I'm not against open source at all. A copy of emacs and a bunch of GNU utilities once used to accompany me everywhere. But there's hadly a single instance of an user-facing open source product without a sucky user interface, so I've more-or-less given up on it for anything but server apps. (I host my own Linux server, so evangelists -- please don't knock with free copies of The Penguin and promises of salvation, I won't be listening.) Even poster kids like Firefox have their troubles: the extensions interface is an embarassment.
I think I've reached the limits of Mozilla Thunderbird's email client. All I wanted to do was to turn off the notification icon in the tray. I no longer believe in being interrupted because my Paypal account has been suspended for the 1374th time.
No can do, at least in a sensible amount of searching.
Because a working, functional, synchronizable, socially aware open source calendar isn't due until around the end of time (the year 2038, I believe) I'm dabbling with Outlook again after a 2 year break. And it's actually rather good, despite its reputation. OK, IMAP support is bad, which is a problem for me as I'm never going to own an Exchange server. Still, I'm beginning to think the benefits outweigh the woes.
But there's one thing making me hesitate from switching.
In Thunderbird, it auto-completes every email address. And after two years on continuous and contiguous use of one laptop, it's captured pretty much everything. I never use my address book, as everything auto-completes! (I hear people record "telephone numbers" and make "phone calls". Strange, are folk.)
Outlook doesn't know me from Farmer Barleymow, so I'm back to re-training it and updating my address book. Ouch.
One of the mantras at Sprint we had for our abortive platform play was that leaving Sprint should feel like getting a divorce and re-training your new wife to live with all your foibles. That meant moving beyond merely keeping stateful customer data hostage and demanding ransom when your contract period was up. We wanted a service that actively learnt about you and how you used the system (without conscious configuration effort by the user). At the time mobile portals were all the rage, so we put our efforts into contacting obscure start-ups with technology to perform all kinds of intelligent search, sorting and collaborative filtering to try to get the right results to the user up-front. Sprint's "no click" to Amazon's "one click".
You would have thought that learning from user behaviour and anticipating need would be a high priority for mobile operators looking to reduce churn. (Don't expect handset vendors to help - they want handset churn, not stickyness). Yet I suspect that precisely zero of the operators are making the move from vertically intergrated telcos to horizontal plays their core strategic driver. Without breaking any commercial confidence, I would say that the criteria used at Sprint all related to secondary (or lower) phenomena, or confused strategic objectives with tactical metrics, or were too generic to be of real value. If anticipated ROI is your top measure, then the VP with the most plausible lies gets his project funded. Anyone for a doughnut shop on 119th St?
In doing so, you would array "defence" actions that prop-up your legacy vertical business, and "offence" actions that either break apart that business into component value pieces offered via a platform (e.g. billing) , or advance any parts where you really have some application-layer advantage (err, probably none). The defence part would naturally lead you to accumulate stateful data and learning about the user. I didn't know it at the time, but I was pitching a customer relationship play to an autistic technology enterprise, so nobody understood what you were saying (and not just because of the accent).
What would you do in practise? Smart address books, "one-click" impulse send of messages and photos to top contacts, intelligent suggestion of handset upgrades or new software or content. Your imagination is the real limit.
By the way, if anyone knows a good calendaring application for under-threes, my older daughter wants to hear from you. I was trying to get her ready to go out shopping this afternoon, and she goes for a fuss with her imaginary cooking set and can't be dragged away.
"Aren't you coming with me to get a new bathroom light, Laima?".
"No, I'm too busy. I haven't got time." she replies.
Ah, time management skills. Need to start 'em early.
Pencil Martin in for a little Telepocalypse.
in Toronto
Monday we'll review a new Skype Certified product that has us all excited. Tuesday a guest blogger shows how he Skypified an enterprise meeting room on the cheap. We'll highlight video conferencing services with exceptional quality. And an update to our list of Skype-related video products you shouldn't miss.
