Steve and Steve at WWDC 2010?

Barrons reports that Steve Ballmer may be scheduled to make a guest appearance during Steve Job's keynote at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference on June 7, 2010.  This would be quite a thing, the nature of the announcement is that Microsoft is positioning Visual Studio 2010 as the tool to write native apps for the iPhone and iPad. 

I don't remember the battle for developer mindshare ever having been quite this fierce.  Apple has done a good job over the past few years of turning its developer partners into selling (Go To Market) partners.  If this rumor is true, then Apple will have made a very interesting play to turn Microsoft's development partners into Apple's GTM partners.

I am having a hard time envisioning how this benefits Microsoft.  Sure there will be more VS2010 licenses sold, but VS developers fueling the Apple App Store?  Maybe the carrot of VS built apps easily transferable to become Win Phone 7 Apps is big enough to justify the risk of long term developer partner erosion.  Well, June 7 will definitely be an interesting day.

Maybe Steve B will lift the ban on iPhones on the MS campus!

One Last Post About Facebook

I have found myself promising to stop writing about Facebook lately.  It surely is a tired old rant, and this really is going to be my last blog post on the matter.  After today, you can find Facebook related thoughts on a section of this website called Facebook.  

On that page I intend to chronicle my efforts to find a suitable replacement.

On 5/19 I turned all of my Facebook settings to the most private possible ("Custom>me only").  I was surprised to find today that what appears to be a new category just controlling what outsiders can see of my friends was turned to "everyone".  

I found this by creating a new Facebook account with a fake name so I could see what people outside of my network could see.  On a side note, I picked Ty Webb as my fake name.  Ty Webb is the name of the character Chevy Chase played in Caddyshack.  Can you believe there are over 700 Ty Webbs on Facebook and most of them have pictures that look exactly like Chevy Chase!

If you are a Facebook user I encourage you to go through this exercise.  I found it much more illumnating than the services that tell you what others can or cannot see.

Much to my surprise, I navigated Ty Webb to my Facebook profile and I could see my full list of friends, and could click through to see all of their friends.  In the past Facebook only presented a few friends and you could not click on them at all until that person had accepted you as their friend.

Interesting I thought.  After bolting down my friends (again), I thought I should have some fun with this -- you know -- now that I could see all of Mark Zuckerberg's friends without actually being his friend.  Turns out, Mark is just not very social.  He does in fact have a page, but it is a fan page, and I could not find a Facebook page for Mark.  He has over 500,000 fans -- but no friends.  And I was fool enough to think he would be leading the charge to share the names of his past girlfriends, ex business partners, and current investors and advisors and employees with all of us.  I could not see what web sites he had gone to, what he bought with his credit card, or where he was right now either.  Not a word about what he was working on, who he was having lunch with today.  Turns out Mark Zuckerberg is quite the private person.

Seems strange that he would want everyone else to share their identity information.

What Microsoft Does Best

I find myself thinking two things about Microsoft in the media lately:  1) They just keep missing the consumer mark, and more often 2) Microsoft isn't even in this conversation.

The main obsession these days both inside Microsoft and outside is Apple getting a bigger market cap.  Here is a piece from the Seattle PI on the market cap, and here is a piece from the WSJ about a re-org in the devices division.  Both seem to be about the same subject if you ask me.

I don't know if Microsoft is ever going to get the consumer thing figured out.  Chasing after the others just does not seem to work anymore.  

I do know that Microsoft has everything it needs to dominate in the business market -- from SMB to the Enterprise.  Why can't that be cool enough to be it?

The Score on Facebook

The next week will be very interesting with regards to Facebook.  Here are a few things to watch:

People Quitting Publicly on a special site set up just for this purpose.

Not that any number of quitters will make a difference to Facebook's nearly 500 million total. But this was just 2,000 last week and this is just a sample of the true number of quitters.

People Giving Money to Diaspora on Kickstarter here.

These guys don't have anything going for them except having said they will build a competing system. So far?  $185,000!  (they wanted $10,000)

Later:  Mark Z. posts his response in the Washington Post.  

Decoding Education Reform

The New York Times Magazine published a terrific piece about education reform yesterday. The Unions have so much power that we do not often see clearly articulated arguments like this in the mainstream press.  In case you are new to this fight, here is a quick list of the codes used:

Resources:  The most frequently misappropriated term in the debate is Resources.  To most this implies funding, and we do need to increase school funding.  However, to the unions this means dues.  Since union dues are by headcount the unions want more headcount regardless of the quality.  Smaller class sizes means more headcount.  Clearly there are benefits to smaller class sizes, but all of the studies now show that better teachers are much more important.

Measurement: Next on the hot list is measurement.  Standardized tests do create all kinds of warped behaviors and this needs to be addressed.  In business we know that there is no single good performance measurement, but we also know that things need to be measured -- the more the better and the more the data is shared the better.  The unions not only oppose measurement, but also oppose better data systems that would make it easier to expose performance data.  In most states this opposition has made it hard to track students even crude measurements like grades, activities, and attendance.

Charter Schools:  The NY Times article said it better than I can:  

Charter schools are not always better for children. Across the country many are performing badly. But when run well — as most in Harlem and New York’s other most-challenged communities appear to be — they can make a huge difference in a child’s life. 

The article goes on to do a side by side comparison of a NY charter school that shares a building with a public school.  The charter school spends slightly less than the public school and performs well above.   The customers (parents) have noticed and tens of thousands of students are turned away from charter schools every year because there are not enough charter schools.  

In some states (Washington included) the unions have successful blocked charter schools with targeted legislation. It is an effective way to keep the resources out of the hands of people that can make more efficient use of them.

The Obama administration's $4.3 billion "Race to the Top" contest is changing things fast.  This is a good example of creative government spending using a relatively small amount of money to make a big impact.  In order to be competitive, a state must demonstrate its ability to measure teacher performance and must have charter schools.  This does not make things look very good for Washington State, but it is absolutely the right thing for the country.

The tide is turning now and we are going to start seeing the states that figure it out get way ahead of the states that don't.  This is very good news for our country because fixing our education system is the single biggest thing we need to do to remain competitive and retain our high living standards.

If you are interested in following along, here are two organizations in Washington State that are making a big impact:

League of Education Voters.

Stand for Children.

I wrote a book review about Work Hard: Be Nice -- which follows the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and Teach for America.

Anonymous Sources: The NY Times Encourages Bad Behavior

Is it just me or is the use of unnamed anonymous sources increasing?  I guess it is not so much the fact that their names are withheld, but that the circumstances surrounding their wish for anonymity are freely disclosed and problematic.  The type I find the most disturbing are the direct references to sources who acknowledge breaching other legal agreements to which they have freely entered into.  

Here is an example from today's NY Times:

One person at the Department of Justice, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the situation publicly, said that the...

A person from the Department of Justice no less!  Either the person is authorized or not.  This is not a case where we need a whistle blower inside the Department of Justice.  The subject of the article is Google and it is not even about a conflict inside the Justice Department about how to handle the issue.

Here is a link to the official NY Times policy about anonymous sources.  Where the paper acknowledges that people may be skeptical of anonymous sources:

In any situation when we cite anonymous sources, at least some readers may suspect that the newspaper is being used to convey tainted information or special pleading

True, but a how about the readers who think the NY Times is encouraging people to violate, participating in the violation of, or portraying as acceptable the violation of other legal obligations.

Here is a post to the NY Times Freakonomics Blog about the matter where Ian Ayres exposes the paper's role in the misappropriation of other people's property.

But newspapers routinely grant anonymity to employees who misappropriate employer information. Often times these grants are given to sources who could be legitimately fired or disciplined for violating their fiduciary duty to their employer. The sources who steal — I mean misappropriate — employer information aren’t willing to directly disclose because they know they could be fired for the disclosure.

Here is a post to the NY Times Bits blog where a source is quoted in violation of a non disclosure agreement.

A senior editor of a major magazine publishing empire working on an internal corporate project, and speaking on the condition of anonymity because of a nondisclosure agreement, told me...

Sure, the non disclosure agreement may have said that you can disclose this sensitive and proprietary information to the press but just not with your name attached, but I have never seen an NDA like that.  

Here is a post from the NY Times public editor about this from a year ago.  There is no mention of this business of encouraging people to break other legal agreements where there is clearly no societal greater good to be gained.

The New York Times and other leading papers should stop this practice.  Not only is the Times turning itself into a publisher of press releases by doing so, but they are reinforcing a growing societal norm that fiduciary responsibility or non disclosure agreements have no weight or meaning.

Could Hollywood Go Direct?

The Wall Street Journal reported today that the Hollywood studios are considering releasing movies to home viewers as early as 30 days after their theater release instead of the customary four months.

This is very likely a good step forward for an industry that has struggled to address the changing nature of its market.

This is very unlikely to be a good thing for the owners of the movie theaters.  These partners of the studios could suffer a significant drop in their business volume at the same time that the studios could gain an increase.  

So should  the studios do it?  What would happen to the movie industry if a whole bunch of movie theaters go out of business?

Turn the Key and it Works

Earlier this year I rented this Camaro and drove up the coast between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay.  I never thought for a moment that I would have trouble making the car work.  I just knew that when I turned the key it would work. Many of you know that I also drive around a world war II era tug boat from time to time.  Aside from a few old timers, I am literally the only person that can make the thing go (and it takes about 30 minutes and 30 steps just to get it going).

Which one of these experiences is your computer and which is your cell phone?  After countless rejections from my kids, I have now stopped offering to teach them about their computers.  When they have a problem I just fix it for them and most times I do so without crabbing about the fact that they won't let me teach them how it works.  They just expect it to work -- and they should.  Computers have been around for long enough now that we should be able to turn the key and they should just work.  Unfortunately, computers are not getting easier to use.  Every advancement in capabilities is accompanied by a greater increase in complexity and we continue to lose ground.  

When you add in the fact that most customers have zero interest in becoming a computer mechanic -- and we have trouble in the making.

So who is going to win?

• Smart Phones: Easy to use - have you ever read the manual?
• Fastest Path to a Browser: Except for the whole Flash thing, this is my iPad -- always on and zero brain damage.
• Anything managed by professionals somewhere else: IT in the cloud.

People who are betting their careers on the PC should spend more time figuring out how to just make them work.

Here is how Steve Jobs thinks about this.  He is still the most impressive CEO in the business.

Should Google Add Some Polish?

Yesterday on This Week in Google, Leo Laporte and his tech friends were reviewing the first day of Google i/o.  The TWIG panel recounted how over 5,000 developers showed up and overwhelmed the event (and the WiFi -- which is pretty funny for a cloud company), and how the content of the event was dense even for its target audience of developers, and how there seemed to be a significant lack of coordination as Google blog posts were going live during the keynote that had no correlation to the keynote messaging.

It was at this point the Leo said all of this rough around the edges stuff was good because a Google with too much polish would be scary.  Forgive the very loose (not direct quote) account here.  Please do listen to the podcast if you want the actual dialog.

This brings up a very interesting idea in marketing.  There is a continuum that spans from accessible and not polished to not-accessible and very polished.  Google seems to be taking up residence on the accessible end and Apple on the other end.  Where do you position your company?  I would argue that trust is highly correlated to accessibility and that if you want your customers to trust you -- don't get too polished.

Google Enterprise Keeping Score

There has been a good deal of press and even more talk about Google taking on Microsoft in the Enterprise.  Last week Google made a post to its Enterprise blog about a channel partner that left the Microsoft channel program in favor of the Google Apps channel program.  In fact the post is guest written by the company doing the switching.  Clearly the chance to be featured on the Google Enterprise Blog is big for a young small company.

The most dangerous part of this to Microsoft is that Microsoft will not even notice.  The partner in question probably does not even show up on Microsoft's radar.  

Losing a partner to the competition, no matter how small, is a problem.  Losing a partner that specializes in migrating to Google Apps and Amazon Services is a problem.  Google is chipping away at the edges of Microsoft's channel partner relationships.

Google i/o starts today in SFO.  So I suspect we are going to see a bunch of stuff like this during the week.

Truth in Banker Speak

The advertising industry has benefited significantly from Bank of America's ad budget.  It is hard to imagine a human in North America that does not know about Bank of America's 1.5 trillion dollar pledge.  

I have to wonder if anyone is going to track what this means or if they do it.  

Here is a link to a page on the B of A website with a April 28, 2008 transcript of remarks at the Federal Reserve Public Hearing on the proposed merger between Bank of America and Countrywide Financial Corporation where Liam McGee, President, Global Consumer & Small Business Banking, Andrew Plepler, President, Bank of America Charitable Foundation, and Janet Lamkin, California State President outlined their intentions. 

It is a little long, with each of the three of them taking turns saying the same thing over and over.  Here are the basic details quoted from Liam McGee's part of the transcript:

I am proud to announce Bank of America’s new, and unprecedented, 10-year goal of $1.5 trillion for community development lending and investments. This is the largest community development goal ever by any company in America. In coming years, this goal is certain to enhance quality of life for millions of Americans in need, by:

• helping finance construction of affordable housing throughout the nation,

• providing loans and other needed capital to small businesses,

• supplying consumer loans, including housing finance, for low- and moderate-income and minority borrowers, and

• financing economic development for communities in need.

In addition, our Charitable Foundation is raising its philanthropic giving goal from $1.5 billion to $2 billion over 10 years. This is the most ambitious long-term corporate philanthropic goal ever announced by any company. We are setting this goal despite uncertain economic times.

I am glad that B of A has made a large commitment to community development.  This list however is just a list of things that bankers do.  So the advertisements saying that Bank of America is giving 1.5 trillion dollars back to the community are a little misleading.

Even so, a search on the B of A website for press releases about community reinvestment produced this from November of 2009:  (dramatic music here) 1 billion dollars!  Some simple math tells us that a 10 year campaign starting in April of 2008 is 20 months into its 120 month life or 16% complete.  I am pretty sure that 1.5 trillion is 1,500 billions.  So 1 billion is .067% of goal.  It appears that Bank of America is REALLY going to have to get after this in the remaining 100 months.

Has anyone seen any news items digging into this?  According to CNNMoney we have given B of A 15 billion dollars in bail out money.  

Even with the diminished capacity of the newspapers to do investigative work, this has got to be worth looking in to.

Physics, Nature, and the Rule of the Mob

Life is governed by the laws of physics, the laws of nature, and the rule of the mob.  Physics is "what goes up must come down". I don't know what the laws of nature are, but we say they have been violated when we see something really disturbing, so I am sure they are useful. And the rule of the mob is about to take down two companies we thought were invincible just a few months ago:  Goldman Sachs and Facebook.

There are undoubtedly books on the rule of the mob and I have not read any of them.  My description goes like this:  when a person or an organization gets to the top of the heap, it has to spend so much energy just staying at the top of the heap, that it cannot stay on the top of the heap any longer.  The timing of the process is highly variable, but the faster one gets to the top of the heap the more likely the mob will vigorously pursue a change in the hierarchy.  

Goldman Sachs got there slowly and stayed at the top for a very long time.  Most of us cannot even remember a time that Goldman was not at the top.  SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro was quoted in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday saying "If we don't get serious about this process, we may cease to exist." Goldman may own parts of the government, but this kind of resolve will be hard to overcome.  Who would you pick for longevity, the SEC or Goldman Sachs.  I go with the SEC.

Facebook blew past 300 million users to its current 500 million or so and its founder has turned down hundreds of millions of dollars to keep running it.  The tide is turning however and it is now cooler to quit Facebook than to use it.  The tech community turned against Facebook several weeks ago, and the rest of the mob will likely defect in the weeks ahead.  In fact there is a web site dedicated to this movement called Quit Facebook Day.

One interesting element to these actions by the mob is the lack of viable alternatives.  Goldman Sachs is probably not any more evil than any of the other firms on Wall Street.  Their unique crime is that they are just so good at taking their client's money.  Clearly market demand for a system we can use to organize our relationships on the web has driven Facebook to its current heights.  No clear successor has presented itself, although the mob is putting some weight behind the Diaspora Project, but four kids with an idea does not a viable alternative make.

If you are Mark Zuckerberg, or Lloyd Blankfein, you can be comforted to know that the crowd will only take you down a few notches and probably not out of the picture all together.  After all, your predecessors put you in good company.  Firms like Standard Oil, IBM, and Microsoft all fell victim to the mob.

Funny, my spell checker wants to replace "Zuckerberg" with "Boodsucker" -- even spellcheck has turned against him!

-image courtesy of www.thefirstreporter.com

 LATER:  NYT post from Friday about how the Web itself is a social network.

Facebook is Amway 2.0

Mark Zukerberg is the next Richard DeVos.  We know history repeats itself, and as we are seeing it right now as Facebook becomes Amway 2.0.  Both organizations provide tools to aspiring networkers, focus on counting things, and work to monetize the relationships to the maximum degree possible.

Aspiring Networkers

Both Amway and Facebook provide the tools and encouragement to build a network of friends.  Quantity of friends is more important that quality, and no attempt is made to value one friend more than another.  There are no best friends on Facebook or in Amway. 

Count Your Friends

Once in Amway you are encouraged to produce a list of your friends so you have a place to start building your network.  You are coached as to how to approach your friends, and suggestions are made about friends of friends.  The objective is to get as many friends into the network as possible.

We Make it Easy for You

Once you get enough friends into the network, you can work to sell things to them, or work to get them to sell things.  You can be a big success even if your friends don’t buy anything – as long as your friends of fiends do.

So the next time someone asks you to lunch to discuss a new “business opportunity”, make sure to ask:  is this Facebook?

All of this is not necessarily bad for Mark Zuckerberg.  After all, Richard DaVos owns a really big boat and the Orlando Magic.

Later:  Here is a good post by Robert Scoble about what Facebook should do.

Know Your Place and Your Responsibilities

A few years ago I took a trip to India.  I was fortunate to meet many of the leaders of the business community in the capital city of New Delhi.  Like many people from the US I found myself in surrounded by people educated much better than I was, and I was prepared for that.  

I was not prepared for the widespread accepance by the elites that the good of the nation was more important than the good of any individual family dynasty.  Sure, they may have just been saying this, but there was some evidence to support it.  You may recall that just a couple of decades ago there were state protected monopolies in India for oil, cars, and just about every other major market.  These were owned by families and as we learned in Econ 101, protected monopolies are not efficient.  Somehow these powerful individual interests were put asside at what must have been an unnerving threat of financial risk to the people in power in exchange for an uncertain payoff as the Indian economy entered the open  world markets.

Now surely these families were seeking any advantage they could secure as they crossed the chasm.  But even so it was a show of defference to the greater good that we could learn from.  While in India the evidence of the caste system is one of the things that you just cannot avoid thinking about.  Being from the US, I do not believe the caste system will bring benefits to India.  I cannot help but marvel at the way the worlds largest democracy incorporates this complex history in a way that may just work.  

This past week I was fortunate to be part of a conversation at Mark Anderson's Fire conference about alternative energy.  Mark has done an amazing job with Fire and he continues to push the people attending to think of new things about how the future could be.  A few years ago he started the CTO challenge.  He assembles the CTOs at the conference into a team and challenges them to think hard about a big problem.  Not unlike a code-a-thon, this 48 hour effort is not expected to solve everything, but to apply a burst of creativity and concentrated energy with the hope of advancing the ball down field a bit.

This year the challenge was to think deeply about how to scale alternative energy.  Many ideas were presented, and along the way it was just assumed that any viable ideas must steer around the vested interests of coal and oil because those elites would never give up their singular pursuit of their best interests (or give up their lobbiests).  

At that moment it struck me that just maybe the responsibility the elites in India feel a for the best interest of their nation comes from the caste system.  Could it be that a horrible construct that condemns people to their place for generations also conveys a responsibility to the people at the top to do the right thing?  

Clouds on the Horizon

Today I am in Los Angeles attending Mark Anderson's Future in Review conference - aka "FiRe".  I have attended this conference several times and it is always my favorite conference of the year.  Like many conferences is it a great way to meet new and interesting people.  This conference is different however because the subject of the future is quite broad and Mark does an amazing job of packing the agenda with a wide variety of subjects -- and all expertly presented in a No PowerPoint zone.  

We are half way through the event and I have a good ten pages of notes. It will take a while for me to distill all of this thinking into blog posts, but until then here are some initial thoughts:

There has been a good deal of discussion about how Cloud Computing will impact the world and how cloudy our future looks when considering the dislocating effects of energy and climate issues.

Energy:  Half the world does not have electricity.  Right now the worldwide production of electricity is 13 trillion watts -- most electricity is created from coal, and we have 2,000 years of coal reserves on hand. Do we make electricity more expensive (to discourage use and reduce carbon footprint) and in the process deny even more of the world population the benefits of electrification, or do we reduce the cost of electricity, deliver it to more people, but figure out how to produce it without such a large impact on the environment.  We need 28 trillion watts of innovation by 2050.  

Ray Ozzie:  It was around the tech world in 45 minutes in a conversation between Mark Anderson and Ray Ozzie that hit at least 20 topics.  Some of the points were:  

On creative destruction:  The amount of money in the system may just drop in the near term. The consumer will pay less, new revenues will be created (later).

• On the shift to consumer (from enterprise): The more there is a consumer buyer of technology the more costly it will be for the enterprise.  This is both in terms of exception management and security. Any CIO should have a very clear view of threat model.  The insider threat included.
• On the Cloud: The cloud = developer sit down, worry about coding - that is it!
• On Privacy and Facebook: Facebook has a lot of momentum.  We as a society have never had to deal with privacy issues on the scale that we have.  We have business models that are fundamentally attached to intent and matching that with advertising.  It is very difficult to cope with.  Facebook is doing us a great service by pushing the envelope so much.

People, Learning and the Role of the Institution:  The core of most organizations is failing and the value is at the edge.  Return on Assets is trending to zero (because we do not know how to value the right things).  The cloud provides power tools for the edge. The edges collide and become centers with power tools and social tools. The edge pulls the core to the edge. There is deep thought going into how these networks are put together. The greatest innovation into how these communities are structured is happening in India and China. How can it be governed?  It is not always about technology.

I will be sending out updates on Twitter @jcleon.  Or follow the tag: #Fire2010.

Eliminating Waste in the Sales Processes

Salespeople go through training to learn how to handle/manage rejection which emphasizes how the process of selling is not only wasteful, but intentionally so.  Salespeople are expected to not close a large percentage of prospects.  This is why the weekday movie matinee is called the salesman's special.  Clever salespeople, or those without much motivation or poorly designed compensation plans, make a habit of picking the deals they are not going to close in advance and avoid spending time on them.

It is no wonder there is animosity between the engineers that make the products and the the salespeople that sell them.  The engineers are grinding out the products and the salespeople are overpaid to go to the movies.  Clearly this is sufficient motivation for the engineers to rebel and it is happening right before our eyes.

Google and Amazon and Apple and others have built their companies on the premise that sufficiently well engineered products don't need any salespeople at all.

CRM and SFA have not done much to address the issue.  In fact after 20 years of these revolutions spending on sales and marketing as a percentage of sales has not declined (gotten more efficient) at all.

Unless sales as a profession can come up with process improvements to match the productivity gains in the rest of the economy it could be at risk of wholesale replacement.   

Comdex is Back

Everything Channel purchased the company that owned the Comdex brand in 2006 and has just this year launched plans to bring back what was at one time the biggest technology trade show on earth.  Believe it or not it probably never made it into the top ten largest trade shows of all time with Auto, Book, and Agribusiness tradeshows dominating the top 10.

But this is a legacy brand with a new twist:  The show is going virtual.  In an refracting irony suitable for the hall of mirrors, Comdex will be reborn in a virtual Las Vegas -- where there are physical replicas of New York and Paris!  Yow!  We can now go to Virtual Comdex and see virtual renditions of New York and Paris set in a virtual Las Vegas, all without leaving the comfort of our desks.

With this many layers of virtualization, I wonder if I have to worry about getting back safely.  

All histrionics aside, we all should applaud Everything Channel for bringing back this great event while at the same time pushing us into a new experience.  We will be there -- and I hope you will be too.

Facebook Blocks Out the Sun

Here is an amazing graphic that shows how Facebook's privacy settings have changed since 2005.  I would say it was day in 2005 and closing in on night now -- who knows what is next.  

There is no shortage to people giving the thumbs down to Facebook these days -- we just may be at the inflection point where something else takes the stage. I have been following the tech pundits/journalists and most of them seem to be souring on Facebook:   Leo Laporte, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis, Steve Gillmore, and their peers all seem to be giving the Facebook "like" idea a thumbs down.  

So, what next?  Even Mark Pincus is turning away -- and he (Zynga) has benefited from Facebook more than anyone other than Zuck himself!

Could it be time to start taking back identity management with a service like ClaimID?

Context is Important

Even though I think that search is just getting started and that a new Google could come along any day, I do regularly have a very satisfying experience with search on Google maps.  After I broke my glasses the other day I need an optometrist close enough to the office that I could do the whole thing in about an hour. I searched for "Optometrist Bellevue", clicked on the map, and immediately had a visual display of options near my office.  As I moved the map around, say I changed my mind and wanted Seattle instead, the search results updated to give me options in the viewable area of the map.  This is good stuff.  Not long ago I would have been looking at list of all of the Bellevue's in the country...

This brings up the importance of context.  Of course this is a simple example and geographic context is the easiest to visualize and make happen.  Facebook is busy building a context system for human identity and relationships and that will prove to be a little trickier.  There are also people working to create context systems in the news.  News is only interesting when taking in context -- and news context is both subjective and illusive.  The Greek debt story in the NY Times today is indecipherable without the proper context and the context around monetary policy in the European Union is more than can be captured in Wikipedia - even though the entry in Wikipedia on the European Union is quite good.

Wouldn't it be cool if we had a simple way to present the sweeping context that surrounds every story so that we are following today?  Each story adds to the context and makes each new story more interesting and more valuable.  I like things presented in timelines, and Wikipedia does that -- but it is not terribly readable.

There was a panel discussion in Austin at SXSW this year that brought this conversation up a few levels and as a result a discussion is forming around the web site the Future of Context.

This is going to be a very interesting topic to follow.

HP Hires - and hires

Mark Hurd has been very busy remaking HP.  Just put "HP Hires" into a search engine and you will get the picture.  Here are a few that I think are the most interesting:

Bill Veghte:  Long time Microsoft veteran and the guy that got Windows 7 back on track after Vista.  He left in January.

Richard Gerstein:  From Sears -- where he was the top marketing guy in charge of the brand.  at HP he will be the top guy in charge of marketing at the Personal Systems Group.

Mark Stephenson:  From Cisco.  Let's watch for the lawsuits on this one.

Add to this all of the talent from the Palm deal and you have a serious make over underway.