When pre-ordering/reservation time came for the iPhone 4, I happened to be at the Mall of America (MOA) Apple store. After an hour of attempting to consummate my order, I gave up thinking I’d try again later that afternoon when I had to return to MOA.

My daughter snagged one as did I that day. My wife was traveling and I ended up ordering one online for her a few days later. When iPhone launch day came I was able to get my pre-order and buy a second phone activated for my wife. Thinking I still had one on order for her—and we’d get that one and activate it for my son—I was dumbfounded to get an email forward from my wife today within which Apple stated there was a problem and they couldn’t ship and to call AT&T.

AT&T was clueless on how to help since the phone number attached to the incoming iPhone was the same as my wife’s…and you know Apple is trying to restrict the gray market or people buying multiple phones and that’s why it was cancelled.

Being reasonable, an Apple fanboy, someone who owns far too many Apple products and once worked for the company, I figured it would be trivial to change the phone number on the order and have that device be “attached” to my son’s phone number.

Not a snowball’s chance in Hades my friend.

After half an hour on the phone with Apple customer service, the “contract” I “agreed to when pre-ordering” was “non-transferable”, even though *I* am the primary account holder for all four of our family iPhones, my son is a minor (without a credit card so I’d have to order for him anyway) and that I could give them whatever they required to switch just the phone number.

Basically telling me to go pound sand, the order was cancelled. So rather than get his new iPhone 4 on July 14th, he’s back in the queue for an August 3rd delivery. I understand that Apple can’t make exceptions when selling/activating millions of devices, but this seemed so easy to do that the end result is me pissed off and my son one sad little guy.

Thanks Apple.

“Today Adobe ran a full-page ad in various newspapers articulating key company beliefs, and company founders John Warnock & Chuck Geschke–whose PostScript innovations were instrumental in the adoption of the Macintosh & desktop publishing–posted their thoughts on open markets & open competition:

Adobe’s business philosophy is based on a premise that, in an open market, the best products will win in the end — and the best way to compete is to create the best technology and innovate faster than your competitors.

John continues on in his post talking about why he loves Apple, how he wants to “…build the most amazing iPad imaging apps the world has ever seen” but “who will decide” if he can get them accepted in the Apple App store? He then goes on to pontificate about innovating, the good of competition, and that his reader should care about this debate, “…because these issues affect your choices as a customer & a creative person.“

No they don’t.

At its core, this entire Flash/no-Flash debate isn’t about “consumer choice” or “open”. This debate/issue is about power and control. Adobe doesn’t give a sh*t about “open” any more than Apple or any other tech company does — unless it’s about tapping into the ecosystem for fun and profit — and if they did care about my choices as a consumer and creative:

• Adobe wouldn’t have essentially made Mac users second-class citizens for years from the late 1990s through mid-2000s
• The Flash experience on the Mac wouldn’t have sucked for just as long (see my post, “Adobe Flash Roasts My ‘Chestnuts’ w/50% CPU Use“)
• Adobe would produce non-developer creative tools to output in Flash (and Adobe folks, don’t argue that point since Adobe doesn’t have any even remotely worthwhile). Where’s the power user Flex?

Adobe controls the value chain of creation-to-output for Flash. Yes, Adobe has tried to appease the developer ecosystem with quasi “open” aspects to the Flash runtime container and tossing ActionScript into the mix, but 90% of the value chain is owned and controlled by Adobe. If I was Steve Jobs, I’d be pushing for open too (and don’t give me the “H.264 licensing” arguments since this no-Flash stance by Apple is likely due to Flash app delivery…not video).

It’s not just Adobe either. If you were an adult and alive in the 1990s (and paying any attention to the personal computer industry) then you couldn’t miss Microsoft’s “good for the consumer” and “consumer choice” moves to crush Netscape by bundling Internet Explorer in to Windows, hiding aspects of their API’s from developers (so their stuff ran better and faster) and Adobe just happened to not bother to be in that Microsoft-control-debate, did they? Where were Warnock and Geschke when Netscape was being killed? Oh yeah…they were ensuring all Adobe apps were optimized for Microsoft and reallocating Mac development resources to Windows-centric development.

So here’s the bottom line: Adobe put most of their eggs in the Microsoft basket and didn’t support Apple when they needed it most back in the late 1990s through about 2005. Apple’s iPhone (despite no Flash) is the fastest rampup in sales of any consumer electronics product ever produced. The iPad is exploding in sales and — unlike Adobe’s chosen BFF Microsoft and their weak selling WinXP Tablet PC — realizes what a colossal mistake they made and now have zero shot and positioning their creative value chain for the next phase of computing, mobile (and I, as many have said, don’t miss Flash AT ALL on my iPad).

So what is Adobe doing? Crying to the Federal government, taking out an ad in the Washington Post and NYTimes (why not a Bay area paper?) and starting that “Why Flash is all about Consumer Choice” ad campaign (being a martyr isn’t a good strategy).

Too many people are on both sides of this debate for a martyr strategy to work (and rally the masses to put pressure on Apple….like THAT would work). Plus, it doesn’t seem real innovative, does it?

I worked for Apple in the late 1990s after Steve Jobs had returned to the company. In presentations, sales calls and even at family events, I was in MAJOR DEFENSIVE MODE at all times since I was frequently bombarded by negativity from customers, prospects, family and friends. “Apple is about out of business,” was a familiar refrain as was “Borsch…you’re just a Mac fanboy” from my I.T., Windows machine toting friends and relatives. I was even given crap about owning so much of the stock (which, believe me, I’m damn glad I kept!!) and have felt vindicated as those same people have now flocked to Apple computers and “iStuff” in droves. Many rely on me for advice and assistance as well, but the irony of their previous attitudes are lost on them.

The success of the iPod, and Apple’s quick cornering of the market for music downloads, began to cause angst amongst record executives who saw not a savior of their failing business model, but a company now positioning them for success in a digital world.

Exactly the same thing is happening now with the iPhone and the iPad and Apple’s insistence on no Flash and controlling how the applications are developed and deployed on these devices. The iPhone (according to Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker) had the fastest rampup in sales of any consumer device….ever. It appears that the iPad’s 1 million in sales in 28 days (which Steve Jobs said, “One million iPads in 28 days—that’s less than half of the 74 days it took to achieve this milestone with iPhone.“) may make it the fastest ramping product ever.

I’ve read many of the arguments for-and-against the closed nature of the “iApp” marketplace and am not going to delve into that in this post, but all of the recent brouhaha about Apple’s “no Flash in iStuff” policy and their supposed “stranglehold on tools to develop iApps” is an example of the concern of success and Apple’s incredible strategic thinking about the marketplace, technology landscape, and anticipating the direction we’re all moving towards and innovating with devices we’ll need to make that journey more effective.

Here are three examples of the angst about Apple’s success:

1) When I see Adobe’s CEO present his “no Flash?” position in this choreographed interview with the Wall Street Journal and following it up with an alleged prodding of the FTC to investigate Apple’s developer policies in an antitrust investigation, I’m embarrassed for Adobe and stunned by their inability to focus on competing, leveraging the power of their customer base (which I’m in, by the way) and find ways to strategically position themselves in the milieu that is content creation. After all, they are THE company in the content creation space and seeing them act like a bunch of crybabies (“Mommy…Stevie won’t let us play in his sandbox!“) is beneath them and John Warnock and Charles Geschske, the two men who founded the company in 1982. It’s no wonder their original lack of support for Jobs when he came back is now coming back to haunt them.

2) Publisher, event producer and pundit Tim O’Reilly said this about Apple in his State of the Internet Operating System: “A few years ago, everyone thought that the big industry showdown was between Microsoft and Google. Now, Apple is the company to beat. With over 185,000 applications, the iPhone app store is creating a new information and services marketplace to rival the web itself. While Apple doesn’t provide Amazon-like cloud hosting services, they don’t have to. iPhone apps don’t live on the web per se, though most of them, apart from local games, do rely on internet-based services.“

Techcrunch focused on the Apple portion in a post entitled, “Tim O’Reilly: Steve Jobs Is Trying To Build A Fundamental Challenge To The Web” which says in part, “Apple, he says, “has a vision of world domination”, and that with the App Store platform Steve Jobs is trying to build a fundamental challenge to the web. But it falls short in one key area: O’Reilly believes that Apple doesn’t understand the importance of web-based services, as evidenced by its decision to make its (somewhat lackluster) MobileMe service premium, with little in the way of a social graph.“

While I respect O’Reilly and think he’s one of the deepest thinkers in technology, he suffers from what we all suffer from: now knowing the strategic plans Apple has, as an example, for the $1B data center they’re building in North Carolina or any other plans they have for follow-on products this year (which were alluded to on Apple’s recent earnings call by COO Tim Cook when forecasting “softer gross margins” this year due to new products in the pipeline).

3) Tim Bray, a leader in defining the internet, had this to say about Apple’s closed “iDevices”:

“The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it.”

The kicker? Bray is an evangelist for Google’s Android operating system.

I don’t have time today to go much deeper than this in to what I see as an ongoing bashing of a company that was on the brink of collapse and came back through a clear vision, unbelievable innovation and strategies that have been years in the making. I understand your fear of power and control — I had it too with Microsoft’s desktop control and have it now with Comcast and Google — but understand that any success comes from vision, innovation and execution (and maybe a little luck) so whining, crying and lamenting another company’s power and control has no meaning.

Craft your own vision, compete and execute.

I’ve been following oil geeks at The Oil Drum for some time, and while they clearly give solid and deep analysis of all the current data and conjecture in the oil industry, it’s this “Crash Course 17A-Peak Oil” video by Chris Martenson (from his Crash Course on economics) that I’ve embedded below and is one that will give you a very concise snapshot of where we are in the world with respect to peak oil.

Having learned more than I ever wanted to know about the looming fate of us all in a world soon hungry for energy, I gave up a 34mpg Mercedes diesel in favor of a Toyota Prius — one I routinely get 48mpg in as an average — since I can see strategically that the world’s dependence on a finite resource is accelerating while that resource is dwindling and getting more expensive to deliver. Not a pretty combination. It’s also why I’ll be buying a plug-in hybrid in the next year or two when I find one that fits my strategic and tactical needs for transportation. Gas prices in the next two years will only go one way….up.

Bottom line? If you’re not thinking about your business and personal life in a world with shrinking energy reserves, then you’re not paying attention and need to be….now.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwNgNyiXPLk

There is no question that the iPad packs a lot of promise in to its small form factor. Already I’ve done liveblogging with it on another site I run (here at Minnov8: http://minnov8.com/mhta2010/) but doing serious blogging on the iPad is still an exercise in frustration. I’m writing this post in Blogpress Pro on my iPad using an Apple Bluetooth keyboard (since long-form text editing isn’t a joy with the built-in keyboard!).

DEALKILLER #1: NO HYPERLINKING or TEXT EDITING
Notice that I had to type out the hyperlink instead of using the app “Blogpress” for the iPad? It’s because it — and the WordPress app now optimized for iPad — are unable to enable easy entering of hyperlinks. Huh? Aren’t hyperlinks “Web 101″ and something at its most basic core? Yep.

I’ve interacted with a guy named from the WordPress team who developed the iPhone version and modified it for the iPad. Seems like a great guy (Chris Boyd @chrisboyddotnet on Twitter) and says both image editing (in Blogpress but missing in WordPress for anything but posting at the bottom of a post) and hyperlinking is being taken in to consideration.

Add to that no bolding, italics or other uses (though I might experiment to see if adding HTML code might do the trick like bolding these words)

DEALKILLER #2: NO REMOTE SAVING/LIMITED FEATURES
The other frustration is an inability to remotely save posts (so I can do a workaround by firing up Safari and finish editing within the web interface). Remote saving would fix that.

Blogpress Pro was $2.99 and is what I’m using to write this post. Of course, I can’t add a thumbnail (used on my homepage) or any custom fields nor can I hyperlink. I’m taking a risk by seeing if the image I placed within this post looks good or not (used Photogene on the iPad to modify it) and then I’ll turn to my main MacPro to add the thumbnail and so on.

DEALKILLER #3: NO HTTPS
When I’m on-the-go and need to access my WordPress backends I *always* login with https in order to ensure my username/password combo isn’t flying through a coffee shop’s Wifi connection exposed for snagging by some unscrupulous packet sniffer running on a geeks laptop.

It’s this sort of productivity stuff that is somewhat missing from the iPad *or* it takes a bunch of new steps most of us don’t yet know. With text editors for coders/developers out and coming out, easy ways to access remote servers (e.g., Box.net, iDisk for MobileMe, lots of built-in FTP capability in apps) I can see that it will become second nature to use our iPad’s for content creation at some point, but it’s just not yet there.

UPDATE: Blogpress posted via Twitter to THE WRONG ACCOUNT (my Minno8 one) because it can only manage ONE Twitter account. It also scheduled the post when I submitted Publish to my blog with a time FOUR HOURS AND 27 MINUTES after I published it. So not only does Blogpress have serious limitations, it has serious bugs.

Toktumi took signups offline in order to recover and guard against future attacks so I added myself to the list of people being notified. But then the “impossibility gremlins” arrived to make buying their service impossible, mainly because their database still has my mobile number in it from last year’s 30 day trial so I’m unable to get past their “Activate Service” screen and complete the transaction.

Sounds easy to fix, right? A quick assistance from a human should do the trick, don’t ya think?

After several customer service emails, calling their toll-free number (support and sales…both of which aren’t answered and encourage filling out a help ticket) and attempting to receive help by using their live chat (which gives a rough time of engaging in live chat–mine has been 6, 8 or 10 minutes the three times I tried using it–but after 45-60 minutes I’ve given up and closed the chat window), I decided today to leave a voicemail for Peter Sisson, Toktumi’s CEO and describe the infinite loop I find myself in simply trying to buy their service, make him aware of it and see if I can “shake the tree” a bit and get some help.

Since I’m highly motivated I’ll keep trying through tomorrow and then give up permanently. It’s sad since I cover startups (at another site I’m involved in, Minnov8) and I’m well aware of the trials and tribulations entrepreneurs experience, especially when a sudden event blows up their company and they scramble to recover. But the ones that have survived “success” like Toktumi is experiencing have learned one thing and executed on it well: focus on those who want to give you their money and become your customers.

UPDATE: That was quick. 10 minutes after I published this post I emailed Toktumi customer service and they setup an account, told me how to upgrade and so forth so I’m moving forward.

Most of the functionality works, but the same latency issues remain and a couple of iPad-centric ones emerge as I’ll explain, but those are trivial to the opportunity the iPad presents for NetVibes.

NetVibes is the best “start page” or “portal creator” engine out there in my opinion.  It’s trivial to create tabs (like those you see in the screenshot above) and populate them with widgets that are either standalone ones for news, weather, sports, email, calendar, Twitter, Facebook or other news feeds and hosted applications and you can create your own widgets too. It’s also incredibly attractive and there are hundreds of “skins” to customize the look, feel and color schemes or you can create your own from scratch.

While this isn’t an exhaustive post about the functionality of NetVibes, I was quite delighted to logon just before lunchtime and see that a “dashboard” which I’d created over a year ago functioned perfectly on my iPad, though was a bit crowded with the 22 tabs I had in it (a number of tabs which looked fine on my huge desktop monitor, but a bit cramped on the iPad).

On that dashboard I removed a bunch of the old tabs and their content and tweaked the dashboard and you can see the result in the shot above. If I grow to love this use on iPad, I might take advantage of building multiple dashboards (instantly accessible under the dropdown menu “Dashboard” you see above) and I can have all of those deleted tabs back!

One issue I had was that I couldn’t use my finger to drag-n-drop a widget in to a column and there were also some other issues with design that forced me to use my computer to create and then refresh the page on my iPad. I suspect this has more to do with WebKit support problems than the iPad itself, but NetVibes must fix this immediately so that iPad users can do 100% of the design and layout with NetVibes or blow a HUGE opportunity to be the starter for the iPad!

The only other issue I have is the same one I had when using it on my desktop (and why I never embraced NetVibes for my desktop or laptop computer use): Each time you click on a tab the widgets re-populate themselves with data and they each have to create a web connection, retrieve the data, render it in the widget, and display it to you. While that sounds trivial, it feels like it takes a long time to load each one–much longer than what the equivalent loading of a news web page or iGoogle, for example–and I’ve never been able to get around that latency.

So why do I care enough now to write about NetVibes on my iPad?

Here’s why: It will be roughly six months before the multitasking operating system will be available for the iPad and this NetVibes dashboard will save me A LOT OF TIME in using my iPad. Who knows…perhaps there will be some speed increases coming or I’ll learn to accept the lag time.

INSTANT DASHBOARDS
But the cool capability of “Instant Dashboards” is really intriguing (read NetVibes post on it here). This will get people pretty excited and I tried it out, creating an “iPad Dashboard” and it instantly created one with five tabs: General (email, Twitter, stuff like that); iPad News/iPad Videos/iPad Conversations/iPad Google (the last one a keyword search on Google and the resulting page of results…refreshed each time you click and open that tab).

So it will be interesting to see if *I* continue with NetVibes as well as whether or not NetVibes will see (and seize) the opportunity the iPad presents!

Man….does this ever bring up memories and an analogy that you might find interesting!

When Apple introduced the Macintosh in 1984, they simultaneously published Apple Human Interface Guidelines which specifically outlined how to build an application that leveraged the supplied interface “toolkit” in ROM so that there would be a consistent user experience across applications (e.g., people would always know where “Quit” was under the “File” menu). There were howls of protests from developers over “the constraints Apple is imposing on us” and “command-line driven applications are so much more flexible than ones that have to fit in to the “File>Edit” metaphor” as well as “who does Apple think they are telling us how to build and deliver great applications?“

Sound familiar to today’s whining about the iPad? Look at the original Microsoft MS-DOS driven personal computers and the graphical user interface (GUI) on the Macintosh (and its predecessor, the Lisa). Which would you rather use?

Yes, all of us have become pretty adept at the GUI and all the applications we use today are optimized for that human interface paradigm. Will a transition to any other form of human interface be painful? Absolutely, especially since we’ve all been using GUIs since the mid-1980s! You know that it’s easy to look back and see that a GUI-driven computer world was a much better one to live in than a command-line one, but it’s more difficult to look in to the future to see what a touch-driven computing world will look like.

Apple has published iPad Human Interface Guidelines and it’s pretty clear that the time has come for the computer to take the next leap. Many are discussing it and this post by Keith Kleiner at the Singularity Hub is a good overview of some of the thought leading technologies being explored with this next generation touch paradigm.

The iPad is the first mass market product to embrace this paradigm and make it palatable to everyone, with the possible exception of the whining developers, tech geeks and others who see it as too limiting, closed or different. Is the iPad without warts? Nope and it’s certain to improve and competition will abound. But every time I look at the landscape of human-created products, services, religions or any other endeavor, absolute perfection seems to be missing so get over it.

When I wrote the post, “MSNBC’s awesome Super Tuesday primary coverage” and started off the post with “This, my friends, is the future of television” I believed it then and believe it even more now. It’s just that the connections to traditional TV weren’t exactly what I expected when using the multimedia platform delivered by the gang over at MSNBC, and that emerging technologies would make TV watching a shared experience similar to the “old days” when many of us would hang around the water cooler at work the morning after some TV event or show and commiserate about it.

The crew over at the Nielsen Company just released a new report that is revealing more about how people are watching “Tweevee” (my made up name for a combination of Twitter use and TV watching):

Americans increased their overall media usage and media multitasking according to The Nielsen Company’s latest Three Screen Report (PDF), which tracks consumption across TV, Internet and mobile phones.  In the last quarter of 2009, simultaneous use of the Internet while watching TV reached three and a half hours a month, up 35% from the previous quarter. Nearly 60% of TV viewers now use the Internet once a month while also watching TV.

“The rise in simultaneous use of the web and TV gives the viewer a unique on-screen and off-screen relationship with TV programming,” said Nielsen Company media product leader Matt O’Grady. “The initial fear was that Internet and mobile video and entertainment would slowly cannibalize traditional TV viewing, but the steady trend of increased TV viewership alongside expanded simultaneous usage argues something quite different.”

It went on to talk about DVR use (surprise…more of us are timeshifting our video use!) and then in to online video consumption:

Online video consumption is up 16% from last year. Of note, approximately 44% of all online video is being viewed in the workplace.  The research shows that Americans watch network programs online when they miss an episode or when a TV is not available.  Online video is used essentially like DVR and not typically a replacement for watching TV.

Active mobile video users grew by 57% from the fourth quarter of 2008 to the fourth quarter of 2009, from 11.2 million to 17.6 million.  Much of this increase can be linked to the strong growth of smartphones in the marketplace.

Here’s the deal: No question in my mind that connecting socially makes it more fun to watch a live event (e.g., Academy Awards, Grammys, Super Bowl) and see what our friends are saying about it, almost like they’re in the room with us. But what’s more intriguing to me is that more of us are consuming information, connecting socially and engaging online while doing something else. Is TV too boring? Is it the ability to share with our friends and acquaintances? Are we more capable of multitasking then we thought? Maybe all or some of those, but we’re also discovering that for every hour of TV watching we do, the increase odds we’ll die go up 11%.

One this is certain though, the way we connect with others and consume media has already changed forever.