A Beacon of Brilliance

Image via Wikipedia

A lot has been and will continue to be said about Steve Jobs after yesterday’s announcement of his resignation as CEO of Apple. You can read numerous articles about him and perhaps this one is just overly simplistic, but it is afterall my blog.

Steve Jobs started Apple Computer with a high school friend, Steve Wozniak in a garage in 1976.

I first learned about Apple in 1977. I worked for a company which started retail of personal computers in 1978. They were offered an exclusive franchise in the immediate geographic area for the Apple II but thought they had a better understanding of the market and turned it down for a personal computer few would remember. They, like many others failed to see the marketplace vision Apple had and were caught up with bits and bytes rather than what the general consumer would find useful in a computer product. This has been the hallmark of his creativity as Steve Jobs lead Apple resurgence when he was rehired to take the reins of Apple.

In a 1985 interview with Newsweek, Jobs responded with this answer when asked if he felt his company had been taken from him:

To me, Apple exists in the spirit of the people that work there, and the sort of philosophies and purpose by which they go about their business. So if Apple just becomes a place where computers are a commodity item and where the romance is gone, and where people forget that computers are the most incredible invention that man has ever invented, then I’ll feel I have lost Apple. But if I’m a million miles away and all those people still feel those things and they’re still working to make the next great personal computer, then I will feel that my genes are still in there.

I can truly say from my perspective there is no one else on the planet that has the same level of creativity and technical savvy combined with excellent business acumen.

Long live Steve Jobs.

Related articles

• Photos: The Evolution Of Steve Jobs & Apple Products (now100fm.radio.com)
• Steve Wozniak Calls Jobs ‘Best Business Leader of Our Time’ (techland.time.com)

Civil Liberty and the Use of Everyday Technology

What is in the water or the air we breathe these last 10 years? Is it the left over effects of 911?

Why do we seemingly give up liberties as if they don’t matter in the name of increased security or utility company convenience? When I write programs for pharmaceutical, industrial parts tracking or machinery control applications, I do so with the idea in mind of improving efficiency, accuracy or safety. I never have faced the moral dilemma of writing an application which essentially allows 24 x 7 eavesdropping into all of our household activities.

For some, this may seem like paranoia but imagine a government police action that decides to focus on homes in a given area to determine who is home, what appliances they might have on, time of day for those activities and when they might enter the home when no one is there. They might also use the collected data to determine if you are running a business out of the house or if you were home when a crime may have been committed.

Think this isn’t possible or likely? Think again because just like the establishment of the intrusive and sometimes manhandling TSA at airports, this type of wireless monitoring of your home has become a reality. You should watch this video and consider the implications of these new smart meters power companies have installed in many homes throughout the country.

The video does provide resource material you may use to disallow your ‘implied consent’ and unlawful installation of these wireless monitoring devices. This country has laws against wire tapping and the utility companies attempt to explain and justify their unlawful practice through the concept of ‘implied consent’.

Related articles

• | Big Brother 2.0 ~ 10 New Ways That The Govt Will Be Spying On You And Controlling Your Behaviour! (truthaholics.wordpress.com)
• Worldwide Smart Meter Revenue to Surpass US$12 Billion in 2016, ZigBee the Early Technology Leader, Says In-Stat (prweb.com)
• Smart Meters (newsworldwide.wordpress.com)

HP and the Challenge of Change

Hewlett Packard company history may not be interesting to some but often the past can predict the future. Briefly, HP was created by Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard in a one-car garage in Palo Alto California. Hewlett and Packard discussed forming a company in August 1937, which they started as a partnership on January 1, 1939. A flip of a coin decided the order of the name. The Hewlett-Packard Company incorporated in 1947 and became public with an offering in 1957.

From an initial capital investment of $538, their first product was a sound oscillator sold to Walt Disney Studios for use on the soundtrack of Fantasia. During World War II, HP designed and built radio, sonar, radar, nautical, and aviation devices. They grew into the largest producer of electronic testing and measurement equipment. Some of their early test instrument designs are still coveted for electronic circuit measurement and fault diagnosis. As technology evolved they became a major producer of calculators, laser and ink jet printers. They continued to dominate the market place in computers as well. By the end of the 1980s, no other computer company had a broader product offering than HP. HP’s Personal Systems Group (PSG) acquired their chief rival Compaq in 2001. The Compaq brand gave HP a low cost computer strategy that appealed to cost-conscious consumers. The decision to purchase Palm in 2010 and continue on the path of WebOS seemed to signal another strategic change in the handheld market, but the Apple I-Pad along with the smaller but very useful I-Phone was the real game changer.

As large of a company as HP is, when HP CEO Mark Hurd resigned in August of 2010 amongst an ethics scandal, the company altered a strategic course away from its Palm purchase and personal computing hardware when it announced the election of Léo Apotheker as Chief Executive Officer and President. Apotheker, previously served as CEO of SAP. The HP Board also elected Ray Lane, Managing Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, as a new member of the Board and designated him as non-executive Chairman. These decisions changed the marketing direction of HP. Clearly Léo Apotheker came from a software background and Ray Lane formerly served as President and Chief Operating Officer of Oracle Corporation.

Larry Ellison, a close friend of Hurd and CEO of Oracle Corporation, sent an e-mail to the New York Times in August of 2010 saying “the HP Board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple Board fired Steve Jobs many years ago. That decision nearly destroyed Apple and would have if Steve hadn’t come back and saved them. HP had a long list of failed CEOs until they hired Mark who has spent the last five years doing a brilliant job reviving HP to its former greatness”.

This is how an understanding of history demonstrates the course of future events. When HP announced today they are exiting from the personal computer business, based primarily on the changes in consumer interest, you have to look deeper. Another aside in how personal behavior can permanently alter even the largest of companies, a shareholder lawsuit was filed following Hurd’s departure. The suit seeks unspecified damages and changes to HP’s corporate governance. It claims HP lost “significant credibility” due to the controversy and a loss of $9 billion in market capitalization when shares began trading the Monday after Hurd’s resignation. They also argue his severance package could have been significantly smaller if HP’s board fired him for cause.

Just as the mass produced PC opened the doors and forever changed the computer industry over 35 years past, the Apple I-Pad I believe has opened new doors to using a computer envisioned by science fiction.

Those who remember or have seen the reruns of Star Trek in the 1960’s, saw the convenience of tablet computing. Strolling further down memory lane, you may recall several technology breakthroughs even though the present consumer versions make the Star Trek TV show stuff look clunky. Here are a few of those ideas which we see now in no particular order:

    1 – Tablet computers
    2 – GPS location
    3 – Wireless earpiece
    4 – Handheld communicator AKA flip-phone
    5 – Touch screen dedicated displays for navigation control systems
    6 – Video conference communication
    7 – Body image and scanning such as CAT scans and ultrasonic’s

Motorola and others have made a tidy sum of money on the imagination of Gene Roddenberry and now Apple seems to be doing the same with the versatile and useful I-Pad. This along with companies such as Google with their Google Apps has altered the way we think about and use computing technology.

Hewlett Packard’s announcement has created a stock market ripple which is already shaky from continued International negative economic news. The change isn’t being received well considering the financial impact a possible sale of one of their key business divisions.

The real long term question will be how well HP can adapt to the changing market. IBM sold off its hardware PC business called Lenovo to China. Unisys, a company formed after the purchase of UNIVAC by Burroughs Corporation has adapted primarily by becoming an IT services company. Unisys was party to a major corruption investigation in the mid-to-late-1980s. As part of the settlement, all Unisys employees are required to receive annual ethics training. Unisys attracted negative computer community attention in 1994 when it announced it held a patent on the LZW data compression algorithm, used in the common GIF image file format. Digital Equipment Corporation, at one time the second largest computer manufacturer, failed to adapt to the changing market and was purchased by Compaq in the 90′s.

Will HP lick its own market place wounds and continue to be a major technology player? Time will tell.

Related articles

• Hewlett-Packard’s abdication: What hath Apple wrought? (tech.fortune.cnn.com)
• Hewlett-Packard Co. to end mobile businesses (seattlepi.com)
• Hewlett-Packard ditching tablet, smartphone and computer businesses (cosmonavigator.wordpress.com)

Telephone Tech 101

Perhaps with all the technology at our finger tips we’ve lost sight of the basics. At least it would excuse some of the behavior I’ve observed and sometimes become frustrated with when I receive or initiate a simple telephone call. Granted we have many options, cell phone, land line, texting, Voice over IP, etc. but there should be some ground rules understood by all to achieve the desired effect.

First off, what’s the reason for placing a call? Does your call have a purpose? If the telephone has a purpose other than a status symbol maybe we need to look at what frequently happens during a call.

If the party you wish to connect with has voice mail, then leave a message. I found out that many people who use automated dialers don’t realize how they work. When a call is placed and a connection is made to a person’s voice mail, often the voice mail message is short. The caller picks up the phone and doesn’t hear anything because the “please leave a message after the tone”₁ has already been announced and rather than leave a message, the caller is confused and thinks they didn’t connect.

Trust me, you hear nothing on the other end because you have already connected but your delay between placing the call and picking up the phone is too long. Go ahead and leave a message, take the risk, what have you to lose except a few seconds?

Next is my number one frustration with people using a phone. When you place or receive a call stick with the call you started, don’t give me that stuff about, I got another call and need to put you on hold. If the call or the person you talk to is important, then stay with it. People that want to take multiple calls as if the world depended on them answering each call annoy me. I want to reach through the phone and wring their neck. The feeling is your conversation isn’t all that important.  If you can’t let the call slide to voice mail then you don’t understand the  purpose of voice mail. Clearly if the other person is that hard to reach so you just have to take their call, maybe it makes some sense, but really, how often is that the situation?

Aren’t we all acting like puppets or is it that we don’t have enough respect for the person we are currently talking with to complete the conversation?

Here’s a variation of the interrupted phone call. I was in a job interview and while there were two people interviewing me, one of them was text messaging throughout the meeting under the table. Perhaps he thought I wouldn’t notice when he held it under the table. The clincher for me was when he asked me if I could be respectful of others when working in a close team operation. I held back what I really wanted to say which was, you are an absolute inconsiderate jerk, you show up to the scheduled meeting 40+ minutes late, text message while sitting across from me, then have the nerve to ask that type of question. I thought this person doesn’t have a clue as to what respect is all about. I answered politely none the less, ‘I’m very used to working in a close team and can respect the ideas of others.’

I’m sure these thoughts on telephone use and etiquette aren’t universally shared, so what do you think?

Clever telephone answering messages

1. Hi, I’m not currently in this galaxy now but my answering machine is, so talk to it instead. Wait for the beep.

2. You have picked a time when I can’t come to the phone, either pick another random time to call or leave a message so I can call you.

3. Jeeves is off somewhere larking about, I obviously can’t come to the phone but this modern device called an answering machine will faithfully transcribe your message after the tone. Thank you.

4. One of us doesn’t seem to be in the same place at the same time, I think it’s my answering machine’s turn to be here, so go ahead and talk to it instead. Hold for the beep…

5. Well shucks, I’ve been waiting for your call for hours and just when I thought you weren’t going to call, you did. The best I can do is ask you to leave a message for me on this new contraption. You have to wait a moment until it burps or something like that.