Answer Guy Central

How can US Senators be so unclear about the meaning of the laws they write?

Today Senator Herb Kohl of Wisconsin, who not coincidentally chairs the antitrust subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, asked NBC to explain why certain Olympic events, available on NBCOlympics.com, can only be viewed there after you prove you have a subscription to a pay-TV service.

Really?

Let’s see:

• NBC’s ownership of paid-only television channels to augment their over-the-air broadcast stations was approved by the United States Congress. Congress didn’t think approving that was antitrust
• Not all events can possible be broadcast on the free channels; there just isn’t enough time
• Presumably, Mr. Kohl doesn’t believe that Congress or anyone else should dictate to NBC which programming goes on which channels

So if an event is only available on a paid channel, is it unreasonable to make that event available to on-line viewers only if they have those channels?

The question was rhetorical; “no” is the only answer to choose from.

Do I like that I can’t have everything I want for free? Of course not. But the business person in me wants Congress to keeps their hands off the operation of businesses and the way they manage business change.

And for members of Congress to understand their own jobs.

Hmm . . . maybe I’m just cranky that the Olympics are almost over . . .

Who Wants a Patent? Because they seem to be getting handed out for just about anything.

I’ve long believed that in general software patents are a very bad idea. This week the United States Patents and Trademarks Office set a new record for calling something unique that’s just not anything of the sort.

To start, let me state that I’m not an attorney. That said, I’ve dealt with Intellectual Property for a very long time and successfully defended against a trademark infringement claim when my software Uninstall for Windows was sued by the makers of the program Uninstaller. In fact, I got Uninstaller’s trademark invalidated. It was pretty much a matter of explaining common sense in a calm, rational manner to the USPTO.

So when Facebook received US Patent 7,669,123 this week I was dismayed. Patents and the applications filed for them are supposed to describe something unique, and as much as I believe that software is mostly a representation of an idea rather than a thing and therefore shouldn’t generally be patentable at all, Facebook’s patent for “Dynamically providing a news feed about a user of a social network” doesn’t really even describe software.

Make no mistake: US Patent 7,669,123  describes the use of software, but it doesn’t actually lay out the software being used at all. 7,669,123 also tells what the use of the software will be, but functionally that use can be described very simply:

“We’re going to take information based on a set of criteria that we believe are important to you, decide what’s important, and show (only) that to you“.

You know, kind of like what the editors and staff at a newspaper do. Not New. Not Unique. Not Patentable.

In fairness 7,669,123 automates that process. And if Facebook described the specifics of the algorithm that they use in their application for what has become 7,669,123 then that specific process, if unique, might deserve patent protection. But they haven’t.

I don’t know whether I’m more upset that the USPTO has misunderstood the very idea of what a patent is, or that Facebook, with 7,669,123 in hand, is likely to start suing any and everyone who automates selective informational displays in anything that might be called a “social networking” environment.

Oh: and the very title of the patent application is not descriptive of what the patent does, which should have been enough to get the application squashed out of hand. The process Facebook describes does not “provide a news feed about a user of a social network”. It provides a news feed about the people the user knows.

If you’re at all concerned about this—and you should be—I implore you to contact the Office of Patents and Trademarks to get patent 7,669,123 invalidated. And if you’re MySpace, Twitter, or another social network and you don’t make big noise about this, well, enjoy the next thirteen years in court.

I’m being less social. My Twitter Community has spoken.

As cool a thing as social networking is (or can be), every time you write something you risk rubbing the people who follow you the wrong way. You probably want to avoid the “I’m Eating Breakfast” messages that I’ve joked about, but how close to that standard is it OK to get, in the interest of being social?

I use Foursquare on my Droid. I’ve told you about the service / game / social networking tool before, and I’ve said both here and in conversation that I’m not really sure what its purpose is. The test goes on, but I’ve disabled one of Foursquare’s features.

Foursquare will no longer send my activity to Twitter.

My kids saw everywhere I went, and now they can’t. They tell me that’s a good thing; even my own children just weren’t interested in my moment-to-moment movements and periodic search for free WiFi. Occasionally, I got a funny response on Twitter from accounts that were set up specifically to annoy people who were broadcasting their movements the way I was.

And every now and then a real person would ping me back. But that opportunity for social networking interaction is no more. Ditto my use of AppAware, a program in my Droid that keeps me up on the latest trends in software for Android SmartPhones. I’m still using the software, but it’s no longer telling my Twitterverse when I add or remove software.

Why have I stopped using Twitter integration in AppAware and Foursquare? Because I was losing followers. Simply put, I was talking too much.

I’m not going to rant about the “right” way to do social networking. It’s simply: be genuine and bring value to the discussions you join. But in the quest for using social networking in your business change, keep an eye on what works and what doesn’t . . . and especially on what detracts. It seems that for now, automatic posts from one social networking platform to another may still be in that latter category.

How’d you like to be review site Yelp? Before you answer “you bet!”, consider this blog post from The New York Times.

A real quandary.

Let’s assume that Yelp’s position (“we’re just the place where people say things and so we aren’t responsible for what people say when they come here”) is fair and right and legally correct.

Let’s further assume that in talking to businesses that contact them with problems their sales pitch includes careful wording, such as “we don’t police this stuff for strangers, but we do make calls to verify information on behalf of paying customers as part of our service to them”.

Have they then done anything wrong?

It SOUNDS creepy, but in my opinion they really aren’t doing anything wrong under those very specific circumstances. The problem crops up when their sales people are something other than clear  . . . or when people think they’ve been something other than precise.

Should Yelp and businesses that do things like what Yelp does be responsible for the actions of others? That’s like asking if  your Internet Service Provider should be responsible if you download something illegal. That’s already been more or less decided in Australia, remember?

More to come, I’m sure. Stay tuned . . .

Ahh, Droid. We barely knew ye . . .

This week, Google introduced a version of Google Earth for Android SmartPhones. In large part, I don’t care; Google Earth is very cool, but compared to Google Maps it has limited real-world use.

And Google Earth requires version 2.1 of the Android operating system. Which means that it won’t run on the Droid, which has been available for just over three months.

Aside from being a Droid user and being in sour-grapes mode, maybe you think I shouldn’t care. You’d be wrong. Android is the fastest-growing operating system for SmartPhones, and Google is splintering the market for that operating system, which like Google Earth and the Nexus One is also a Google product.

Operating Systems don’t do very well when they get splintered this way. Just the introduction of viruses that act differently on one version than on another is all the proof you need of that. In fact, be cynical if you like about the Microsofts of the world being after your money, but the real reason you have to eventually upgrade to a new version of Windows  even if you think you don’t need it is because unless you do you’re open to all kinds of security threats.

I sometimes pick on Apple for the heavy-handed way they control the Macintosh OS and iPhone OS, but users of both sure do get consistent behavior, don’t they?

Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” slogan is feeling more and more like a line of . . . nothing. And as a business consultant I understand that they need to make (lots of) money. But to be as involved in the marketing of the Droid as Google was and after such a short period of time leave its users behind as they try to sell more Google-branded phones (the Droid is supported by Motorola, not Google) is just . . . bad. Evil. Wrong.

By the way: while Google Earth officially requires Android 2.1, People who use Android 2.01 can get it to work by going here.

You know . . . assuming there’s no virus.

Who said using computers was easy?

I’ve been a computer geek (umm . . . not really, but close . . . think of me as Leo LaPorte without the bazillion viewers) for a long time. I remember the days when people thought that the little tray that popped out of the front of your computer at the press of a button was a coffee cup holder. No, I’m not kidding.

I go back even further than that, actually; in the old days of MS-DOS the most common system error was one that to get you to acknowledge a problem read “Press Any Key To Continue“. I’ve had people tell me that they couldn’t find the “Any” key on their keyboards. Again, I’m not kidding.

Oh and by the way: Microsoft eventually addressed that problem by changing the message to read “Press a key to Continue”. The result? People have pointed out to me, thinking they were tech-savvy, that they could push keys other than “A”, and things worked just fine.

So I shouldn’t be surprised to see this video? Right?:

It’s the aforementioned Leo LaPorte taking a call on one of his netcast programs this week, as a woman tells him that she can’t connect to her wireless network. And . . . she had no wireless network, because she’s been . . . borrowing someone else’s bandwidth for over a year.

Time for the business moral: please lock down your wireless networks. I’m as egalitarian as anyone and love the idea of sharing, but you’re creating a real security issue if you don’t take care of this properly. You may have a reason to leave your wireless network open, by the way, but the reason can’t be “I just didn’t bother to lock it”. If you need help, The Computer Answer Guy can take care of you. You don’t even need to be local to us. In fact, we’ll talk you through this one for free.

Enjoy Leo. And tell him I said “Hi”.

Something’s gotta give. Something is going to. Business Change isn’t just an idea; it’s become an imperative.

In a world where the health care we provide for people isn’t even good enough for animals, where famous columnists like Nicholas Kristof and economists like Paul Krugman—very different guys with diverse right and left leanings— are stating the same thing, it’s time.

Politically speaking, it’s a hot potato. The number of people you cross by passing health care reform is huge and the number you cross by not doing so is equally high. And not being from California and looking at our left-coast liberal contingency in exactly the stereotypical way that we East Coasters usually do I see the nearly-forty-percent-jump in that group’s health insurance premiums and . . . shrug. But if President Obama fails to get a meaningful health care reform bill passed, and soon, very bad things are going to happen.

Doctors can’t afford to be doctors any more. Remember when you wished you had listened to mom and become one? I do. And I also remember being at a party with a very successful cardiologist over twenty years ago and him complaining that the best and brightest weren’t going to medical school any more. Things haven’t improved.

Be smarter than the US Congress. When things change in your business, have the nerve to do something about it. Watch for Business Change every day, and be fearless about enacting it.

Do you want to hear what I think of Tiger Woods’ apology-heard-round-the-world? I’ll tell you, but let me be clear this is a business change conversation, and not a gossip piece.

If you want to watch the entire speech Tiger gave today as apology for his recent behavior, you can see it here.

Here’s what I think: I don’t care how good a golfer this man is; I can’t look at him any more. I’m not making a moral judgment; Tiger Woods, like anyone, is a human being, and human beings make mistakes. We should all stay out of his personal life, period. Being a celebrity does indeed open you to scrutiny, but nobody needs to know what happens inside Tiger Woods’ home.

My brand-new issue in watching Tiger Woods is that as a superstar celebrity he needs to learn how to speak convincingly. I believe that he believed every word he uttered today, so sincerity isn’t technically in play here. But Tiger Woods gave a thirteen minute speech about the most intimate details of his life—or at least acknowledged them, which couldn’t have been easy—and sounded like a robot. John Kerry would have been President of the United States if he didn’t sound like a block of wood every time he spoke to the American people in 2000. And Senator Kerry’s subject matter on the campaign trail was never as personal as Tiger Woods’ was today.

This applies to you and your business.

In an era of ever-more social networking, where we blog, post details of our lives on Twitter and Facebook, and generally are more “with” people than ever before, it’s imperative that you’re perceived as “real”. Write and speak from the heart. Think hard about open processes and engagement . . . because pretty much everything you do and say is open.

Business Change is about change. Be social. Add value to conversations. Don’t be like Tiger Woods.

The Whining Has Gone Mainstream. Even the Whining Required Whining.

Yesterday, there was a lengthy article in The New York Times about companies that buy patents and then go after companies using the matter covered by those patents for licensing fees. Specifically, the article talked about Intellectual Ventures, a company run by the guy who was in charge of much of the science in Microsoft’s early days.

Steve Lohr, the author of that article, is apparently so passionate about the subject that he needed to write a blog post follow-up this morning. And as blog posts often do, that article reads more like opinion than journalism.

I’m fine with that. Yes, newspapers need to be dispassionate to a point, but in a world of competing 24-hour news channels it’s OK to add opinion (so long as the opinion is kept separate from the news).

So here’s reality from the Answer Guy Central Business Change side of things: Patent Trolls Are OK.

Let’s start by acknowledging something; this issue can be a bit tricky morally, but is way less so when viewed from a business perspective.

If we start with the assumption that lawyers, for all the benefit they are supposed to bring to society, are adding nothing to the GDP or GNP and therefore are “evil”, we see the immediate issue: companies like these patent-hoarders that don’t actually innovate but which benefit from the innovation of others are . . . icky.

On the other hand: these guys bought the patents, either with money or by assigning the right to re-license something. They not only did exactly what the system was designed for (insert additional disparaging-to-attorneys comment here), but they PAID THE INVENTORS.

Nobody would blink an eye at the idea of an inventor selling the rights to something he’d invented to a bigger company. But if you’re an inventor (conjure up mad scientist in a small room image), making those deals is very hard. So the inventors sells to these guys and these guys—bigger, stronger, and well-funded—extract the licensing fees.

There is, in fact, nothing wrong with this. You know, unless there is. But that position is a bit too utopian to play in the real world.

Business is a tough sport. Business Change is even tougher. This is how the game is played.

This week in Barcelona, Spain a conference called Mobile World Congress is happening. The attendees are employees of some of the world’s biggest and most influential companies: AT&T, Apple Computer, Motorola, Google, Microsoft.

Their goal? To consolidate the market for the software that runs on SmartPhones. Summing it up if you’re from Apple, you might say: “there’s an app for that, but only if you use an iPhone”.

So let’s see: Apple, the undisputed leader in the SmartPhone market (but losing share quickly to Android), would like everyone’s software to run on everyone else’s phones? And Microsoft, who have released yet another version of their phone software, is looking to be cooperative with their competitors?

Yeah. This ought to work.

Yesterday, this article in The New York Times explained, correctly, that the market for SmartPhone Apps is fracturing in much the same way that the personal computer fractured. Apple Macintosh sucked off a small portion of the market from Microsoft Windows, Windows became “the standard” in businesses, and it took decades before Macintosh became a worthy competitor, market-wise. Mobile World Congress’ goal is nothing less than to stop that kind of thing from happening again.

Now if only a group of large companies with more to lose from coopetition that they have to gain would cooperate and create  . . . what? A single operating system?

Mobile World Congress has an admirable goal. But it’s unattainable. Large companies don’t make changes of that sort easily. And they sure don’t make them proactively. Verizon and AT&T have just started allowing data-based voice software like Skype to run on their phone networks, after years of fighting to keep them out. They enacted that business change only when they realized they had no choice and were better off doing business with their previous “competitors” than pushing the proverbial rock of refusal up the proverbial hill of “good luck stopping them”.

What’s Apple’s incentive for playing nice with Google and Android, or Microsoft and Windows Phone? Theoretically, being the leader of the pack will look appealing, but not for these guys.

Mobile World Congress is a big waste of time. Which is too bad, because I sure do wish I could run the Answer Guy Central iPhone App on my Droid.