you can apparently do up to ten finger multitouch. They even have the magic mouse which apparently allows multitouch of some sort. Why is it user friendly and intuitive to use ten fingers on a touch screen but not more than one mouse button on a mouse?

OK, you probably could argue that touch and gestures are more natural to humans than pushing a button. I won't argue that point but is dealing with a button ten times more difficult than dealing with complex gestures that require a fair amount of dexterity and practice? It may be a sign of my age, but I'm still not all together comfortable with even two finger gestures. The thought that I can use three or more does not give me any comfort at all.

With the invention of devices like the Kinect though this is probably the general direction we can expect things to go in. Human computer interaction is moving away from the simple ones and zeros represented by button clicks and towards a more analog, or real world model. Having said that, the kinds of gestures currently supported by touch screens seem too abstract and complex to me. The Kinect essentially moves gestures from 2D to 3D. I'd expect touch pad like devices to have 3D gestures in the next decade. No doubt I'll be complaining about them as well if I'm right.

Image via CrunchBase

Engagement And Social Networking

I've been spending a lot of time on my side project over the long weekend which didn't leave much time for blogging. Now it's time to go back to the day job so I'm not sure how active I'll be here over the next few days.  I learned how to multitask and be productive while pursuing my MBA and working full time but there are only so many hours in the day and something has to give. So far it's been my guitar making and this BLOG.

I'm starting feel like less of a neophyte in the social networking space. I won't say I'm an expert but that early feeling of "what the heck am I supposed to be doing here?" has faded and I'm making decent progress. There are still surprises occasionally like when I checked my Klout score a couple of days back and it had dropped three points for no reason that I could discern. I've since recovered plus a little so whatever it was seems to have passed.

My big success has been on Empire Avenue where I managed to pass the one million Eave mark a week or so ago and have seen steady share growth for nearly a month. Eaves are the virtual currency of Empire Avenue. In theory that success means I'm doing well at the social networking game. In practice I'm not entirely sure that is the case. As I said above I feel like I've made a lot of progress but I'm not confident I'm doing as well as Empire Avenue seems to indicate.

Figuring out Google+ is kind of impossible since it's changing rapidly and people are still working their way through the best way to use it, myself included. I'm still annoyed by the who real names controversy but have decided not to cut my ties as there is a chance it's going to be a really useful tool and I like the platform in general. I'm also building a network of interesting people to hang out with and chat which is kind of the point of social networking. I do wish more of my Facebook friends would join up though.

Twitter momentum has been kind of minimal. I think it helps to have a larger than life personality on Twitter and that's not me. The one hundred and forty character limit also makes it difficult to have real engagement. It's really just a series of sound bites and brief asides intermingled with links to interesting articles. That isn't a bad thing but it does limit the scope. I tweeted this past week that Google+ is what Twitter should have grown up to be. Twitter did introduce the ability to auto post tweets to Facebook this week. I suppose that's cool but I don't see the point. For me the two services have completely different use cases.

Speaking of different use cases, I'm running into issues trying to decide how to use foursquare. Generally I break social networking sites down into two categories. The first is ones where I primarily engage with people I know personally. Facebook and foursquare would fit in this category. The second group is of course sites where I engage more broadly. That would include pretty much everything else.

The problem with foursquare is that I can see it working in both scenarios. Somebody on one of the Empire Avenue forums posted that they check in via foursquare when they are giving a talk for instance. These check ins effectively become subtle advertising. I'm not planning on getting into public speaking but hearing this idea did point out to me that foursquare might be useful with a broader audience than I'd been envisioning previously. Then again, I really don't want to spam people with my trips to the grocery store or my favorite restaurants. I'm going to have to spend some more time thinking about this one before I come to any conclusion.

Time to get ready for work. It's a virtual Monday here in the US. Hopefully nothing broke at work over the long weekend. I'll know soon enough.

Image by kristiewells via Flickr

Whatever Can Go Wrong, Will Go Wrong (So Think Ahead)

I've talked a bit about my side project/venture over the past few weeks. I've also mentioned some bumps along the way. I've had two more in the past twenty four hours. Nothing major and I'm continuing to make good progress but the number of problems has been higher than normal. I feel a bit like my resolve is being tested. I'm doing well if that's the case. Adversity isn't a whole lot of fun but it's inevitable.

I'd been doing my main development and testing on a Linux VM running on my laptop. It's a beefy machine with eight gig of memory and a quad core i7 Intel processor but I'm doing a lot of database related work and the IO was really killing performance on both the VM and my Win 7 host OS so I made my first semi large purchase for the business, a low end Acer desktop system that is quad core AMD based with four gig of RAM and a 1TB disk. The new desktop/server is arguably a bit slower than the laptop but it gets to use all four CPU's and doesn't have to go through the overhead of running on a VM. I'm also fairly sure the disk IO is significantly faster based on the performance I'm seeing which is what I'd expected.

The first problem I ran into was installing the server edition of Ubunto Linux 11.04. I downloaded the image, burned it to a RW DVD and it booted to the initial install screen just fine. Soon after I told it to start the install though it would lock up. I tried disabling various options but the result was always the same. It turned out to be a bad image write. Somehow I'd missed the error message on my laptop when I did the burn. Not a huge deal but I lost an hour or two to debugging the issue.

Once the install was done I was able to transfer everything over to my new server without issue. I had to install a few additional optional packages to get things to work but I was up and running by midnight. With a sigh of relief I decided to call it a night since it had been a long day and I was beat.

Another problem I've had along the way is my wireless router. It is less that a year old but it loses its mind periodically and needs to be power cycled. The server wasn't plugged into it, but my laptop does use it get to the network. About thirty minutes after I called it a day the wireless decided to stop working. In theory this shouldn't have been a problem. Unfortunately I had started everything up while remotely logged in from my laptop and when the laptop dropped off the network the jobs I was running to gather and process data died. Luckily I woke up at 6:30AM and was able to get things working again quickly but I lost six plus hours of data gathering which isn't fatal, but painful since the project I'm working on is highly dependent on data.

The tough thing about any task is that the devil is in the details. In both these cases I neglected to take into account a potential failure scenario and I got bit. I could argue that chance didn't favor me but at the end of the day that doesn't matter; what matters is results.

I've mitigated the odds of my second failure repeating by running all of my tasks in the background via a handy program called "screen" that lets me detach my virtual terminals and reattach from any place I can log into the server from. The screen program is extremely venerable but still useful in circumstances like this.

Time to get back to work. Number one on the agenda is some sort of reliable data and code backup solution. Chance clearly prefers those who ask it few favors.

Image via Wikipedia

Amazon Touchpad/Venture Update (Short Take)

One of the interesting bits of news recently is that Amazon may be contemplating an HP firesale like price point for the new tablets most of us expect them to introduce soon. The thinking is that HP can afford to sell at a loss since they are primarily in the business of selling content. It's basically the same model that game console makers have been following for years and it's seemed to work fine for them. In reality I doubt Amazon will want to sustain $200 or more in losses up front per unit sold but $50 might be OK and that would put them at a very attractive price point. There are also rumors of a $99 Kindle. If it's color, that would be very cool.

I've been doing my early code development venture work on my laptop via a Linux VM. I woke up this morning to find that my laptop is feeling very sluggish as the VM is busy doing all sorts of database queries. This laptop is under a year old with four real cores (Intel I7) and 8 Gig of memory. I feel a sense of accomplishment that I've been able to bring it to its knees. :) I have an old desktop machine sitting around gathering dust that I'll be installing Linux on this weekend so I can transfer my work to there.

I've worked through some possibilities for the business side of the idea I'm working on and am getting excited about the possibilities. I don't think this idea is a complete dud which is nice. In any case I'm getting to learn some cool technologies and am excited about coding for the first time in years.

Image via Wikipedia

Related articles

• Will tablets be sold like video game consoles ? Bundled loss leaders ? (nextbigfuture.com)
• Blog - What Amazon Can Learn from HP (technologyreview.com)

What is a "Real Name" Anyway? G+ Fails

A few more thoughts today on the whole "Real names" Google+ debate. You can find my previous entry on this topic here. And yes, I realize some people dislike "here" links. Sometimes they are the most natural way to back link.

One of the things I've heard people say in support of real names is that they want to be able to search for a persons name and find out more about them. The problem with this assertion is that it assumes that everyone has an uncommon name. My first name is Mike, which has been one of the top two or three male first names in the US for decades now. My surname is Miller which is a very common surname in the US. I'll add an additional piece of identifying information.; I live in California. Now, do a Google search and pick me out. Hint, you wont find me on at least the first couple of pages. I'll throw in the fact that my middle initial is J. Again, you won't find me on the first few pages. You probably won't find me on the first hundred. My name is a lousy way to identify me uniquely if that is what you're trying to do.

If you search for emkey1 on the other hand the very first thing that comes up on Google's search is an entry from my BLOG.

If the point of this policy is to make it easier to identify people than it's an epic fail in the case of those of us who have common names. My "brand" is emkey1 which is a fairly unique label that is easy to locate.

Another issue I have is that even even if I acknowledge Google's desire that everyone be tied to a real identity I don't understand why anyone besides Google needs to know how to tie a public persona back to a real person. Can anyone explain that to me? Google could even share demographic data with partners without violating peoples privacy which is a big part of their business model so again, I'm perplexed why they think they need to have and enforce their policy as currently constituted.

I'm not a social networking superstar, but I am somebody with a modest presence and I wouldn't mind growing that presence. Google's insistence that I use my real name on G+ makes it more difficult for me to build my "emkey1" brand. Google is essentially asking me to put time and effort into an outlet that isn't furthering my personal goals.

Actually I have a confession. technically my real first name is Michael, not Mike. Nobody but my family calls me that though so hopefully Google won't insist that I use it on G+.

Image via Wikipedia