Unto the pure, all things are pure

With hindsight, we can tell what cause certain things to succeed wildly.  My takes are as follows. BlackBerry: It was the full qwerty keyboard.  Anyone who has tried to use a 0-9#* keyboard to enter an Url, even with T9, will realize that it is a real pain.  All BlackBerrys had a full qwerty keyboard, and to me that was the critical success factor.  It is not enterprise acceptance because of fantastic security.  In fact, any CIO who recommends the BlackBerry service should be sacked.  Permitting all mails to go to route to one Canadian operator is plain wrong. iPhone: The pinch zooming and touch panning.  The iPhone screen is small, very small, only 480x320 addressable dots.  No web pages can fit into that amount of real estate.  Hence, the ability of a very quick way to allow the whole page to be read is critical.  All small screens without a similarly efficient way to pan has failed without exception. SMS: The limit of less tha...

What do you notice about mobile devices, especially the cell phone? It is the extremely small screen. An entry-level tiny 14-inch notebook can typically hold at least twelve (12) cell phone screens! Hence, what you can see on a cellphone is less than one order of magnitude of what you can see on the cheapest notebook. If you are using your cell phone to send and read SMS’es, it’s no big deal. The moment you use it to do something like reading a “usual” web page, there is a big problem. You are able to see only a small fraction of what you can usually see on your notebook. Until the iPhone came along, this stumbling factor prevented phones from being used to browse the web. It was just impractical as you would be spending 99% of your effort scrolling the page one direction or another. Apple is rightfully credited for introducing touch zoom and pan. Touch zoom and pan was innovative and is the best solution so far to read a document that is bigger than your display area. To...

The technology to connect two (mobile) parties by voice or message has been solved a long time ago. Whether it's GSM, PCM, VOIP or whatever, it's all passe. Messaging is even simpler. What makes a solution useful is, not news, the network effect.  Remember the old story about that super fax machine that can transmit a full color page in 0.01s and you are the only one with the glorious privilege of owning one?  It's totally useless until you can find another person with the same machine.  And its value increases proportionally, if not astronomically, with the number of people owning the same fax machine. Part of the network effect is also the directory system.  Besides having to be technically compatible, you need to know the address of the other party you want to talk to, when you need to.  It is a joke if you have to frequently use another communication network in order to find out the number/address of the person to whom you want to communicate. T...

Today, I installed a Windows AD domain controller while waiting in the line for lunch in the cafeteria. This was on a newly installed Windows Server 2008 R2. I started adding the DC role when I joined the lunch queue.  The longest decision making required was perhaps on choosing which functional level to install.  In the end I decided to go for Server 2008 R2.  When it was my turn to order the food, the upgrading was already in progress. I did all this using my mobile phone, a Samsung Galaxy Note and Jump Desktop's RDP client . I disconnected when I got my food as I didn't want to mix my lunch with dcpromo.  As I was busy after that, I found time to reconnect to the server almost half a day later.  As it turned out, the upgrading process completed beautifully while I was away. The wonders of technology! What I see on my cell phone

My apologies, but Thomas Jefferson was wrong, perhaps just this once.  Not [all men are created equal]. (I won't split hair over whether it should be all men are not created equal or all men are created not equal.) You must have heard of this anecdote before: if every possession in the world today were confiscated and then divided out equally among every living person, after ten minutes, the whole world will be unequal again, assuming everyone acts rationally .  There will be the Bill Gates'es who would successfully trade their bottle caps for medals.  There will be others who would give away their farms for something trivial, trivial as in trivial to you and me. The ugly and yet beautiful fact is that the world functions because of inequality.  If all men are equal, the world grinds to a complete halt.  Life freezes, and, if the equality is really maintained, everyone drops dead. Society works because everyone places a different value on the same thing....

These are my private laws of economics: Heresy #1: People respond to incentives Heresy #2: People respond differently to (the same) incentives, and this creates a functioning society. Heresy #3: Not [All men are created equal] . I have an advanced degree in Economics from the School of Hard Knocks.  I missed many classes.  But as there was no government in the School of Hard Knocks, I decided to award myself the degree anyway.

If IP owners want everyone to treat their IP just like any other property, then perhaps they should start by treating their IP just like any other property. First (not in any order of importance), the freedom to use IP should be similar to the freedom to use all other property.  When you buy a chair from Ikea, you can do anything you like to it.  Sit on it.  Put things on it.  Use it as fuel for a BBQ.  Even if Ikea does not sell chairs but only rent chars, you are free to do whatever you want with a chair, as long as you are able to return it, less fair wear and tear, at the end of the rental period.  But when you buy Mac OS, you are not permitted to install it on non-Apple hardware. Then, we should also be free to transfer ownership of the IP with the same ease to transfer ownership of other property.  If someone threw his old TV set out of his house to let the garbage collector pick it up, in most jurisdictions, people are free to pick it up and...