iPhone: Genius! Flop! Unreleased!

I knew this was going to happen: the latest product from Apple has flown up the hype curve and crashed to the ground, and it hasn’t been released yet.

CNet analyst Michael Kanellos writes about “the Apple phone flop,” pointing out that it will be difficult for Apple to replicate their success with the iPod in the mobile phone market for a number of very good reasons (phone manufacturers are masters of style, existing smartphone products like the Blackberry are pretty good, phone makers innovate rapidly, quality of service is a make-or-break problem) as well as some non trivial ones that Kanellos didn’t raise (the carriers frequently get in the way of innovative products, disabling phone features that they can’t figure out how to monetize).

The article misses a couple of key things, though:

  1. Apple hasn’t released a phone yet.
  2. Even if it does, there’s no reason it has to conform to the rumored specs and price point.
  3. Apple’s real genius is in integration. The iPod and the PC or Mac, the iPod and iTunes—none of these are about single-function stories, they’re about ways that you can combine activities that are unexpected and add more value. There are plenty of ways for Apple to innovate in the phone space that the competitors in the space can’t match.

For some perspective, it’s worth remembering that this meme has been kicking around for four years now, and some things are just as true today as they were when Daring Fireball branded the whole mess as iPhony. Armchair product management is a fun sport, but it’s important to remember where the chair is located.

The Madison County Project

I got an early birthday present last month when I saw my Mom and Dad, but managed to forget about it until I dug it out of my briefcase last night. (What can I say: things have been a little hectic up in this joint.) It was a documentary on DVD called the Madison County Project, and it was pretty amazing. The documentary goes around my father’s home county in North Carolina and interviews ballad singers, keepers of the oral tradition of “murder ballads” or “love songs” as they’re variously called in the movie, and looks at what happened thirty years ago when academics and folk ethnographers first recorded the mountain ballads. In addition to the DVD, there’s a multimedia website (still technically in beta), and you can download movie cuts in progress, outtakes, and even a low-res version of the final edit of the movie in iPod suitable format from the project blog.

The amazing thing about this music is that it’s still alive and well, as a glimpse of the website of Sheila Kay Adams and her husband Jim Taylor testifies. If the Cold Mountain filmmakers had wanted to do something authentic with mountain music, they could have looked much closer at hand than where they ended up.

Oh, and that Folkways record that they made? All but one track can be downloaded from eMusic, and the full album is available from Smithsonian Folkways along with a bonus DVD of John Cohen’s original documentary.

Communitize your data

Techcrunch: Swivel aims to become the Internet Archive for data. Normally the stuff on Techcrunch washes over me—a lot of it feels like the next Pets.com—but Swivel (coming later this week) looks interesting. I for one have felt the pain of not having good ways to share large data sets, when I was doing the Weblogs.com data experiment, and this might be an ideal way to make data sharing sexy, which is of course no mean feat.

Twas a snowy day

Finally, snow in the Northeast. It’s coming down steadily right now but is a little light. I have to fly to Columbus this afternoon, so hopefully it doesn’t get too heavy between now and then.

In the meantime, I’m left pondering the encounter between Senator-elect Webb and Lame Duck — er, I mean President Bush in which the president asked how Webb’s son, who is serving in Iraq, was doing, and Webb responded, “I’d like to get them out of Iraq, Mr. President.” Bush’s response? “I didn’t ask that. I asked how your boy was doing.” Tin Man takes a cut at the etiquette of the situation, as does the New York Times, but for me it boils down to this: you’re asking the parent of a soldier who is in a hostile country about his son. What parent isn’t going to say, “I’d like him at home”?

And if Webb’s response counts as uncivil in a time when the other side has been busy jamming phones and inventing controversies about the patriotism of legless veterans who question the war’s execution? Well, God help us then, because it will be a snowy day in Hell before we can have an honest debate about this war with these people. And by these people I mean both the politicians and the press who cover them.

It was 17 years ago today (er, yesterday)…

At perhaps my strangest birthday, in 1989, I had friends and family together at my house. One friend (who I’ve lost touch with—where are you, Jenny Choi?) bought me a copy of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses—hot on the controversy tip, and just prior to the fatwa. My family got me a copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—the first time I had heard most of that album.

And a couple of my friends decided to get me a belly dancer. Yep, at my house. I was so mortified I didn’t even know where to look—which was, perhaps, the point. I still don’t know whether to thank Jim and Andrew or throttle them.

And what’s most astonishing to me is that that particular memory is almost old enough to be drafted. Half a life ago.

Happy birthday to me

The end of the year has gotten to be a much busier time since my career started spanning both product management and sales. (As the director of product management for iET Solutions, our North American sales engineers report to me, and I’m frequently out on the road to talk with existing customers or work with prospects or analysts.) So the holiday month of December takes on a combination of anticipation and heightened stress for me as last minute sales calls and end of quarter business combine with holidays, the Pops, and church choir services.

Thus it was a rare pleasure to actually enjoy my birthday yesterday, which included not only tributes from Isis and A Small Café (and, Isis, just for that I may have to break out my scanner and my high school pictures; the photo illustrations on both posts indicate the ongoing dividends of befriending a photographer during those sketchy days of high school fashion) but a rare visit from Charlie and Carie, who were in town to finalize their move to Manhattan by finishing the sale of their New Hampshire house. So I got to enjoy some serious cooking last night. We made a risotto with prosciutto and peas—Charlie’s first; he even got to stir the pan a fair bit—and then had a chicken that I had boned and stuffed with a mixture of sausage, bread crumb, parmesan (no, not parmagiano reggiano—this stuff came from Argentina and was powdered. But hey, it was in in our fridge), garlic, and parsley. Which, for those of you who have the Marcella Hazan Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, came out looking nothing like the illustration on page 346. A trussing needle is not an optional piece of equipment for preparing this particular bird. But it was delicious anyway.

And it’s a good thing that Saturday was relaxed and delicious, because getting in Thursday at midnight, and coming home early from work on Friday to deal with our wommitin’ dogs as they recovered from the anesthesia of their tooth cleaning, was not fun. But that’s (mostly) behind us now, and the pink streaks from the Pepto Bismol are fading along the dogs’ muzzles, and we are going to be OK, and life will go on for another year. And next time I might reflect on how much time has passed since certain photographs, but maybe I won’t, either.

Travelers blues

So it was, as we arced out of the airport at LA after crawling painfully to it through the traffic along the 405, as we settled into the airplane seats for the unjustly long coast-to-coast flight, which leaves one gazing desperately at the Skymiles catalog as a sort of antidote to fatal ennui rather than the suck of despair it really is (“the Victorian Glowing Painting! The turbo yuppie nose hair trimmer! The officially licensed Porsche self-motorized wheelchair!”), that I decided that travel has, after all, compensatory value.

Sure, there are downsides to spending one to three nights a week on the road, particularly when one’s wife is unwell and the dogs need to be put under general anesthesia for a dental procedure. (Which, by the way, is something that far too few human dentists seem willing to do.) But the opportunity to catch up on weeks of neglected email, to rearrange one’s Documents folder, to sit next to one’s vice president and look productive… priceless.

As I think back, though, the route between LA and the east coast has been a good one for me. Back in 1995, the LAX-Dulles route was the first I flew regularly, traveling between a DOD site and my former employer’s offices in the DC suburbs. It was this route on which I had my first really bad travel experience (chronicled elsewhere on this site), in which a brief delay extended to four hours’ delay on the ground at Dulles and a four hour free stay in an airport hotel in LA before proceeding to the poetically named Inyokern Airport (international call letters: IYK, “Icky” phonetically). Yes, gentle reader, back then airlines put you up gratis if their colossal blunders and failures to abide by generally accepted maintenance practices left you stranded; compare to my experiences trying to get from Boston to Salt Lake in September, which left me stranded in Chicago for 18 hours completely on my own nickel. But the route had its charms. Back then food on the flight, while dubious, was free, and while beer and wine were $3 (somehow, priced at a value point less than hard alcohol, as though the point was to make one visit the restroom to void the extra water included in the $1 discounted bargain) it was nice to sit with a 187ml bottle of something vaguely Californian and read.

Some of those cross-country flights were notable cultural experiences for me. I still remember settling back with a hardback 1940s edition of For Whom the Bell Tolls (purchased in some Georgetown used bookstore, now long vanished) and a small bottle of cabernet, and finding wedged into the pages a photo of a Korean woman, perhaps a serviceman’s sweetheart. I still have the book, and the photo, and will have to scan the latter and post it. Perhaps someone can reclaim that piece of a family history. I just know that it gave me a shudder of synchronicity as reminders of one war nestled among the fictional recollections of another.

Or on another occasion, one of several red-eyes, armed with a newly affordable portable CD player and falling asleep to a newly purchased copy of the Hilliard Ensemble’s Codex Specialnik, as pure a celebration of Renaissance polyphony in all its anonymous glory that the great men’s ensemble has ever produced.

And tonight, on one of the few LA-to-east-coast direct flights that I’ve taken since those days, I sit with a laptop and a “RightBites” box dinner, which costs $5 and combines various organic processed foods (pita chips, hummus, Late July brand “rich crackers,” canned tuna, raisins, Toblerone bar) into what still feels like a school lunch. But I have a 187ml bottle of cabernet, now also $5 (the same price as the Devil’s liquor), and a laptop with a podcast from KEXP on it, and noise cancelling headphones, which alone are worth much of the inconvenience that has occurred in the intervening 11 years.

And what if the turbulence makes it difficult to read the high-resolution LCD screen of the laptop? And what if I will arrive home after midnight and have to attend to another sales prospect, another customer issue, another product decision, bright and early tomorrow morning? I have wine and music. Who can say I am not the happy genius of my household?