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I Went to Macworld and All I *Didn’t* Get Was A Lousy WiFi iPod

Posted on January 25, 2007
Filed Under Consumer Electronics | 5 Comments

Well, I didn’t actually attend Macworld but I figured the title worked.

Another year has gone by and we’ve got no WiFi-enabled iPod.  (A $600 iPhone with WiFi doesn’t count.) This feature just seems to fundamental to me, so basic.  Having to be tethered to a PC to download from iTunes or sync your podcasts just seems so against the grain of the everything-mobile world we live in.  And the iPod doesn’t make it easy (for the average consumer) to get content from multiple PCs either; you’ve of course got to have iTunes installed, your playlists defined and optionally your podcast subscriptions configured.  So not only must you be wired, but you are effectively bound to a single PC.

You can’t blame Apple entirely, no one else really has WiFi either.  Sure, the Microsoft Zune has WiFi, but it’s for Zune to Zune sharing only, and it’s a limited-power/range implementation of 802.11 b/g.

All I want is WiFi in my regular 5G video iPod.  If I were designing the feature I’d have the iPod be a full fledged WiFi client with support for running a slimmed-down version of iTunes and the ability to download content directly from the iTunes Music Store or from my PC which holds my entire song/podcast collection.  Note that I’m not looking for iPod to iPod WiFi.  This will just become another conduit for piracy and people are already irritated with Apple’s DRM and the state of DRM in general.  And look how well the Zune music sharing DRM was received.

Why hasn’t Apple done this yet?  I have several theories:

• They don’t have to; there’s no (significant) competition.  And from the beating that the Zune has been getting by the media and through anecdotal accounts, it isn’t a competitive threat(yet).
• WiFi-enabling iPods won’t sell more of them.  Despite my desire for the feature, people I’ve spoken with aren’t holding off for WiFi before buying one.
• The iPod monoculture already has people willing to pay lots of money for the existing devices.  Why reduce margins by adding manufacturing costs?

WiFi iPods will appear eventually, but on Apple’s timeline.

Wikipedia’s Success Doesn’t Validate Wikis

Posted on January 16, 2007
Filed Under Internet | 1 Comment

It seems like everyone is using Wikipedia. Almost no one will disagree that Wikipedia has achieved astounding success over the past year. With high Google PageRank, Wikipedia results are likely to be at the top of many search results. This, and the fact that Wikipedia has become near-de facto standard for people doing ad-hoc research ensures that this cycle of success will continue.

Wikipedia’s incredible success however doesn’t validate the Wiki as a collaborative platform. Rather, it’s the combination of right-place, right-time, critical mass, network effect, viral marketing Web 2.0ishness that made Wikipedia shine. Wikipedia is similar to many other Internet success stories in that their formula for greatness is anything but easy to decompose. However in the case of Wikipedia, a critical item NOT in that formula is the use of a Wiki as the underlying collaborative engine.

This is evidenced by several factors:

• There are no other Wiki mega-success stories on the Internet
• Problems associated with democratizing content creation, as has been the case in several high-profile Wikipedia-related cases have raised a degree of skepticism towards the Wiki as an authoritative body of knowledge
• The Wiki paradigm, a collaborative process which allows users to directly contribute to other people’s work, isn’t radical enough to cause a paradigm shift. The underlying technology, which lets users modify each other’s content in-place has existed for a long time under different window dressings.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t good Wiki use cases (i.e. corporate internal/team collaboration) or that future hits like Wikipedia won’t happen, but the Wiki as a medium isn’t the secret sauce that will make the collaborative environment a success.

Ten Ways To Increase Your IT Value

Posted on January 9, 2007
Filed Under Articles | 1 Comment

I wrote this Computerworld article back in 2003, but most of the points still apply today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m planning on updating this list at some point and resubmitting it.

I’ve Been BlitzKrieged!

Posted on January 6, 2007
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 2 Comments

This is apparently what happens to your Google AdSense ads when you’ve got no content and your name is Krieger.  Translated to German, krieg (as in blitzkrieg) means war.  krieger translates to warrior, fighter or soldier.

  

 

 

 

 

 

Auf Wiedersehen!