The most recent event, and the one I am willing to talk about, was my recent down-sizing. This came two weeks after my 42nd birthday and one paltry day after the acquisition of a newsed (used, new to me) Saab to replace my increasingly infirm 21-year old 900 Turbo. It was explained to me that the company simply didn’t have the funds to support my position any more. Oddly enough, I had spent the last year explaining to those involved that the managed services industry was changing and that those who didn’t change with it were doomed to go South, in a big way.

Natch.

So, here I am, seeking a new job and hoping to find one soon. This time around doesn’t seem as bad as two years ago when I sent out hundreds of resumes and never got back one response. Today I have an interview and I have sent me CV to a company which looks deeply promising, both for them and for myself.

I found Ning after getting out of Facebook because I still wanted a social network for my friends. I signed up for Ning only to find out that it will no longer be free starting in July and decided it wasn’t for me. While I was able to delete the single group I had created I found that the only option I have to get rid of my account is to deactivate it. This is worse than Facebook’s method of hiding the Account Deletion page and then making it take 14 days before it actually happens, but not by much.

The rationale here seems to be that once you are a member of the site, its tantamount to self destruction to let that member leave for whatever reason. They must have thought that they would simply fix whatever issues the member is having and that everything would be good. In the case of deactivating your account in Facebook, they assume you simply don’t understand how to use the site, and try to redirect you to the Help Center to educate you.

I don’t see this as acceptable in any way, shape, or form, especially in the context of a social web site where people share their personal information, current location, photos, thoughts, and ideas with their friends. If you are done with a service, you should be done with it, and that service doesn’t have the right to archive your personal belongings when you don’t want them to remain there. I’ve read Facebook’s Terms of Service, and here’s the first and salient section (the links in this section are to pages owned by Facebook):

Date of Last Revision: April 22, 2010

This Statement of Rights and Responsibilities (“Statement”) derives from the Facebook Principles, and governs our relationship with users and others who interact with Facebook. By using or accessing Facebook, you agree to this Statement.

1. Privacy

   Your privacy is very important to us. We designed our Privacy Policy to make important disclosures about how you can use Facebook to share with others and how we collect and can use your content and information.  We encourage you to read the Privacy Policy, and to use it to help make informed decisions.

2. Sharing Your Content and Information

   You own all of the content and information you post on Facebook, and you can control how it is shared through your privacy and application settings. In addition:

   1. For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos (“IP content”), you specifically give us the following permission, subject to your privacy and application settings: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.
   2. When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).
   3. When you use an application, your content and information is shared with the application.  We require applications to respect your privacy, and your agreement with that application will control how the application can use, store, and transfer that content and information.  (To learn more about Platform, read our Privacy PolicyAbout Platform page.) and
   4. When you publish content or information using the “everyone” setting, it means that you are allowing everyone, including people off of Facebook, to access and use that information, and to associate it with you (i.e., your name and profile picture).
   5. We always appreciate your feedback or other suggestions about Facebook, but you understand that we may use them without any obligation to compensate you for them (just as you have no obligation to offer them).

All in all, I think that these terms of service are pretty good, as legalese goes. What they fail to cover, however, is anything regarding the deletion of your user account. Indirectly, of course, Facebook claims that you own your content, which suggests you can control the ultimate status of your account. Why, then, can I not delete my account?

That is a question for Facebook to answer, and any other company that chooses to employ this kind of policy.

Last night I found out about Diaspora. Dan, Max, Elliot, and Rafi decided that they, too, had their fill of crap from the likes of Facebook and are now building an open source alternative. They made a video and stuck it up on KickStarter and passed around the news to various sites like Engadget. The idea has very quickly caught on, and their $10,000 goal has been well surpassed. As of 9:30PM in SoCal, they have raised $123,958.00 and they still have 18 days to go.

I very strongly suggest that you go check it out and make a pledge. Support this project and these guys will make it happen. We need something like this. The social power of the internet is a critical tool in the development and growth of the world. It brings people from every walk of life and social background closer together, while services like Facebook only serve their investors and advertisers. Get to it and pass it along!

The straw on the proverbial camel’s back was the Free iPad offering. I don’t fall for these scams and I don’t know anyone who would, yet Facebook joined me to a Fan Page which not only linked me to this group without my permission, but also spammed all of my friends. This is unconscionable behavior and I will not tolerate it.

Prior to this particular event, Facebook could not stop screwing around with their privacy policy and kept opting people in to things that members weren’t asked about. Facebook has also modified the privacy settings to make them difficult to use. You can’t even cancel an account without having to wait 14 days!

While I have no proof, I could easily speculate that their financial partners have been putting pressure on them to monetize the site somehow. After all, those Ziinga people have been pounding out millions of dollars in revenues from Facebook members, and I don’t think FB sees any of that. Word is that Facebook is going to change how that all works, and that Ziinga could be creating their own network in reaction.

Am I an Apple fan boy? Sure as hell am! I’m not ashamed to admit it, just like I’m pleased to admit that I was an LA Kings fan back when Gretsky was still on the ice and McSorley was cracking skulls. Apple, since Steve Jobs return in 1997, has fostered a steady and relentless growth, smoothly taking the few bumps along the way in stride and never missing step (i.e., Cube, HiFi, build quality issues). Now Apple, the company the press couldn’t stop using the word ‘beleagured’ to describe, is now a powerhouse in the mobile media and smart phone industry segments, and has been steadily growing their computer systems market share.

This is not the kind of market Apple can simply take over. People are invested in hundreds, even thousands, of dollars in PC gear and software and they won’t simply dump it all because Apple says boo. Considering that, it was brilliant that Apple started up the iPod industry and reshaped the music market single-handedly. I’m betting Jobs knew that they couldn’t grow on computers alone because Microsoft had the 90% marketshare. Then Apple came out with the iPhone to show people what a real computer can be like, another brilliant stroke. How can people not wonder how easy a Mac is to use when they love their iPhone.

Companies look to see maybe a 1% response rate on their marketing material as a gain, but that material isn’t a product in itself. Salespeople have to convert those prospects into customers. Apple’s sales material is the iPod and iPhone, and people are paying to get those slick, digital pamphlets. Now, however, Apple is showing us two new possibilities with a single product, the iPad. Either they are showing potential converts that there is now an easier path to Apple fealty  or they are showing us all a very likely possible future of computing. I’m leaning towards both being true, and potentially, a third or fourth reason I’m not smart enough to figure out yet.

The biggest problem we are going to face as we march into the future of technology is wrapping ourselves around the concept of what computing is to us. Computer technology has grown steadily since the personal computer hit the scene in 1977 with the Apple I. When Apple rolled out the Mac in 1984, it created the desktop publishing market which showed everyone what a desktop computer could do, and the market grew from there. In general, though, there’s little about daily computing which requires as much raw horsepower we have grown towards.

There are some industries which demand such power, like the CAD/CAM users in architecture, engineering, and in the entertainment industries like music, video games, and movies, but what about email, web browsing, word processing, spreadsheets, and even multimedia-strong stuff like presentations, listening to music, watching movies or streaming web video requires 8GBs of RAM, a quad-core CPU, and 1GB of video RAM? The last thing I need to read an email is a $3,000 PC workstation when I’ve been pleased to read it on my BlackBerry for years.

I have a strong feeling that these are some of the arguments Apple has been making with itself in order to justify the development and eventual release of the iPad. Remember how I opened this piece with saying that Microsoft is stupid? Apple’s iPad is your proof. Microsoft can’t engineer itself out of a paper bag and is only in the lead because they were able to get away with questionable marketing practices before the FTC and the Federal government had enough smart people to catch on, and by then it was too late. With Windows 3.11, Windows 95, and Windows NT floating around the corporate workplace, companies who had invested millions in custom development were unable to turn the ship in time to miss the iceberg.

Over time, Microsoft made strong efforts to make it clear that basing your business on the Microsoft platform was not only smart, but essential. You could do it with other systems, but the Mac was too girly and UNIX was too complicated. You practically NEEDED Microsoft to make your business run, and corporate America lapped it up because Apple wouldn’t counter, the UNIXes were pleased with their massive government contracts, and people didn’t know any better. Now we have a computer culture built on the idea that more powerful makes things work better. Even Apple has had to play that game, since its core to the American consumer and cannot be displaced.

So, Steve Jobs comes along and says something like, “We can’t dig them out because they are too entrenched, so we need to flank them and catch them in places they are unfamiliar.” The first place turned out to be the mobile media market, and Microsoft is completely inept in that space, even when they build their own hardware, the completely miserable Zune. Apple built the mobile media market when there was very little action in that space, but when they entered the mobile phone market there were already a large number of players there, including Microsoft. Microsoft had even managed to carve out a good chunk of that market for itself since Palm was unable to fix its own problems.

Apple, confident with its 75% marketshare in mobile media with its killer iPod and with eyes on making it better, saw an opportunity in the mobile phone space. I suspect that the iPod Touch was the next iteration of the iPod for Apple, and that they saw the possibility that it might work as a phone, too, and worked on that for a few years until they perfected it. One look at the smartphone market when Apple rolled out the iPod you could clearly see that there was chaos and a lack of clarity, with RIM on top with its BlackBerry, which has changed little in 10 years. Palm was the same, with its languishing Treo line on a platform from the previous decade. Microsoft was doing well because companies like HTC built their own UIs on top of Microsoft’s super-old UI. Not exactly a set of barn burners.

It was clear how badly people wanted a good phone when lines for the first day of iPhone availability were massive. The millions of iPhone users are speaking with their wallets and Apple managed to make up 35% of the smartphone market in about two years, a shockingly strong growth rate, and that number grows. The question arises, now that we are aware of the iPad, what Apple’s intentions have been with the iPhone. My spidey-sense tells me that there is a chance that Apple is guiding the computer-buying public in a direction which requires less power, offers more perceived speed, takes up less space, and handles everything the average user needs.

I look at the iPad and I don’t see the slick industrial design, light weight, durable finish, and clean interface. I see the reality that most people spend their time in email, browsing the web, watching and/or listening to media, reading, playing games, and other relatively low-level activities. I don’t see the problems with multi-tasking since it is an illusion. We are capable of paying attention to only one thing at a time. We can change focus to several different things, but we can already do that with the purportedly non-multi-tasking iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad simply by switching applications and being placed back right where we were when we left. I don’t see needing an in-built camera, since I’d rather use a real camera to take pictures. Do you really want your history to be captured by a crappy little phone cam?

I am convinced that the iPad will be a huge hit for Apple and that later this year, or sometime next year we will see the introduction of something like the iMac Mini, a stationary iPad with a 12-15″ display which is designed as a sort of kiosk for the home and which will likely be around $750. We might even see the demise of the Apple TV in its current form, where its next iteration might be a simple storage bay and connectivity hub for the UI which lives on an iPod, iPhone, or iPad. You can’t tell me that would not be near the ultimate in home theater.

I don’t have an oracle’s vision into the future, and like any pundit I can only read the tealeaves of the past to try to discern the hazy comings of mankind, but I think Apple has left us a rather clear trail of its past efforts and, from them, I think I can see where we are going. We need only be bold enough to say to ourselves that we are willing to entertain the possibility that Apple has it right and Microsoft, despite being the biggest, doesn’t.