“The control the Web took from the vertically integrated, top-down media world can, with a little rethinking of the nature and the use of the Internet, be taken back.”

The main way we’re seeing this happen is through pay walls and locked down services, mostly in the form of apps and specialty devices that emphasize convenience over control. Most users aren’t savvy enough to dig into the nuts and bolts of technology—geeky techno-details be damned, they want what they want, immediately. Unfortunately, the consequence of this apathy towards technology is a future where a select few companies will control a significant portion of the content we consume. Apple would be the key culprit here with sleek must-have devices that, although tremendously well-designed (full disclosure: I own an iPad myself), lock users into a convenient, ‘black box’ mentality of computing.  Powered by iTunes, the App Store, and iDevices Apple controls the flow of content (the new TV network), monetizes the media you consume (the new record company and music store), has final say over which apps you can use on your devices (a new software monopoly), and controls the end user experience via extremely inflexible devices (recall Ma Bell owned all the actual telephones at one point as well).

Mobility is also a big factor. With more people creating and accessing data via mobile devices (e.g. smart phones, Kindles, and iPod Touches), we see more niche uses of the net that don’t include browsing and the open distribution of content. As the Wired article notes:

“Within five years, Morgan Stanley projects, the number of users accessing the Net from mobile devices will surpass the number who access it from PCs. Because the screens are smaller, such mobile traffic tends to be driven by specialty software, mostly apps, designed for a single purpose. For the sake of the optimized experience on mobile devices, users forgo the general-purpose browser. They use the Net, but not the Web. Fast beats flexible.”

The emphasis on convenience over control has built other media empires as well, including services that use templated experiences to simplify the web (think web presences on Facebook or even Blogger, as opposed to sites created by individuals and designers). Author and web pioneer Jaron Lanier derides many such efforts as dehumanizing and anti-intellectual, and cautions us against lock-in to design principles that were conceived by those more interested in advertising and data aggregation than people and intellectual property. His recent book, “You Are Not a Gadget” serves a manifesto for those unhappy with the current direction of most web 2.0 initiatives. He notes,

“Lock-in removes design options based on what is easiest to program, what is politically feasible, what is fashionable, or what is created by chance.”

It’s nice to think that lock-in and disempowerment is happening to help consumers and create better experiences, but it is also happening because it’s profitable. The ‘ease of access’ versus ‘freedom’ argument is a false dichotomy; you can have both, it’s just more work and more costly. But, it can (and should) be done. However, for companies, it’s easier to cite reliability and security concerns and far more profitable to keep things locked down. Lock-in allows for monetization via proprietary formats, advertizing, and device replacement. In a poignant, yet fairly targeted jab at Google, Lanier goes on to say:

“If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.”

Herein lies the problem. Apple is creating its own walled garden, but has effectively created a way to monetize content and distribute money to artists and application creators. Google on the other hand has taken a much more open approach, but monetizes content via advertizing, which is not distributed to content creators. In both cases, the individual consumer feels cheated.

I wrote about much of this before in a Wikinomics post about Jonathan Zitrain’s book “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.” The main issue: locked down appliances like the iPhone that could eliminate the PC, and with it the “test bed and distribution point of new, useful software from any corner of the globe,” and “the safety valve that keeps those information appliances honest.” The move towards appliances also dumbs-down the user experiences. When appliances break you don’t open them up yourself to fix them, you call the manufacturer. This is exactly how the Apple approach varies from the PC approach. The internet dystopia that Zittrain feared could be upon us, and most users (even tech savvy ones) don’t even perceive this as an issue. As one commenter to my Zittrain post mentioned:

“The death of the PC should not be an issue. It’s like caring about the death of the CD, who cares, something better has replaced it. There will probably always be PC’s for those who prefer optimal performance in certain hardware and want large visual displays. But the majority of the population makes a waste of all that good hardware just by only using a PC to go on Facebook or chat with friends. Let them have their mobile devices and gaming consoles.”

Ah, but PCs do matter and here’s why: Without PCs we lose control over how we experience media. Media that is streamed at us through apps and gamining consoles treats us as passive recipients in a similar way that TV or radio did; it hosts purely sanitized content, it is controlled by companies not individuals, and it’s infused with advertising. The reason we don’t notice (or don’t care) is that it is social and so gives us the perception of control and creation. But what we perceive as control is data entry into predefined fields and forms that limit our expression. We need PCs to truly create new content.

Social media has debased intellectual engagement and self representation by making it effort-free. The cognitive load required to type something on Facebook, comment on a blog post, or even post a video on YouTube is small because these sites are designed to mimic a stream of consciousness. Although little creative energy is expended to interact, time is still spent, and information is still created and consumed. Much of the content includes off-the-cuff remarks that would traditionally have dissolved the way idle chatter does; however, repurposed using social media they are often compared in the same light as actual article writing or high-quality productions. Most apps don’t encourage the thoughtful creation of content, whereas using a full blown desktop is all about creative freedom. In a fairly balanced response to the Wired piece, Shane Tilton from the Center for Society and Cyberstudies Journal says:

“Creation vs consumption: Most of the promoters of the death of the open web are looking at it from the viewpoint that we go online to get our information, check in with our friends and maybe post a picture or video. If this was the case, the closed web would have won years ago. However, we like the ability to do create works from time to time and love having a way to share it with a larger community. The app based system of uploading content is relatively simple, which is the good and the bad point about the system. You can share content as it is in the real world, however it is moderately hard to edit it and add a creative mark to the content. An open web system gives access to online editors and content creation tools. The close system, for the most part, lacks these qualities.”

The multi-billion dollar question is, are locked-down devices, apps, and internet pay walls the future? Or, will it be open devices powered by the likes of Android and Symbian, and supplied with open content via web search and peer-to-peer networks? As long as the web is free and open and accessible to all, companies like Google can index it and derive value from it. And, with the launch of Google Instant, it seems that Google is trying to move people away from integrated search bars back to the home page (where it can better monetize its ads). Whether it’s Google’s web or Apple’s apps, one thing is clear, the next phase of the internet will be monetized by a few key players and far less free than it used to be.

The bigger fear, I fear, is a much larger can of worms. This is why I was delighted to see Tim O’Reilly’s weekend post, Putting Online Privacy in Perspective. While O’Reilly’s post itself is largely quotes from search engine expert Danny Sullivan commenting on a WSJ article, it hits on a core issue that is often left below the surface when we’re openly discussing privacy: facebook is only one company that’s collecting data on our activities, there are many others, collecting and crunching data on many other (often ‘private’) activities. One example, as Sullivan explored:

My credit card company knows everything I’ve purchased, which is a pretty personal trail. That doesn’t get “anonymized” after 9 months or 18 months. I have no idea at all what happens to it. I can’t, like at Google, push a button and make it go poof, either. I don’t think I have any rights over it at all.

Credit card companies aren’t the only organizations with access to tons and tons of data about us. Our cellphone service providers know where we are and who we’re calling and texting, and our IM providers keep our conversations for a few weeks. Even in-game behaviors in videogames can be tracked. While a lot of this data collection is justifiable to improve the customer experience, it can all just as easily be used for any number of other purposes.

I think that this is where we need to focus our public dialog about privacy and control. Facebook’s data collection is just one symptom of the direction where society as a whole is moving: to the mass collection, aggregation, and cross referencing of consumer data so that organizations can better understand, target, and market to each and every one of us. From the perspective of the the enterprises, this is where we want to go, and more technology and instrumentation means more, better data. Speaking for myself, as a consumer and citizen, it’s not where I want things to end up. This is a discussion that we need to have.

Cloudmade is a great example of “business as platform”. From the ground up, day 1, Cloudmade’s founders set out to create monetizable services around free mapping. That’s what lines them up against the likes of Google and Nokia, true behemoths of the mobile space. For those who are new to mapping, briefly, mapping’s popularity began with in car navigation in high end saloon cars (BMW for example) where the nav app could be charged out at a fraction of the saloon car price and still be worth $3,000.  That was less than a decade ago. Navigation is now free, and maps – or geo-data – are the next big wave of content and applications.

Cloudmade’s platform makes it easy to create any kind of map, or geo-data-related app for any mobile device or web service. Apps range from games to locators to, in future, opportunities that might include delivery companies coinciding with their customers in mutually convenient places rather than delivering door-to-door, and devising more of an any time any place offer.

Still, you might say of Cloudmade, just one more API project, and one more ecosystem.

The difference is that Cloudmade is out to create the reward structure for its eco-system, rather than leaving all those app developers (10,000 of them now) to sink or swim in the market. Because Google sees dominance in advertising as its right (in return for all those things it gives away like free search) Cloudmade’s business plan also involves out thinking the Google business model.

Nick pointed out that Google is fantastic at creating new tools around its free services and giving these away, all in the name of increasing ad revenues. What it tends not to do though is create business opportunities for app developers (if you are an ad words professional then you know it does create opportunity in the ads world).

Cloudmade’s unspoken pitch is therefore to take the moral framework of free beyond what Google has enshrined in its business practices. This is not just about giving stuff away so the platform owner can pocket billions of dollars. It is driven by a model where everyone shares the revenue growth.

Cloudmade could then be in the process of redefining what it means to be a platform business. Not only does it reach beyond Google, it also extends the platform model beyond Apple, who, like Google, do not help apps developers monetise their apps beyond the iTunes download.

In Cloudmade’s model apps developers can sell their apps (on iTunes or elsewhere) but also have ad revenue potential – by using the Cloudmade SDK’s they are inextricably linked to Cloudmade’s platform, which includes a contextual advertising service. Cloudmade is in fact an ads aggregator that places geo-contextual ads for merchants via the growing network of Cloudmade developer apps (700,000 people accessed Cloudmade geo-apps in March and the figure is growing at 15% per month).

Two more points are worth making around the Cloudmade model.

First it reflects the fact that open collaboration carries responsibilities. Cloudmade’s founders are openstreetmaps‘ founders. Openstreetmap – with Cloudmade’s support – provides the means for anyone to upload mapping information. For “mapping information” read anything that relates to a place.  Openstreetmap and Cloudmade are crowdsourced map, direction and place related databases and the rewards structure needs to be fair.

Secondly a new wave of entrepreneurs is taking free in new directions.”Cloudmade’s support of openstreetmap is driving the cost of data collection down to zero,” says Nick after recounting how much Nokia paid for mapper NAVTEQ ($ 8 billion).

By driving the cost of data collection towards zero Cloudmade can fight on Nokia’s turf. By creating an ad network for its app developer network Cloudmade represents a low cost competitor in the world of Google.

Looking to lessons for the larger economy, I had a few days this week in Stockholm where the rumour is that the large European mobile infrastructure players are facing price reductions of 30% per annum from Chinese competitors.

If that’s the case then finding radical ways of taking cost out of US and European product is an imperative as the economy begins to revive. The question is does it mean that more companies need to work through the moral framework of free, and the reward structure of the eco-system platform. Somehow, somewhere we need to claw back the idea that we can export cost reductions and instead begin devising new pacts around prosumer and developer activity.

A recent article by Nate Anderson in Ars Technica highlights professor Mayer-Schönberger book, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. The message: “Technology has now made ‘remembering’ the default approach to information, and in doing so, threatens to make ‘forgetfulness’ obsolete.” This is not only a profound change from 20 years ago, it can also be detrimental to our ability to think and analyze information. The article goes on to say: “Selective forgetfulness is a boon to humanity; it keeps us from drowning in our own recorded data. It allows us to sift and sort, then to think at a higher level of abstraction instead of wallowing in detail.”

But, this may all soon change.  Perhaps, computers can learn to forget too.

Researchers led by doctoral candidate Roxana Geambasu, at the University of Washington in Seattle are working on project called Vanish. The idea is to encapsulate data such as e-mails, selected text in messages, or documents that are sent over the Internet. The system would create corresponding keys for decapsulation that are widely available online, but that would deteriorate over time so that the data in readable form would only be available for a certain period of time. The overview page of the Vanish project states, “We strongly believe that realizing Vanish’s vision would represent a significant step toward achieving privacy in today’s unforgetful age.” Mayer-Schönberger suggests a similar solution that uses metadata to tag data objects with expiration dates and cites the work of Lawrence Lessig who has proposed a broader approach to combine policy and software to force privacy compliance.

nGenera’s research project Leading in an Age of Unbounded Data is looking at new sources of data available to the enterprise and how these will lead to new insights, opportunities, and challenges, as well as change enterprise processes and decision-making. One of the assumptions we make is that data will continue to grow and companies, through analytics, will develop a type of ‘sixth sense’ or situational awareness about the organization thanks to information captured from across the business ecosystem. We have already found that the growth of personal information and digital identity data will lead to rich digital profiles containing social graph information. These rich profiles present opportunities to better engage with customers and employees, improve customization, and facilitate knowledge management by anticipating user needs and connecting them to relevant people and information.

Projects like Vanish force us to think about data, not as an asset with an indefinite lifespan, but rather as something that depreciates over time, just like physical assets do. This would effectively reduce the amount of data that we need to manage and improve signal-to-noise ratio as more important facts and information would be retained while less significant information would be deleted. By eliminating the perfect memory of computers, we might also feel less pressure to maintain digital facades and manicure our online profiles. Additionally, the idea of adding expiration dates and metadata to data could accelerate the shift in power away from marketer towards consumer as it would allow individuals to dictate what personal data is used, who has access, for how long, and for what purpose.

But, self-destructing data would also diminish the value of many of the ‘big data’ opportunities that we talk about such as using large data sets to infer the truth about various situations, and using sentiment analysis to mine online customer comments and status updates for market research and product insights. It would confound companies and marketers that store petabytes of information to generate longitudinal trends and rely on usage data to drive Web analytics and build reputation and ratings, as well as improve information management through technologies such as collaborative filtering (e.g. the technology used by Amazon to recommend books to you based on the activity of people with similar behaviors). By collectively deleting our less-than-favorable digital trails, would we also be doing a disservice to future generations of anthropologists that could benefit from a complete digital history and behavior map—both good, bad, and questionable actions—of their ancestors?

The idea that all data should live on forever is a relatively new concept that many people have already taken for granted. In general, I think enterprises, governments, and individuals would benefit from more discussion on the topic instead of seeing it as a foregone conclusion. The idea of having an information lifecycle for all data is a powerful one. Personally, I would welcome more initiatives such as those by the Vanish team and professor Mayer-Schönberger that broach the topic and reintroduce a little forgetfulness into our digital lives.

The Nexus One, made by HTC, is reportedly to be sold by Google to invited buyers only starting on January 5, 2010, Engadget believes.

The first answer I usually get is in relation to Twitter itself. It tends to go something like “Well duh, if you’ve only got 140 characters to create a message in, a service to shorten URLs helps save you space.”

But wouldn’t something like a hyperlink be better for that? Think about it – most people know what hyperlinks are (and if you don’t, click on that underlined thing to both experience one and read about it). Anyone that’s ever written on a blog knows exactly how easy they are to create – press that little button that looks like the link in a chain, put in the URL, press a button and the text on the screen (usually) turns blue with a line under it. And if my math is correct, that process takes up exactly zero characters. So aren’t URL shorteners a step backwards in terms of saving space?

This question has bounced around in my head for awhile. I was reminded of it when I read the TechCrunch article about Bit.ly getting Fu.kd (yup, I was right – zero characters). Everyone’s getting in the game. The winner will be the one with the most unified view of all the data behind the links. But the question still nibbles in my mind – isn’t there a way to get all this data, and send all these tweets and other messages, using some kind of hyperlink?

I’m assuming that I’m just missing something here. What is it exactly? Something around data transmission? Certain technology interfaces?

Vertical integration was popular in the latter part of the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century as a means to assure consistent and predictable supply chains for large-scale enterprises. Andrew Carnegie coined the term in the late 1800s to describe the structure of his company, U.S. Steel, which owned virtually their entire supply and distribution chain — the inputs to production (ore and coal mines), the means of production (steel mills) and the means of product distribution (steamship and railroad lines) – ergo a completely vertically integrated company.

Vertical integration was one of the key inventions used by industrialists to manage the proliferation of transaction costs involved in the orchestration of a scale enterprise. Industrialists at the time did not have the Internet nor did they have well-developed global financial markets or global supply chains. As a consequence these early large producers had to create their own infrastructure and transaction cost deflators through vertical integration. Otherwise the coordination, collaboration, and transaction costs would have overwhelmed their enterprises. As the industrial economy developed, other industries followed suit with other vertically integrated firms in the petroleum, automotive, and newspaper / communications industries. However, as economies matured and suppliers and supply chains became more reliable, the model was largely abandoned in favor of a more distributed model with specialized firms serving segments of the supply chain and many vertically integrated companies divested.

All of that is history: today is different. While vertical integration may be on the rise, entrepreneurs and executives operate with many more tools in their strategic arsenal. Let’s look at two tools that help shed light on the new approach to “going vertical:” the Internet and collaborative business platforms.

1. The Internet. The Internet is now a euphemism for the reality of a highly-interconnected always-on business environment. More to the point, this highly connected world has radically reduced collaboration and transaction costs. When vertical integration is applied in this context, the purchase of an element of the value chain is not used to corner the market or reduce transaction costs, but rather but rather to solidify the company’s position relative to the business ecosystem. So for example, the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, enables Oracle to embed its software in a hardware platform, similar to the iPhone or to the Google Nexus One, that in turn provides more options to work with others and build growth through an interconnected ecosystem (for commentary on the pending handset war between Google and Apple, see Laura Carrillo’s post). With the hardware, Oracle has the potential to involve more partners and grow the business beyond the bounds of a software provider. Consider also that Oracle can also entice other developers to create add-ons (apps) for the Oracle tool. One other benefit: Oracle potentially opens new markets with smaller companies that desire industrial strength databases.
2. Collaborative Business Platforms. In a prior post, I noted an emerging “best practice combination” of a collaborative business platform + a business ecosystem. Google needed to remove itself from Apple’s Board and create their own handset and move into head-to-head competition with Apple, RIM and Nokia. Google has the world’s most powerful and extensible collaborative platform with 100′s of millions of users. But, without a handset (i.e. a mobile device) it cannot differentiate itself nor assure its place in the increasingly mobile marketplace. This inability to garner sustained loyalty of its customers was a key threat to Google’s ecosystem. Without a branded mobile device, Google is just another “app provider.” This vertical integration play allows Google to instantiate its brand in a physical mobile device. Why is this better than instantiating its brand in an iPhone or a Blackberry? Because, the device enables Google to offer a more extensive set of apps and offer functionality that is critically dependent on firmware integration. It also creates new options for Google, who has been largely dependent on the hardware manufactures for it innovation model. Now the Google innovation maven can drive innovation in hardware and firmware.

So the new form of “going vertical” is a merged strategy that will operate in concert with collaborative business platforms and robust business ecosystems. In the case of Oracle, Apple and Google, the addition of hardware assets to their respective business portfolios increases their competitive options, extends their brand, provide a closer connection with their customers, provides a new “sandbox” for innovation, and offers new ways for partners to contribute to their business ecosystems. In the new style of vertical integration, the goal is not to go it alone, but rather to set up the game, so that more partners can participate in the supply chain thereby enhancing Oracle’s, Apple’s and Google’s prognosis for growth.

Yesterday, a blog post on mashable.com outlined  four issues that Google and Apple will face. Below are my thoughts on those comments and a couple other considerations.

The Google Name – “Much like Apple, Google has its own huge pool of impassioned fans who could be easily converted into buyers…All signs are pointing to the Nexus One being released by Google with their branding, so we can count this as an advantage in Google’s favor.”

I agree that Google has an edge here based simply on the sheer number of people that are exposed to Google on a daily basis from any platform. While Apple has developed a large following, and claims over 17 million iPhone users,   if Google can convert most of its Google Apps users, estimated at 20 million, Apple is in for a battle. That battle could be difficult given the millions of other Google search users that could be open to adopt a Google device .

GSM Unlocked – “..users could insert a SIM card from their preferred wireless service provider…buyers wouldn’t have to lock themselves into a contract with one carrier over another simply to get the new Google phone.”

I agree that this has potential to be a substantial factor in Google phone sales. Given that Apple’s contract with AT&T is set to expire in 2010, Apple does have the opportunity to open up to more carriers, however this would require many carriers to switch to GSM networks or for Apple to add a chip to the iPhone to access CDMA networks (currently used by carriers like Verizon and Sprint). I wonder who is more apt to change? The carriers or Apple?

Price Point – “The iPhone continues to sell exceptionally well because AT&T subsidizes about half of the actual price tag, making it a cost-friendly device.”

There is still no information about what the price will be for the Nexus One, however based on what we know about the technology and what the phone offers, it will be difficult to compete with the iPhone on price. Would enough Google users be willing to pay a premium in this economic climate? I don’t think so. Google could look to partners to help defray costs, but Apple definitely has a leg up in that department.

App Advantage – “..now that they (Apple) have well over 100,000 apps, their slogan “there’s an app for that” rings true”

Google definitely has a ton of ground to make up here. The iPhone has grown a large and loyal developer base, focused on making new, exciting and useful apps for the iPhone. “Apple has clearly mastered the application experience.” I could not have said it better myself!

The other primary issue that Google will need to combat is Apple’s brilliant development of not only the iPhone as a product but the iPhone as a business platform. The iPhone is not just a smartphone it is a platform that Apple has leveraged to develop and launch other new products, improve it’s own existing products, as well as create entirely new markets and communities. As my colleague Nick Vitalari discussed, “Apple’s platform was so successful that competitors were forced to launch competitive products.” If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then Apple has been taking that praise all the way to the bank. iPhone sales grew 245% in 2008.

While Google’s Nexus One sounds like it has some very promising attributes it still has some significant hurdles to clear to give Apple a run for its money. What do you think? Should Apple be concerned? Will the Nexus One be a game changer? Either way, it’ll be fun to watch!

Twitter Guru Denis Hancock is thankful for: “the seamless integration between the camera on the iPhone, and SMS messaging. My wife is out and about with my daughter all day, and it’s SO easy for her to snap a picture of her and SMS it to me that I tend to get several each day. Getting those visual updates throughout the day makes my life a better place.”

Naumi Haque, our expert in sentiment analysis adds: “Personally, I am thankful for my Cisco IP phone and wireless Internet. It’s pretty basic, but it means I can seamlessly work from home when I want to/need to which has made me more efficient, saved me commuting every day, and let me spend more time with my family.”

Naumi also considered enterprise level innovations and added that “the combination of sentiment analysis and CRM will be huge. It will allow companies to merge 2.0 customer experience activities (like Twitter, participating in blogs and forums, Facebook fan pages, etc.) with their contact center operations, get a single view of the customer, and develop an official support structure around Web 2.0 channels so they can measure ROI of engagement activities. This technology will also lower market research costs as companies gather insights from customers simply by “mining opinions” online.”

Author and prolific blogger Steve Guengerich is thankful for the iPhone 3Gs. It is “much faster, contains more storage for media, files, and apps., and allows me a big step closer to a future without a desk or office, where I can just carry my compute power with me in my pocket. It is indispensable.”

Jeff DeChambeau, technology whiz and online gaming authority “can’t say enough good things about Dropbox – you install the service on your mac, pc, or iphone, and it adds a folder to my documents, then anything you save there is synced across all devices linked to your account. You can also share specific subfolders with friends and peers, and any change (all tracked and version controlled) they make to shared files is updated for everyone immediately, effectively turning every file into a wiki.” See Jeff’s post last year for more details and a cool video of the service.

Jeff is also a big fan of “Yelp!, especially their mobile app. It’s great and often settles many “well where should we eat?” debates quickly with reliable suggestions, especially when visiting unfamiliar parts of the city. Simple but tremendously helpful.”

And from our Product Development and Web 2.0 expert Steve Elmore, he is most excited about Google Wave. It “ has the potential to be a game changer, combining email, instant messaging, wikis, file sharing, and social networking. But more importantly, this is not proprietary Google IP or infrastructure, but rather an open protocol available to anyone who wants to build a Wave server – this alone will promote rapid development.”

From a technology perspective I am most thankful for the adoption of social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. I can effectively connect with colleagues, friends, family and follow interesting people and brands, keeping up to date with numerous stories all at the same time. In less than a couple minutes I can see that the Call for Papers date at a conference was moved, a new product was launched at a company I follow, my sister is back from vacation, CNN is interviewing Sarah Palin at 3 o’clock, so-and-so had her baby, my co-worker needs help with a project, my son is acting up at daycare and my Manager will be traveling until tomorrow. I know it can seem like information overload, but I get more value out of the little interactions both professionally and personally than was ever possible even 1 year ago. I believe it makes me a more productive professional, a more informed individual and a better friend. So as we get ready to carve our turkey tomorrow, what technology innovations are you most thankful for?

Vendors such as Apple and Google are driving the consumerization of technology and hence the need to redefine employee computing. However, the majority of vendors, including providers of traditional “end-user services,” have vested interests in yesterday’s computing model and customer relationships. They may not be a source of progressive advice on how to transform employee computing, but you may nonetheless need to leverage their capabilities and adjust how you work with them.

As a first step, understand where vendors are coming from and how their strengths and directions fit (or don’t fit) your roadmap for employee computing in the future. For purposes of illustration, the figure below arrays selected major vendors on three important dimensions: Are they focused on the consumer or enterprise market? Do they primarily provide hardware or software? And are their offerings geared for the public cloud or private networks? The figure also includes generic buckets to represent the Web 2.0 and SaaS vendors. It shows the historical strengths of each vendor, but their placements are shifting. For example, Google is coming from the consumer space and moving more towards the enterprise.

Vendor Landscape

Technology Vendor Trends
Individual technology vendors may not be clear about how they want to play in tomorrow’s employee computing environment. However, we see positive trends among vendors generally. They tend to be:
• Appreciating the need to provide more open solutions, including software that is available from any device.
• Finding that their devices and applications are increasingly being put to both professional and personal uses as work and personal habits intertwine. The BlackBerry and iPhone are good examples.
• Developing more offerings in the cloud (though what may be free in the cloud for individuals may not be free to enterprises).
• Aware that consumerization of technology means individuals have more power.
• Building interfaces that are increasingly more intuitive and easy to use.
• Enabling mashups by letting progressive users configure the information and applications that they need.
• Offering more APIs (application programming interfaces) to developers. The iPhone is a good example.
• Admitting that current applications don’t always translate easily between global locations but they have to.
• Supporting small vendors offering innovative functionality (although we expect consolidation to occur at some point).
• Blurring boundaries as they expand beyond their historical strengths.

What Should You Be Asking Your Technology Partners?
As you work with your current and prospective vendors to evaluate and plan how they fit your employee computing plans, we recommend discussing all of the following issues. They cover not only functionality and cost, but also value and the ongoing viability of the vendor’s business model in the fast-changing technology services scene.

• Vision: What is your vision for how we might operate our employee computing environment?
• Architecture: What does you architecture look like, and how is it evolving? How scalable is it? What resides on your devices and ours? What’s in the cloud?
• Capabilities: What capabilities are available today and what is planned in next 12-18 months?
• Costs: What are my total costs, direct and indirect, immediate and ongoing?
• Openness: How do your products and services interoperate with other vendor solutions in the marketplace?
• Integration: How will your solutions tie to our infrastructure and employee computing roadmaps?
• Security: What is your security model? How do you make sure my company’s information is secure in your environment?
• Value: What value are your reference accounts seeing from your products? How is that measured, both quantitatively and qualitatively?
• Business model: What is your business model? How do you make money? How is your model changing, and why?

A free download of the Redefining Employee Computing management summary is now available. We welcome your comments and questions.

As I came to know about the resignation, the first thought in my mind was that Google and Apple had set the stage to engage in open and overt competition in the consumer markets; that one or the other was about to make their first move to capture market share in the others ‘territory’.

One week on and today came the evidence that proved my theory. Today saw the launch of the ‘Droid Does’ campaign. As most may have guessed ‘Droid’ is short for Android a.k.a. Google’s mobile OS. Some additional details to go along are that it will be released through Verizon (the iPhone is serviced by AT&T) in November.

The product positioning and competitive strategy at play are quite clear, so I’ll just let you watch it.

As reported on ArsTechnica.com, the computer gaming industry is not pleased with the response that AT&T filed with the FCC.  It suggested that online games should be relegated to the category of being nice but not essential. “For Americans who today have no terrestrial broadband service at all,” AT&T wrote the Commission, “the pressing concern is not the ability to engage in real-time, two-way gaming, but obtaining meaningful access to the Internet’s resources and to reliable email communications and other basic tools that most of the country has come to expect as a given.”

This did not sit well with the Entertainment Software Association.  Online video games “are no less important to the future of the Internet than email and web browsing were to the past and are today,” a senior ESA representative told the Commission on Wednesday.

They’re used for employee training and in schools, he noted. “Online video games are a meaningful part of our participative culture. They remove geographic barriers, connecting people from across the country and around the world. They teach cooperation, cultivate leadership skills, and empower users to express their creativity.”

Google’s submission took the most sensible approach. “Ultimately what interests us about broadband is not what it is, but what it enables,” the search engine giant wrote to the Commission. Broadband should be defined at speeds “that enable full utilization of broadband services and applications.” The connections should be “sufficiently robust” enough to let users “receive, generate and interact with voice, data, graphics and video, which will enable users to receive the maximum value of broadband.”

Google’s dream definition of broadband? “A high-quality, ‘always on,’ packet switched, technology-neutral, high speed communications transmission platform,” the company suggests. “This platform further should allow users to harness the Internet, access and upload content, and otherwise engage in high-speed two-way connectivity and interactivity.”

I started looking at Yahoo! Answers quite awhile ago because it’s a type of prosumer platform – people ask questions, and the community provides the answers. Sadly, most of the answers are terrible – and the only time people I know find value from it is when they’re looking for a laugh. Why this might be is a subject for another time. Today I want to focus on how terrible answers from the platform are bubbling up to the top of Google Search.

The last time I was reminded of this was when I googled “average baby size”. It seemed like a straightforward request for some factual information. But the top link was from Yahoo Answers. The “best answer” highlighted at the top (as chosen by voters, with a grand total of one vote) noted that the average was 6 to 8 pounds, which is quite a large range. Other answers, of which there were 5 (each with zero votes), included a variety of guesses in the same range, and a very helpful Coco who answered “Don’t know, but all the babies I’ve seen ranged from 5 to 8 pounds”, and helpfully listed his or her source (worked at group home for teen mothers).

It’s something that’s very hard for me to reconcile – how does the world’s best search engine cull through the 13,800,000 sites that have some information on this topic, and provide a top link to a site that not only fails to provide a good answer, but doesn’t appear to have very much activity related to it (i.e. the grand total of 1 vote placed on the answers)? Are that many people linking to it?

For a more humorous example, you can google “how to defuse a bomb”. Yahoo Answers is again #1 for me, and like in the previous example the question has been declared “resolved”. Which seems odd, given the best answer (as chosen by voters, with a grand total of two votes) is “Why do you have a bomb?”. At least I’ve heard a hypothesis behind this one – the site pops up on a number of “check out these funny answers” type sites, which might lead to a lot of traffic.

But still, it seems very odd. I’m curious to know if someone can explain how these sites are getting to #1 in the face of both common sense and the fact so few people have bothered to vote on the Yahoo answers. And I continue to be convinced that there must be a better way to search for things waiting in the wings so long as results like this keep popping up.

Google’s announcement late yesterday about the launch of the Google Chrome Operating System puts Microsoft square in its sights. The announcement is chock full of little jabs clearly aimed at Microsoft:

“the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web”

“Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code”

“The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web.”

“we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.”

“we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google”

“We hear a lot from our users and their message is clear — computers need to get better. “

The best news is that the description of the upcoming operating system reads like a response to the “top 10 pet peeves” that people have with today’s bloated systems. Here’s a few of them:

• Fast: boots in seconds
• Web based user experience
• Large footprint – works on browsers on Win/Mac/Linux
• Universally accessible data
• Open source – code will be opened “later this year”
• Range of devices – from netbooks to desktop systems
• ARM and x86 support

Can’t wait to see the Microsft response to this. No doubt they’ve imagined this day might eventually arrive – but they’ll need more than bing to counter the Google threat. If anything, the conclusion here is that the OS itself is no longer the seat of competitive advantage. It’s not even clear how much leverage the desktop computing environment is going to have long term anyway if game console and mobile phone manufacturers have their way. This is less about Google getting into the “OS business” and more about the shift of computing into the cloud – the only platform that matters. Apple, Google, Microsoft and a huge number of wild cards are all jockeying for position there, and each bring very different competitive assets to the table. It promises to be an interesting horse race.

Inspired elsewhere, I think this image captures the emerging competitive dynamic nicely:

So what do you do when your talent starts walking out the door?

Well, if you’re Google, you create an an algorithm.

As the Wall Street Journal recently pointed out, Google has created an algorithm to predict which employees are likely to leave the company, often times before the employee knows him or herself.

As the WSJ explains:

“The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.

Google officials are reluctant to share details of the formula, which is still being tested. The inputs include information from surveys and peer reviews, and Google says the algorithm already has identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.”

From a managerial perspective, this insight could be quite useful depending on how those inputs are structured. It’s interesting to think about “employee engagement” as a key performance indicator, or an average “likely to leave” rating which could give a manager a close-to-real-time employee morale index.

In addition, could managers monitor the changes in employee morale as a result of implementing policy changes? For example, did a certain training program leave employees feeling more engaged over a certain time period?

If bundled with the latest social network analysis software , a manager might be able to visually see social clusters where morale was low, and potentially isolate the issue to the leader or some other characteristic specific to that group of employees.

Not everyone shares my optimistic view of the potential uses of such data. Some of the comments on the article:

ZAC HINKEL wrote: This reminds me of the movie ‘Minority Report.’ Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Mark Shallcross wrote: There’s a precious quote buried in there: “… and some found the company’s human-resources programs too impersonal.” Now, why would they think that?

James Curry wrote: This very action is indicative of why Google is shedding talent. Math cannot manage human beings.

CHRIS GROTHKOPP wrote: “You will now be given your mathematically appropriate level of positive feedback today to keep your departure quotient in the acceptable variance range.”

What do you think? Is this an effective use of data? Will it help Google solve the ‘talent exodus’?

When most of us think of our digital profile, we think of the footprint that is created by our active maintenance – à la Facebook or LinkedIn.  On these networks, either we or those we “know” are responsible for maintaining our rich user profile that comes to define us in the digital world.  There is tremendous power in these networks for facilitating both our social and professional lives, but one of the associated challenges is that there are so many of them – how can one keep track of them all?  If you have maintained a consistent online handle, things can be much easier, but for those of us who haven’t, there are emerging tools such as UnHub that act as simple aggregators, allowing users to create a single destination where their many profiles can be found i.e. http://unhub.com/richardbranson without having to purchase and set up an independent domain.

For better or for worse, there is also another very important level of profile maintenance that is taking place in the background, requiring very little effort on our part – passive maintenance.  Programs such as ChoicePoint have become important destinations for comprehensive personal information by aggregating data from a number of public sources and privately held databases.  By serving as mass aggregators, with over 17 billion records in ChoicePoint’s case, such organizations are able to sell profile information for the purposes of insurance, reference checks (tenant, employee…) and many other uses.

While such services can be quite convenient, they are not without important risks, the tip of the iceberg being data integrity (what if information is wrong/outdated) and data security (they present a single point of failure in the case of compromise).

Curious to investigate my own ChoicePoint profile, I have attempted a number of times lately to take advantage of the opportunity to review my information for free (available once a year).  Interestingly, I have received the message below when seeking profile access from my office in Toronto.  Funny…I always thought Toronto was within Canada.

Now I don’t want to be alarmist, but we have all heard stories of online missteps that have ended in less than ideal circumstances, often due to oversharing of information.  Therefore, it is important to not only think about, but purposefully monitor and maintain your profile on the web – afterall, you are what Google or the aggregators say you are, at least to non-discriminant or lazy searcher.

Just the other day I was involved in a dinner conversation over which a colleague mentioned that they had seen an unflattering 1980s prom picture of another colleague at the table go up on Facebook a few hours earlier. The subject of the photo replied “Yah, sure glad I took that down.” Not seconds later did another friend chime in with “oh, that picture…you mean this one?”, triumphantly holding up their iPhone for all to see.  In the minutes that the photo had been up, it had been not only viewed, but saved for others to enjoy.  Now this story was all in good fun, but it raises the important notion of control over your digital identity.  Who is really in control?

Will online missteps such as an embarrassing/uncomfortable photo surfacing (or worse) matter as much in future to a generation who has grown up with eroded privacy expectations?  Or, will it be understood that perhaps it will only matter in certain relevant contexts?  Is the social contract that we have entered into with not only friends, family, colleagues, but also many of the programs/networks that we have integrated into our daily lives be “enough to protect us”?  Has anyone out there stopped for long enough to read a Terms of Service agreement lately?  I suspect that if we did so, we may not be so comfortable…

More to come on the happier side of the Pervasive Personal Identity in the next entry.  Until then, keep combing the vast Net out there to ensure that your identity that is becoming quite pervasive, and personal, is in fact doing you justice. 

This reality looks to soon be a thing of the past. In a couple of days, Wolfram (the people behind the MathWorld resource site) will be launching Wolfram|Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” that can answer factual questions — essentially deriving new conclusions and results from existing web pages and documents (read the engine’s introduction here).  ReadWriteWeb recently got a chance to play with Alpha, and they seemed very impressed:

In today’s demo, for example, Stephen Wolfram searched for “internet users in europe,” or “weather oakland” – two queries that most users would also use in Google or any other search engine.

Where Alpha exceeds, is in the presentation of its “search” results. When asked for how many internet users there are in Europe, for example, Alpha returned not just the total number, but also various plots and data for every country (apparently Vatican City only has 93 Internet users).

Another query with a very sophisticated result was “uncle’s uncle’s brother’s son.” Now if you type that into Google, the result will be a useless list of sites that don’t even answer this specific question, but Alpha actually returns an interactive genealogic tree with additional information, including data about the ‘blood relationship fraction,’ for example (3.125% in this case).

Similarly, I.B.M. has developed a system that is also able to compute knowledge. In an amusing move, they’ll be introducing the technology to the world by having it compete on Jeopardy!:

In a demonstration match here at the I.B.M. laboratory against two researchers recently, Watson (the system) appeared to be both aggressive and competent, but also made the occasional puzzling blunder.

For example, given the statement, “Bordered by Syria and Israel, this small country is only 135 miles long and 35 miles wide,” Watson beat its human competitors by quickly answering, “What is Lebanon?”

Moments later, however, the program stumbled when it decided it had high confidence that a “sheet” was a fruit.

Missteps aside, these are exciting developments, and represent the introduction of computing to a higher level of information. Initially systems could only compute numeric data presented in very strict formats; this remained the paradigm for a very long time. Only recently has the development of extracting in-text relationships from so-called “unstructured data” made forays into mainstream technology — but such data still required human interpretation and understanding. These parallel developments from Wolfram and I.B.M. take the interactions between machines and information that next step further — which, despite being considerably more technically complicated, is likely to greatly simplify human interaction with computers.

YouTube has also run into trouble over expiring licensing agreements, with music companies seeking better terms for their contracts (essentially, more money from YouTube).  As one example, Warner Music removed its Youtube videos back in December amidst an impasse in negotiations.  Music videos and other mainstream tv/film clips, Youtube’s premium content, represent the one area where YouTube could generate more revenue (operating more like Hulu), but maintaining favourable licensing agreements is difficult.

Recently, Google’s top brass have been trying to point out optimistic trends.  In an interview with MacLean’s on Tuesday, Google CFO Patrick Pichette maintained that advertising models will support YouTube in the future.  He might have a case – YouTube announced earlier this month that they had reached an agreement with Universal Music to create Vevo, a seperate video site.  YouTube is also working on the launch of a specialized portal to accomodate tv and film content, hoping to compete with Hulu and generate more ad revenue.  Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently stated that YouTube has been making “good progress” in negotiating with small- and medium-sized studios for this purpose.

But even if YouTube can profit off of their premium content, will they be able to earn enough revenue to offset the massive cost of hosting the world’s home video library (for free)? 

I’m skeptical on this business model.  Let’s assume for a moment that Google can’t find a way to stop bleeding cash through Youtube (which, I think, is a safe assumption for the near future).  What are they to do?  Here’s 4 possible directions:

1)  End the free ride and start charging users.  I’d wager that Google will do anything to avoid this- with over 100 million YouTube viewers in the US alone, and the role it now plays in society, the backlash against Google for ending the free Youtube era could be fierce.  This would be a major controversy, and would probably be a last resort.  A middle ground, however, might be to have some videos “expire” at a certain point.

2) Invent their way out of this mess.  If Google could figure out a way to substantially lower the cost of bandwidth, the problem would be solved.

3)  Maintain YouTube as a cost center.  For now, they might be stuck with this option. 

4)  Create new revenue streams.  To their credit, they are working on a few options  that show some potential, but still, I’m not sure that these fixes will offset their growing costs.

YouTube (and Google) are staring at a problem that’s likely to get worse.  As more and more people worldwide become Web savvy, the number of YouTube users uploading content will grow, with growth in bandwidth costs continuing to outpace growth in ad revenues.  Eventually, Google’s going to be faced with some tough decisions, as option #3 becomes less attractive and #4 falls short (*fingers crossed for #2*). 

Forget the monetization of Twitter for the moment – it’s YouTube that needs a business model.

For many, the answer could be yes, says Kevin Carey, policy director of Education Sector, a Washington think tank.  Writing in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Carey argues that both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information.

It’s clear that newspapers are in a death spiral. The Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, is bankrupt, as is the owner of the The Philadelphia Inquirer. The Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are gone, and the San Francisco Chronicle may not last the year. The New York Times’ debt has been downgraded to junk.

All of this is happening despite the fact that the Internet has radically expanded the audience for news. Millions of people read The New York Times online, dwarfing its print circulation of slightly over one million. The problem is that the Times is not, and never has been, in the business of selling news. It’s in the print advertising business. For decades, newspapers enjoyed a geographically defined monopoly over the lucrative ad market, the profits from which were used to support money-losing enterprises like investigative reporting and foreign bureaus. Now that money is gone, lost to cheaper online competitors like Craigslist. Proud institutions that served their communities for decades are vanishing, one by one.

(As I’ve always said, leaders of old paradigms have the greatest difficulty embracing the new.  Why didn’t Gannett create The Huffington Post?  Why didn’t NBC invent YouTube?  Why didn’t AT&T launch Twitter?  Yellow Pages should have built Facebook and Microsoft should have come up with Google.  And Craigslist would have been a perfect venture for the New York Times.)

So far there is no Craigslist equivalent in the education industry, says Carey. That’s because teaching is more complicated than advertising, and universities are sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation. “Anyone can use the Internet to sell classified ads or publish opinion columns or analyze the local news. Not anyone can sell credit-bearing courses or widely recognized degrees.”

Doubtless universities today are as confident as newspapers were ten years ago.  The confidence by some is justified. “Tony liberal-arts colleges and other selective private institutions will do fine, as will public universities that garner a lot of external research support and offer the classic residential experience to the children of the upper middle class.”

But less-selective private colleges and regional public universities, by contrast - the higher-education equivalents of the city newspaper - are in real danger. To survive and prosper, says Carey, universities need to integrate technology and teaching in a way that improves the learning experience while simultaneously passing the savings on to students in the form of reduced tuition.

One thing for sure.  The smartest students want to get an “A” without having ever done to the lectures.  They understand that there are better ways of learning than being the passive recipient of a one-way, one size fits all, teacher-focused model where the student is isolated in the learning process.  When the cream of the crop of an entire generation is boycotting the formal model of pedagogy, the writing is in the wall.

My five-week-old son has had over 1,400 individual visitors to his website. Within two hours of his birth, he was Twittered because a friend got a text message announcing his birth. In a matter of days his name was indexed in Google. A friend’s five-month-old already has a Facebook page. Anecdotally, I find that a favourite pastime of many new dads in my peer group is electronic communication involving their newborns. Maybe it’s a way to connect both to the newborn and to the outside world during what is a cocooning and potentially isolating time. Maybe it helps dads become involved. Whatever the reason, most new babies these days are “born digital,” to borrow a phrase. What it will mean when they grow up, I’m not sure, but it changes something fundamental about who your little one is in the world. He has a public persona often before he can hold up his own head.

The author notes that when friends and families live far apart, the immediacy of online communication is a powerful way to share in the birth. But will these “born digital” children grow up to regret their parents enthusiasm to chronicle the early stages of their lives online? Or, will this level of personal transparency be seen as completely natural by the time they are old enough to voice an opinion? Perhaps it already is.

Today, at least three forces are opening up the regulatory process to a much broader global audience.

1. Satellite imagery coupled with a plethora of intelligent micro-sensors allows us to cull staggering quantities from our natural and built environments (see the California Institute for Technology and Carnegie Mellon experiments where low-power intelligent wireless sensors measure everything from temperature to movement to chemical composition and report that information back in real-time). And thanks to tools like Google Earth, much of this information is now freely available on the Internet, which gives considerable ammunition to conservationists (see here and here, for example).

2. There is growing recognition that at least some resource stocks should be considered global public goods, due to the ecological services they provide to the broader global biosphere (the Amazon being one example). Citizens around the globe have taken an increasing interest in the protection of those public goods and in doing so they call into question traditional notions of national sovereignty when it comes to planetary stewardship.

3. As a result, there are well organized and increasingly agile networks of conservations and environmental groups that reach across national borders and wield considerable influence in key policy debates. They have also become increasingly adept at exposing instances of abuse and pressuring either the culprits directly or the regulatory authorities, or both.

My favourite example in this space, Global Forest Watch improves transparency and accountability in forest management decisions by increasing the public’s access to information on forestry developments around the world. They have a cool Data Warehouse where users can download a vast array of geographical data and manipulate it for their own analyses using their interactive map server

Other examples include the Forest Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council, both of which were set up as joint efforts of industry and conservation groups to impose new eco-labelling regimes that help consumers recognize and reward sustainable practices in forestry and fishing.

For other posts in this series see:
Time for participatory regulation
Participatory regulation for workplace health and safety
Participatory regulation and anti-corruption efforts

To see what a leading anxiety disorders specialist thought about our use of online health sites I went to Dr. Randi McCabe, Psychologist-In-Chief at Hamilton, Ontario’s St. Jospeh’s Health Care. Part of her anxiety disorders research has examined the extent to which health-realted sites provoke anxiety. She was able to put the dangers and benefits of online health info searching into perspective for me.

“For peope who can critically evaluate the information that’s online, it’s great. For people who continuosly doubt their health, people with health anxiety in specific, these sites often make matters worse. On (a site like Patients Like Me [mentioned here and here]), a health anxiety patient might hear about a side effect of their medication. That will provoke anxiety and from there the patient might get to such a high level of anxiety that he or she will stop taking medication or stop going to counselling. In that case, the info online can have indirect, negative health consequences.”

What I took away from my conversation with Dr. McCabe is that for people with moderate-to-severe health anxiety disorders, online health info can provoke extreme anxiety. But for anyone who is not “health anxious” already, the Internet is generally a helpful health resource.

So let’s stop prepetuating this rumour of a cyberchondria epidemic, continue to be responsible consumers of information, and recognize legitimate online health communities as genuine sources of help and support.

In case you hadn’t heard, NORAD has been tracking Santa’s movements for over half a century using radar, satellites, Santa Cams, and fighter jets, and now works in partnership with Google to show kids Santa’s movements on Google Earth and Maps. More recently, this technology has become available as an iPhone app for kids. This year, children not only got to follow Santa’s flight trajectory on Christmas Eve, they also uploaded their pictures from their mobile phones (6-year olds have iPhones!?) and shared their holiday experiences with others from around the globe.

The article in the WSJ argues that Google’s not-so-new practice of using edge-servers—servers that are closer to dense user populations—as part of their content delivery network is an overture against their pro-net neutrality stance. According to Wired, these edge-servers are co-located at ISPs near their users (which would logically mean major urban centres), which improves the performance of Google’s sites (like YouTube). The WSJ contends that this faster access these edge-servers provide is a breach of net neutrality, as its only for Google content.

Richard Whitt fired back at the WSJ article saying that it missed the point: Google is doing a service by speeding its content to its users, and that they’re not blocking any other content providers from doing the same. The WSJ article also argues that these practices essentially give Google “they’re own fast track to the web”. Wired fired back with a more appropriate analogy, likening Google’s servers to free car washes near their users. I don’t like that one so much, because it implies that it’s for everyone. Really, the speed-up is for Google content. So how does this analogy sound: “It’s like a Audi Roadside Assistance. You’ve got to drive an Audi to get it, but it’s not preventing any Toyota drivers from access to their own Roadside Service.” How does that fit?

I have to agree with both Wired and Mr. Whitt on the unnecessarily alarmist tone the WSJ article took while accusing Google. The WSJ also seemed to spread the idea that equality on the Internet was losing some of its most fervent supporters in Larry Lessig, Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Again, Wired has done a nice job of exposing those statements as either speculation or as untrue.

I’m just a little floored at how off-base the WSJ article seems, and it looks more like sound and fury than substantiated narrative. Any readers have any thoughts when they read the WSJ article? Or is net neutrality not as cut-and-dried as Google makes it out to be?

As the Wall Street Journal notes:

Closer ties are crucial to both sides. P&G, the biggest advertising spender in the world, is waking up to the reality that the next generation of laundry-detergent, toilet-paper and skin-cream buyers now spends more time online than watching TV. Google craves a bigger slice of P&G’s $8.7 billion annual ad pie as its own revenue growth slows.

One can imagine many comical, yet extremely valuable exchanges like the one captured in the WSJ article:

As the two companies started working together, the gulf between them quickly became apparent. In April, when actress Salma Hayek unveiled an ambitious promotion for P&G’s Pampers brand, the Google team was stunned to learn that Pampers hadn’t invited any “motherhood” bloggers — women who run popular Web sites about child-rearing — to attend the press conference. “Where are the bloggers?” asked a Google staffer in disbelief, according one person present.

For their part, P&G employees gasped in surprise during a Tide brand meeting when a Google job-swapper apparently didn’t realize that Tide’s signature orange-colored packaging is a key part of the brand’s image.

I wonder what other kinds of collaborative employee exchanges could prove beneficial? How about healthcare providers and pharmaceuticals? Large retailers and product design teams? Marketers and contact center employees? Anyone thinking about video game designers and corporate IT executives? University professors and social media companies?