KISS YOUR DATA GOODBYE

While we may have been preoccupied with political firestorms ignited by President Trump's efforts to curb immigration, repeal and replace the Affordable Healthcare Act ("Obamacare"), repeal the estate tax, build a wall on our border with Mexico, bomb Syria in retaliation for using chemical weapons and  posture over North Korea's nuclear capability (or lack thereof), your personal privacy may have been eroded and you likely have not noticed.

On April 4, 2017 PCMag reported:

As expected, President Donald Trump on Monday signed a bill that overturns a Federal Communications Commission rule requiring ISPs to get permission before selling consumer browsing history and other data.

Trump's signature comes after both houses of Congress voted to pass the resolution, which means Internet service providers could have an easier time selling their customers' data.

What does this mean for the average person?  If the average person is not someone "connected" by technology, probably it means very little.  If, however, you are a person who, in a few common examples:

• a cellphone
• a computer connected to the Internet
• a GPS device in your vehicle
• a cable or WiFi connection for you television or telephone or game system at home, or
• a device that tracks your daily physical activity and workouts,

you probably generate a whole lot of cyber-data every day, whether you realize it or not.  Think about the data generated by using such devices to make online purchases or view movies and videos, take pictures, or make appointments or reservations for meals or travel.  The list goes on and on.

You think that data is yours, locked inside your device, safe --- something only you can access.  Well, you are wrong, at least when you are connected to networks for access to information and products and to share information with others, and particularly when you make commercial transactions.

Bit, by byte, by byte, those activities reveal who you are, what you like, what you do.   You do not need to be posting on public service like Facebook or Twitter (although many of us do).

Who cares about all these personal details?

 First of all, you probably get a benefit out of creating this cyber-portrait  of yourself.  Here is a personal example:  I buy a lot of things from Amazon:  dog food (five dogs, a lot of dog food), books, compact discs, other household items and gifts for others.  In addition, I pay for Amazon Prime, so I get free shipping on most purchases and access to free movies through Amazon online.

Amazon keeps track of those purchases.  When I want to re-order something like dog food, it is easier to click through a re-order of prior purchase and order it again.  Also, Amazon suggests other products that I might want to consider and alerts me of new items related to prior purchases.

Amazon sometimes takes this a bit further.  Amazon also sells products from other vendors.  Amazon is the broker.  So, Amazon is matching up my interest in purchasing something with another retailer who sells it, brokering my information to better serve me.  It also helps smaller retailers sell products.  I am pretty sure Amazon has smart lawyers and somewhere in the pages and pages of its terms of service, I agreed to let them use my data for these purposes.

What if Amazon could go further and sell all my buying information and habits to anyone who wanted them?  The purchasing party could start soliciting my business, trying to sell me whatever they had to offer, whether I was interested or not.  (Think about the telephone sales calls or solicitations you get on your land line, if you still have one, or now on your cellphone number.)  You may be comfortable with Amazon having your personal profile, but very uncomfortable with anyone being able to buy it.

That, of course, is what Trump's bill overturning the Federal Communications Commission rule does.  It lets the companies who have gathered your information sell it to someone else without your consent.

To illustrate the consequences, let's look at another PCMag story that appeared April 24, 2017:  Unroll.me Sells Your Anonymized Email Data to Uber.  The New York Times ran an article on April 23 profiling Travis Kalanick, the CEO of Uber and his aggressive tactics to achieve success, including his data raid on competitor Lyft through the email productivity service Unroll.me:

Using its application Unroll.me, "Slice collected its customers' emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber," the report notes. "Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of Lyft's business."

For those who need some translation here, Uber and Lyft compete with each other in provide "ride hailing" services.  Unregulated ride hailing services compete with regulated taxi cab services.  You use an app on your phone to arrange a ride with Uber or Lyft.  A private driver appears at your location and takes you where you want to go.

Unroll.me is an application that scans your email as it comes in and sorts it into categories.  The objective is for Unroll.me to separate your "junk" mail so you can discarded and unsubscribe easily.  It is email triage designed to clean up your inbox and let you read mail that you really want to receive.  In this process, however, Unroll.me sees all your email and analyzes for classification purposes and it knows a great deal about what you have been doing.  It can identify receipts for Lyft and Uber, thus knowing if, when and where you are using those services.  That Unroll.me anonymize this data is some comfort with respect to personal privacy.

By stealing Lyft's receipts through Unroll.me, Uber could determine how well Lyft was doing in given markets and plan ways to compete against them.  Kalanick has made other attempts to obtain data that was protected.  As the New York Times reported, Apple CEO Tim Cook once threatened Kalanick with banishment from the Apple App Store for hiding unscrupulous activities from Apple.

Your data is being used already by many websites.  I use Google frequently for searches.  From those searches it knows my interests. A while ago, I searched for car dealers for servicing my car.  I went to websites for these dealers.  Now, when I search on Google advertising appears on the pages that I view for the exact brand of car that I own.  I wonder how that happened.

The change in the Federal Communications Commission's rule on requiring ISPs have your consent will result in many ISPs selling your information and targeted advertising will increase.

Fortunately, some ISPs sense customer backlash and are pledging not to sell your information. I use a web-based application called Evernote.  I use it to take notes of all kinds and to draft these Reality Byte columns before moving them to Word for final edits.  Evernote also has a feature called “Evernote Clipper” that allows you to save copies of webpages and links to information you find on the Internet.  I use this frequently, not just to clip articles I later want for research, but also for wide range of personal reasons such as saving receipts for online payments (saving the screen acknowledging payment).

Through using these features, Evernote ends up with a very large bank of information (data) on the user.  If it looks at what I write, save or clip, it will see recurring patterns of interest and significant information about me.  It could package and sell this information to others who could use my data for commercial or other purposes.

I was searching online with Google recently for contact information on a college classmate. Google displayed box indicating that it could search my Evernote account for information on my friend.  This seemed useful, but also scary --- that Google could have access to all of my Evernote information.  I decided to see what would happen and launched Evernote so that Google could search it.  This prompted a somewhat reassuring message before displaying Evernote results on Google:
  

Evernote does not track your search terms or results, or share any of your information with search engines.

Results did appear from Evernote on Google’s page, but only after I launched Evernote (thus consenting to the search).  If the above statement is true, only I can see those results through Google’s search.  What is uncertain here is whether Google “harvests” the information it gets each time it searches an Evernote user’s account.  (And, in during this search, Google displayed another car ad!)

I hope that the custodians of our data can withstanding the temptations presented by change in the FCC rule.  We may want to pay more attention to what we do online, the trail of data that it leaves, and what consent to use and disclosure we have already given through existing terms of service agreements.

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Flashbyte: CAPTCHA: Are You Gort or Gnut?

PCMag reports on December 3, 2014 that Google has eliminate CAPTCHA, replacing it with a simple yes/no check box to the question "Are You a Robot?"  CAPTCHA is a "challenge response" test designed to detect spammers and other non-human computer automated (robotic) programs from clogging online ques.  An example would be a robotic program trying to purchase concert tickets for a ticket scalper.

This solution seems so simple it poses the question "why did it take so long" to figure it out.

So are you Gort or Gnut?  Yes ____  No _____

(Disclosure:  The author has stock in Google, but did not use a robotic program to purchase it (although the author's broker certainly may have used a computer in the transaction).)

Googling Google - MSBA Tech Talk

As some readers know, Reality Bytes originates from blog posts online at http://technobytesmd.blogspot.com.

It takes a while for these posts to reach print readers in the Maryland State Bar Association ("MSBA") Section of Estate and Trust Law Newsletter, which can be found online at the MSBA website at this link: http://www.msba.org/sec_comm/sections/estate/default.asp, under the section labeled "Media."  You can also find a link the Reality Bytes blog there if you want to sign up.

If you have gotten this far, what I really wanted to tell you is that the MSBA also has a wonderful technology resource called Tech Talk, which appears periodically in the MSBA's electronic newsletter Bar Brief, found at this URL:  http://www.msba.org/departments/commpubl/barbrief/.  Look for the link to Tech Talk at the bottom of each issue of Bar Brief.

As I write this post, the current edition of Tech Talk (http://www.msba.org/publications/barbrief/14march_tech.asp) (March, 2014) features a very informative and practical guide to certain more obscure features of Google.  For example:

Google Public Data Explorer - The Google Public Data Explorer allows users to upload their own data sets for visualization and exploration. It makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate.

 and

 Undo a Sent Message – (One of the Experiments) You can set Gmail to wait 10 seconds before sending a message in case you want to stop it. Go to Settings, Labs and scroll down to Undo Send and click on Enable.

There are other tips on using Google. Google is an important part of our lives, perhaps in more ways that we realize.  Whether we are using it or not, we likely have a digital presence and others use Google to find out things about us.  So, go to Tech Talk and see other Google Tips for yourself.  Then, go Google yourself and see what you find!

If you are an MSBA member and like Tech Talk, you should be getting a periodic email each month from the MSBA alerting you to new editions of Tech Talk (unless you opt out of receiving the email).  If you would rather check out new Tech Talk posts on your own, it comes out every fourth Tuesday of the month.  Go to the links above for the Bar Brief and check it out.

And, if you are tired of trying to write down all these long URLs, consider reading this column as a blog online (http://technobytesmd.blogspot.com), where you can find hyperlinks. 
 .

Location Services

Keeping your life private these days may be harder than you think.  You can shun social media and decline to "check-in" on Facebook or Foursquare, but you may still be carrying your cellphone around and it could be collecting information on you that your cellphone provider may be packaging and selling.  So reports the Wall Street Journal.

Your data is the big goldmine of online life.  Companies like Facebook and Google have histories on what you like and search and they use it to make money.  This is generally done by using that information to match your activity, likes, and searches with advertisers who may have a product in which you would be interested.

Those pesky ads that slip into your Facebook feed or pop up next to your Google search results are a product of  this type of data mining.  Google recently has been trying to resolve legal and public relations difficulties that resulted from its priority display of advertisers' sites ahead of other hits in its online search results.

The WSJ article points to another well-know fact of modern life.  If you have a cellphone, smart or not, the phone company (a.k.a communications Goliaths like Verizon and ATT) have data on you.  Lots of people may want that data, particularly on where go and who you call or on searches that you make through a smartphone.

One the one hand, you should be concerned about your civil liberty.  When something goes work, government law enforcement agencies, whether federal, state or local, may want to know a lot about you was talking to whom at the time of a certain event.  Think about the recent bombing at the Boston Marathon.  Law enforcement relied very heavily on video surveillance cameras in the area of the bombing to identify suspects.  Later, a cellphone's location tracking helped police follow the suspect's movements.  There is recent story of NYC police chasing down a stolen cellphone using the tracking system, complete with a "French Connection" car chase. (Here are links to reports by UPI, The Blaze and The Times Ledger)

Here's a part of the WSJ article on the new interest that cell carriers have in cashing in on your activities:

The information provides a powerful tool for marketers but raises new privacy concerns. Even as Americans browsing the Internet grow more accustomed to having every move tracked, combining that information with a detailed accounting of their movements in the real world has long been considered particularly sensitive.

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The new offerings are also evidence of a shift in the relationship between carriers and their subscribers. Instead of merely offering customers a trusted conduit for communication, carriers are coming to see subscribers as sources of data that can be mined for profit, a practice more common among providers of free online services like Google and Facebook.

It is unlikely that large cellphone carriers are going to turn their backs on the money to be made here.  They also insist in the WSJ article that they are taking care not to give advertisers anything that would identify individual users.  So, until we have a stricter set of laws about what happens to your data, the corporate holders of this data are essentially asking you to trust them.

So, what are you to do if you do wish your activities to be mined? You may not be able to do this completely without getting rid of your cellphone or other mobile device --- anything that connects to a network and therefore accumulates data on your activity with whoever runs the network.  But, there are some simple things that you can do to be more careful about the data that is accumulated.  To begin, be careful what you post on social media like Facebook and Foursquare.  When you check-in, you are telling someone where you are and the network will have that information in its storage of data on your activity.

Also, with applications on smartphones (Apple or Android) remember that many of those applications ask you to let them access your location through location services setting on the phone.  Think about that before you authorize such use.  It may make some sense to let the application know where you are when you want to get directions from that location to somewhere else.  What about knowing the weather?  That seems logical, but you can always enter in applications like The Weather Channel app the location for which you want the weather information rather than let your phone tell them where you are in real time.  I have The Weather Channel app set to give me the weather in five or six different places around the world and I am not in all of them (or any of them) simultaneously.

Go to the Settings menu on your phone and go through the applications to see which ones have location services turned on.  Decide (a) whether you need the application at all (our phones are often bloated with applications that we do not use; I am slowly trying to get rid of them) and (b) does it make any sense at all for the application to know where you are?

Also, while it is comforting to know that there is an application that can find your smartphone if it is lost or stolen (or down beneath the cushions on your couch), you may want to consider turning off your smartphone completely from time to time --- for purposes of privacy and just plain old peace and quiet.

Spam, Spam Spam; Digital Afterlife - Google-style

Here are some late breaking (April, 2013) additions to Reality Bytes.

Spam, Spam, Spam ...

This post is especially short, because the source for it is Peter Lewis, and he is a much better writer and it is his personal story.  In the wake of the bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 15, Peter began encountering new waves of spam which set his blood to boil.  One particularly distasteful and macabre batch used the tragedy in Boston to entice readers.  After a teaser message, readers were given a link to further information.  Clicking on a link would result in malicious software being loaded onto the computer.  Another wave involved email received through Facebook.  By referencing one person that Peter knew, the Facebook email tried appear legitimate -- an extension of Facbook's "friend of a friend" connectivity designed to build ever wider circles of interaction among users.  The Facebook email, however, also contained a malicious link.  Peter dashed off a hasty post to his Facebook friend:   “Friends don’t let Facebook friends spam other Facebook Friends." You can read Peter's full, much more colorful story in his column Words & Ideas at www.peterlewis.com or at this link. 

Planning Your Digital Afterlife -- Google-style

I have written before about the digital footprint that we all are creating and will leave behind when we die.  Examples:  Personal information, photographs and other memorabilia on Facebook or other social media, customer accounts with online services like iTunes or Amazon, playlists on Spotify, and personal files stored in the "cloud" that may back up everything from personal journals to your banking and tax records.  Not to mention the digital archive of email, Twitter posts, listservs, and blogs like Reality Bytes.  There are significant issues over who controls all this after you are gone.  There are contractual agreements with providers of these services in cyberspace.  Some states have enacted statutes to establish who has authority over and rights to these digital remains.  Maryland is considering such legislation.

Now, one of the most significant players in this domain, Google, has set forth a policy that it labels: "Plan your digital afterlife with Inactive Account Manager".  Google begins this policy statement by saying:

Not many of us like thinking about death — especially our own. But making plans for what happens after you’re gone is really important for the people you leave behind. So today, we’re launching a new feature that makes it easy to tell Google what you want done with your digital assets when you die or can no longer use your account.

What follows is really the introduction to an application, the aforementioned Inactive Account Manager (" not a great name, we know"), which enables Google users to make decisions about what data Google will delete or deliver to trusted contacts.  Giving you some idea of the scope of this application, Google states that this services covers:

data from some or all of the following services: +1s; Blogger; Contacts and Circles; Drive; Gmail; Google+ Profiles, Pages and Streams; Picasa Web Albums; Google Voice and YouTube.

"Inactive" is certainly an interesting euphemism for death, but Google has a verification warning before it will do anything with your information.  It will send a text message to your cellphone and an email to your secondary address provided to Google.  You may have noticed, as I did, a recent prompt from Google when you logged in asking you to update, verify or provide a cellphone number and a secondary email address.  There is sort of leap of faith here that you have both a cellphone and a secondary email address, but it is probably the most reasonable approach.

I would urge all readers to check out Inactive Account Manager and post any comments or questions online at this blog.

POSTSCRIPT:
I actually went and set up the Inactive Account Manager for my Google services, which include this blog.  This took about 10 minutes.  It involves choosing some preferences and providing information on how you want Google to try and contact you if you have not used your account(s) for the period of time that you have chosen and on who you want to have access to your digital remains on the Google services mentioned above.  You need a cellphone number that Google can text and an email by which Google can contact the trusted digital caretakers for your data.


This may not mesh perfectly with the legal administration of your estate, but Google seems to have provided a fairly simple method for users to handle a portion of their digital afterlife.
 

Piracy, Privacy and Money, Money, Money - Part II

This is the second in a series.

PRIVACY

I have written here before about privacy and likely will again.  It has been an important area of  American constitutional law since the drafting of the Bill of Rights.  Since that day when Alexander Graham Bell summoned Watson with words spoken over his telephonic invention, we have becoming increasing concerned with protecting various forms of telephonic and electronic communication.

In January, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled United States v. Jones that the government needs to obtain a search warrant to track the public movements of a person by attaching a GPS device to the person's vehicle.  Antoine Jones was a suspected drug dealer who lived in DC.  Authorities had a warrant for Jones in the District of Columbia and attached a GPS device to his car to follow his movements.  Information on Jones' movements in Maryland was collected, however, and authorities had failed to get a warrant in Maryland. The Court split 5-4 on how the 4th Amendment applied in this situation.  Here is a link to a further discussion of the case at Marketplace Tech Report. 

The  Jones decision may become landmark of constitutional law.  It certainly will be important in understanding the current interface between technology and privacy.  We have seen societal situations that raise significant questions in this area. In recent political movements from the "Arab Spring" to the "Occupy" movement, electronic means of communication such as Twitter and Facebook have been used to organize protest. In response, Arab governments first tried to shut down these communications.  More recently, and more ominously, governments have been monitoring these communications in order to find dissidents and suppress protest.

The Jones case may begin to tell us where constitution protections attach in a world where we are revealing more and more about ourselves through electronic communications.  Consider, however, that we now reveal a great deal of information about ourselves willingly on Facebook and Twitter and other social networking services.  If Antonie Jones had been checking in on Facebook or FourSquare, would government monitoring of his postings and travels been protected?

One important question continues to be what expectation of privacy we have when we use such social networking services.  When people sign-up for these services, they must agree to contractual agreements that provide the terms under which the service is provided.  These terms of service agreement set out important legal rights to material posted and privacy policies.

Of note recently is that both Google and (yet again) Facebook have changed their privacy policies.  These changes have received wide publicity. As we provide more and more personal information on such services, including using such services to reach  or interact with others online destinations, these policies are very important to our online privacy.  These policies, however, are not really intended to protect our privacy as much as they are to govern what information Google or Facebook or other service providers can access and use for their own business purposes.

Remember that Google, Facebook and other online services are businesses looking to make a profit. 

These social networks want you to post personal information on their services.  Such sharing is fundamental to the business model on which such services are built.  The information that you share encourages your friends to join to see your posts and to share their own information.  This cycle brings more and more people onto the network.  Participants keep the treadmill of information spinning round and round by providing the product for the social network.  In one way or another, good Internet businesses use our information and usage history to make money.

Not only are the users the product, but they are also a potential customer. Let's take a look at a simple scenario.  You go to Google and search for information on the book, "The Devil and the White City".  You find links to various bookseller's sites and go to them.  Google now knows that you may be interested in books, even the type of book, and can place paid advertising for a booksellers on your search pages.  Or you go to Amazon and buy the book.  Amazon knows that you purchased this book and will recommend similar books to you in the future when you visit Amazon.

In one sense this is good for you.  You may get "better" search results or better service, because the search engine or the vendor knows something more about our preferences.  This is certainly a critical element that makes such services "smarter" and, thus, faster in getting us to the things we are trying to find.  What you may not realize, however, is that your activities are leaving behind a kind of electronic footprints or fingerprints, showing where you have been on the Internet and what you have been viewing.

Technologically, much of this deals with little pieces of code called "cookies" that you leave behind in your travels in cyberspace.  These markers allow sites to recognize you next time you visit and improve your use of sites, but they are digital signposts as to where you have been and what you have seen or done.

Do we want this kind of information available?  If we do, to whom -- Google? Facebook? Amazon? The government?  What limits are there?  Privacy policies and terms of service are designed to protect this information from general dissemination.

There is a conflict of interest, however, because most commercial sites want to use such information to target you for advertising or products when you use the sites.  Such sites do not want to give up the use of such information entirely, because it would mean cut off a significant source of their revenue and profit -- advertising or sales.  Once the site has the information, however, when should it be made available beyond the reach of the terms of service to which you agreed?

These are important societal questions deeply embedded in the technology that we use today.  It will not be easy to draw lines here, especially because of the money involved.  More on the money in the final post in this series.

On and Off the Cloud

On the heels of my last column about cloud computing, there is plenty of confirmation that the cloud is here and that some clouds may be dark and stormy.

Platform Wars
A couple of days ago, Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google discussed the "Platform Wars" at D9, the annual All Things Digital conference.  Schmidt referred to four dominant players who have used their distinctive platforms to dominant the web:  Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.  What about Microsoft?  Forget about Microsoft, says Schmidt; it isn't a player on this field.

Store It In My Cloud
This comes close on the heels of Amazon's move to get us to upload our music and other files (with encouragement to buy more from Amazon) onto its "Cloud Drive".  Apple responded with its own cloud storage initiative, named (who would have guessed) iCloud, which debuted on June 6 at the Apple's World-Wide Developers Conference.  It is clear that the platform players are jockeying to get you on their cloud (and tied to content that they sell or make money through advertising).  So the Cloud Wars are heating up too.

It's Security, Stupid!
Now for the dark side.  As discussed in my last column, the "cloud" is really using someone else's computer.  Instead of computing or storing things on your desktop, or your laptop, or your smartphone, you using computers and servers on the Internet and storing information, documents, financial records, music, videos and other data on someone else's computer.  When you use Facebook, you are piling up personal comments, pictures and information on Facebook's servers.  If you play on XBox Live or some other online gaming platform, you are leaving information with the servers for those gaming platforms, whether it is gaming preferences and history or financial information to pay for the service.  Think about the computing that you do on the "cloud" and what you leave behind.  Think about it again when you are prompted by an app on Facebook that requests permission to access your Facebook personal information, friends and other data that you have left behind.  What do you think those apps are doing with that information?  Building you a better cow in Farmville?

It turns out that other people's servers may be no more secure than your own.  Servers for major platforms on the Internet may be even bigger targets than your computer for security breaches.  As the story goes, when bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, said he did it because banks "where the money is".  In cloud computing, big computer servers are where the information is.

Recently we have seen hackers breach Nintendo's servers.  Now comes a more frightening wave.  Computers at major defense contractors have been breached.  Big time defense contractors: Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and L3 Communications.  The report just linked is even grimmer in that it says that prevention of such breaches by serious hackers (who may include foreign governments) is very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.  One weakness:  People.  Servers are attached to networks and networks connect people, and people are the weakest link.  People can be convinced to "leave the door unlocked" and let the bad guys in.

So, cloud computing is here to stay, but be careful, because you may be the weakest link.

Where Are We Going? (Part I): The PC is Dead! (Or Is It?)

All Things Digital ("ATD") is a rather good website for commentary on technology and the business of technology.  It features two Wall Street Journal standouts, Walt Mossberg, who authors the WSJ Personal Technology column/blog, and Kara Swisher, who does the same for BoomTown. A few years back, ATD decided to host a conference about, well ... all things digital.  In early June, this year's conference, D8 rolled around and the opening night featured an expansive Mossberg/Swisher interview of a modern day Lazarus of sorts, Steve Jobs.

In case you have been out of touch, Steve Jobs is legend.  Having co-founded Apple somewhere around the dawn of the personal computer age, Jobs helped steer the company to be one of the only true alternatives to the hegemony of Bill Gates' Microsoft. He left Apple for a while, and then returned when Apple seemed to be foundering.  During this return engagement, Jobs has reshaped Apple and the world of computing yet again, revitalizing Apple's core line of computers, both desktops and laptops, and revolutionizing a somewhat definition-less space loosely called personal computing devices.  A few years back, personal computing devices amounted to not much more than a few smart-phones that were struggling to become smarter and more integrated through wireless connection to the Internet.

Jobs did a flanking maneuver with a personal music player called the iPod.  He built an online store called iTunes and started selling music to fill iPods.  The industry took this as a noble little gesture befitting of Apple's technology wizardry:  a sleek little device to entertain us, but hardly a big threat.  Still, people seemed to like this idea and started buying iPods, filling them with their own music and downloading songs from iTunes.  Soon other things came along, like a new thing called a "podcast" and videos.  Othe companies brought out generic MP3 players.  Microsoft thought that it could compete in this market and launched a player of its own, Zune.

The first iPods were relatively primitive.  (I know, because I still have a second generation Mini, which but for the lack of any battery life, still works.)  By the time that Zune arrived, however, Apple had newer versions of the iPod that were better and fancier and started to do more things, like play video that could be downloaded from iTunes.  The first generation Zune never had a chance. Nowadays, I am told that there is an outstanding new generation Zune that outperforms the iPod in a number of areas.  Unfortunately, not many people care.  Apple's iPod dominates.

This pattern bears watching, because Apple repeats it.  Jobs admits that Apple needed to make much more strategic choices.  Apple is a hardware company that does particularly innovative things with the software it develops for that hardware.  Its computers remain a much smaller part to the market compared to the legion of computers that run Microsoft's Windows operating system.  What Apple does is look for openings in the market where it can excel and innovate.  It has succeeded and, in doing so, has moved the market toward Apple.

Apple brought out the iPhone to take on other smart-phones that were having trouble figuring out how to integrate their functionally with the Internet.  Several generations of iPhones down the line, Apple dominates the creative side of this space, with the rest of the industry still trying to keep up.  It has made this market interesting enough to draw Google into the operating system competition.  Microsoft recently released a new version of its mobile phone operating system, again trying to catch up in this competition.

Apple also brought out an iPod called the "Touch" or "iTouch" that connected to the Internet via WiFi.  Built with many features in common with the iPhone, the iTouch started to capture the attention of younger users who wanted mobile access to the Internet for emailing and social networking, but did not necessarily want to get an iPhone (just yet).

Finally, Jobs unveiled the iPad this year.  The iPad is a tablet computer that appears to be redefining the non-desktop computer sector.  Of course, we still have laptop computers, which thanks to Apple's leadership again, are getting small and lighter, but are capable of providing full-function computing on a par with a desktop computer.  We also have "netbooks", devices that are smaller than a laptop, which connect to the Internet and provide some computing capability, but lack the memory and other features of laptops.  Finally, we have e-readers for electronic books, such as Kindle, Nook, etc.

Building off the iPod, the iPad is a uniquely different computing device.  Through it, Apple definitely has designs on furthering its emergence as a media company.   Apple is making a play for the market held by e-readers like the Kindle.  The iPad also is designed to build on the iTouch and provide more utility as an access point to the web.  The competition has followed Apple's lead by announcing its own tablet computers.

Through all this, Microsoft largely has been missing in action.  It failed to mount any meaningful competition to the iPod.  It has meandered around in the cell-phone operating systems wars without much distinction.  Google's Droid operating system is a more formidable challenge to the iPhone.

Apple recently surpassed Microsoft in market capitalization.  And, Jobs dodged the grim reaper in his bout with liver disease.  So, getting him to sit down and talk on opening night of D8 was huge.

There are significant problems in the forgoing success story, some of which are attributable to Jobs' insistence on doing things the "right" way (his way?).  First, the iPhone has only been available on the ATT network, which, for all its technical synergy with the iPhone, is universally viewed as a lousy network.  Apple will now be selling a lot more iPhones, as the rumors that the iPhone will be available on Verizon next year appear to be confirmed.

Second, and more problematic, Jobs could not get satisfaction out of Adobe over weaknesses in its Flash Player, so neither the iTouch, iPhone or the iPad run Flash Player.  As Flash Player is integral to the operation of many website audio/visual clips, particularly on Google's YouTube, Apple has wonderful devices to reach the Internet, but spotty content once you get there.  No word at this writing on how this standoff will end, but Jobs is asked about it in the interview.

Finally, the newest iPhone model, iPhone4 received bruising criticism for reception problems related to the device itself (not ATT's network).  The New York Times reported that Consumer Reports would not recommending the iPhone4 because of a flaw with its antenna.  The furor dragged down Apple's stock price for a while, but seem to have blown over.

With apologies for the long lead above if you already knew all this stuff, what I want to discuss are comments by Jobs at D8 on the future of the computer and a response from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on the last morning of D8.  Let's clarify terminology first.  The term "PC"seems to be a bit of a sore spot between Jobs and Ballmer.  My take on these interviews is that Jobs uses the term to refer to full size desktop computers generally and to some extent fully functional laptops (with hard drive memory and CD/DVD capabilities).  At one point he says as much to Walt Mossberg, describing himself and Walt "as people from the PC world" and saying that "PCs have taken people like us a long way".  Ballmer seems to respond as if he interpreted the remarks to apply strictly "PCs", i.e. -- computers running Microsoft Windows (or the next OS from Microsoft, which may not be called Windows anything).

Remember that Apple is a hardware manufacturer.  Microsoft is a software company.  Except for the Xbox game system, Microsoft has not really succeeded in developing any significant hardware business; it makes its money on operating systems that are installed in the vast majority of full scale desktop and laptop computers.  So, Ballmer may simply be defensive about Microsoft losing market share, but he comes off sounding like the PC half of those famous Apple Mac-PC ads.  (Ballmer is certainly defensive about a lot of things these days;  listen to his comments about Google and Android and Chrome.  Here is a mash-up putting the Jobs and Ballmer comments side by side in a point-counter point debate.)

Jobs essentially made an analogy that the full scale desktop computer is like a truck:  it has great utility and will continue to have great utility to accomplish the jobs for which we need a full scale computer.  (And, like trucks, there will be some people "driving" a full scale computer when they do not really need one.)  Jobs thinks, however, that we have already entered an era where typical computing needs can be handled by small devices, that there is a paradigm shift under way.

Ballmer made some jokes about "Mac trucks" and offered some backward-looking platitudes about Windows PCs being "mass popularizers", but ultimately conceded that there will be smaller devices that serve different functions.  Jobs, of course, does not say that the iPad is going make the PC obsolete (at least not any time soon), but that new order is coming.

Microsoft is really besieged on several sides by the forces of change.  Google (which Ballmer called a "behemoth", as if Microsoft is somehow the new David to Google's Goliath) is focused on more and more functionally occurring online, with the need for resident operating systems and programs in our personal computers becoming less important.

My take on this is that Ballmer's smugness hides an unease about Microsoft's ability to adapt.  With the desktop computers beginning to wane and Microsoft missing in action on most other fronts, Microsoft faces the prospect of watching is its operating system business for PCs slowly (or rapidly) disappear.

One can only hope the Ballmer and others at Microsoft can read their own corporate history and understand its implication for the future.  After all, what Jobs said embodies and extends the vision that Bill Gates had many years ago when he foresaw the personal computer becoming a part of every day life, empowering people and moving us out of the era of mainframe computer.


Ballmer seems to lack a vision of the future.  His comments are reminiscent of a backward looking discussion last year by Mircosoft's chief strategist, Craig Mundie.  Jobs is not clairvoyant.  He is just a keen observer of what has happened with computer technology and where the future lies.  Historically, as Gates foresaw, computers and computing devices have gotten smaller, more affordable, and have empowered more and more people and have rapidly broken down definitional lines in the process.  The Internet has driven this process even faster by allowing people to do many things online that they used to need a desktop (or mainframe computer) to do.

Interestingly, in September, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano declared the PC business dead in an interview with The Wall Street Journal's Viewpoints.  Remember that IBM invented the PC.  IBM sold its PC business several years ago for a reasonable price. Palmisano went so far as to say that he "could not give [the PC business] away today."

I think that there is little doubt that we will see a growing use of smaller computing "devices", more use of the Internet in place of the desktop and more freedom and power to use this technology in the hands of more and more people.  The desktop will still be around.  Netbooks may or may not survive the advances represented by the iPad.  Our cellphones will get smarter.  We yet may see widespread availability of connectivity through WiFi.  (Google is certainly pushing in this direction.  The major wireless carriers better take notice because their monopolistic pricing structure will be vulnerable to competition for access that is more fairly and properly priced.)  Microsoft's challenge seems to be finding its place in this future.  Jobs is at the crest of the next hill telling us what he sees beyond. Ballmer is still huffing and puffing his way up to get a peak.

Look at the people around you, at work, at home, at leisure.  Increasingly, people are doing many things without a desktop computer (PC or Mac).  Laptops have become more common place, even within offices.  Whether they are using a netbook, a iPhone, a Droid phone, an iPad, an iPod Touch, other similar devices, people are connecting  and computing through the Internet from home or office or places in between.  The Wall Street Journal ran a story recently on the surging sales of portable communication devices, including the iPad, at big box retailer Best Buys.  The article also noted that the iPad was drawing customers away from laptops.
Whether at work, on vacation or at the gym, people are reading email, listening to music, going to websites, linking to their workplace network, making dinner reservations, checking out local movie listings.  I typed part of this column on a laptop at an ACTEC meeting in Pennsylvania.  It is fairly clear that a new paradigm has emerged.  The next part of this series of columns will discuss some of the reasons why the desktop computer and even the traditional laptop computer, while still important, are increasingly secondary in the modern world.


(Disclosure:  The author holds stock in Microsoft, Apple and Google.)