Answer Guy Central

Last week I made some noise about how ridiculous Facebook’s US Patent 7,669,123 is, and asked you to make noise too. Now, Our friends at Apple are showing us a real-world here-and-now example of why software shouldn’t be patentable under most circumstances.

Let me be clear, once again: software isn’t “unique” unless it does something that can’t be done some other way. By definition, then, the only time software should therefore “infringe” is when it uses exactly the same code to do exactly the same thing as what the Patents and Trademarks people call “prior art”. Apple, in suing HTC (manufacturer of the Google Nexus One Smartphone), isn’t so much defending its work or intellectual property as an “idea”.

Palm will be next. Motorola (they make the Droid) will get sued too, as will anyone who uses the idea of pinch/spread to zoom/widen. Again . . . Apple’s patent on exactly how to implement “multi-touch” might be unique, but the idea isn’t. The idea can’t be patented. Software patents are ridiculous.

Software patents are a business change that benefits no one except the attorneys who get paid to sue or defend against suits. Don’t fall into this trap. Make your next business change a real change.

Here’s a Business Change you need to think about right now: Are you speaking the same language as your customers? I have opinions about outsourcing to far-flung countries, but today’s context has nothing to do with that.

Today being the first day of the month, we were getting ready to send out the monthly Answer Guy /  Virtual VIP Newsletter. We use a popular email management service to send the newsletter every month, and something was going wrong. I used the vendor’s instant messaging application, got a representative on line in a matter of seconds, and . . . well, I won’t bore you with the details of this friendly-but-ultimately-not-productive customer service / technical support experience.

What’s noteworthy is how badly things can go when communications are something other than careful and precise.

After not being able to solve my problem quickly the customer service representative asked me a question: “Do You Have a Program Called Skype?”

Skype is a way of connecting with people over the Internet. Voice, Video Chat, File Exchange  . . . all free, and all very effective and efficient. Yes, of course I have Skype. It happens that I don’t use it from the computer I was working on, however, and assuming she wanted to watch what I was doing my answer was “Yes, but not on this computer. Give me a moment to Install It“.

But that isn’t what this technical support representative wanted. She was thinking that if I did have Skype, it might be interfering with her company’s software. This sounds unlikely to me, but the point is that she had asked me a question without context, and I had assigned one based on my experience.

I’m not trying to blame her for the mistake. I’m also not taking responsibility for it. We were simply not on the same page at the same time, and she failed to control the issue from her end, while I failed to control it from mine.

Wait a minute: come to think of it, this was her phone call with a frustrated customer: I AM assigning blame. Her company had not trained her in precise communications, and we wasted time, I installed software I didn’t need, etc., etc., etc.

Sometimes Business Change is about making sure change only happens the way you need it to. A simple “Be Careful” fits here!

By the Way: Since we’re talking about it . . .  we’d love it if you would subscribe to Answer Guy / Virtual VIP Changes. Just Fill in this box and click!:

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.