Rogers About to Get Something they Didn’t Want: Competition

I got a news-flash email from the CBC today (I’m no one special; I’ve signed up for alerts like this):

The federal government is $4.2 billion richer with the conclusion of the cellphone spectrum auction on Monday, while customers stand to win as five new companies are now well positioned to launch services over the next few years. The windfall is considerably larger than the original $1.5 billion many industry analysts had predicted before the auction began on May 27.

I linked to the related story on the CBC web site, and 3 passages caught my eye. (in all cases, bold and italics are mine) First:

The big winner — and biggest spender — among potential new entrants was Toronto-based Globalive Communications Inc., which currently sells home phone and internet service under the Yak brand. The company has emerged from the auction positioned to launch a national cellphone service with 30 licenses broadly distributed across the country.

Second:

The new entrants are widely expected to build third-generation networks based on global system for mobile communications (GSM) technology, which is what Rogers and its Fido subsidiary use, or its newer fourth-generation offshoot, long-term evolution (LTE).

and Third:

Iain Grant, president of the Seaboard Group telecommunications consultancy, said a national carrier could be up and running by Easter at a cost of $500 million, although other estimates say a launch could take a year or two. The trickiest part of starting up will be negotiating rights for transmission sites, many of which will either be on top of tall buildings or on towers owned by Rogers, Bell and Telus.

So here we are, looking at a Spring of 2009 roll-out for at least one competitor to Rogers/Fido Wireless, and did Rogers position themselves well for such a situation? In my humble opinion, absolutely not. Anyone in Canada has seen this coming (anyone who was not in Rogers management, that is). In the past years, months and weeks, Rogers has made so many Canadian consumers so angry that they can count on no customer loyalty whatsoever. Their brand may very well be damaged beyond repair. Any new cellphone vendor who supports a GSM 3G network will be able to grab a large pool of customers ready to switch immediately, or when their contract with Rogers is up (and you can bet that they’ll put that date on their calendar!)

How did Rogers screw this up so badly? The recent history of Rogers, particularly with respect to pricing and marketing tells some of the story. If you live in Canada and have had any dealings with Rogers, you’ll know much of this, so feel free to skip to the end…

First, over the past 3 or 4 years, Rogers charged some of the highest data and call rates in the world. Then, in 2007, consumers and tech watchers criticized them for being slow to bring the iPhone to Canada after it was available in the U.S. for a year.  In April of 2008, Rogers chief executive Ted Rogers told investors the iPhone would arrive in Canada some time later in the year. In June, Rogers set the iPhone’s debut for July 11 (along with several other countries throughout the world), but were quickly met with harsh criticism about the data pricing plan, which was perhaps the second highest in the world (with Sweden being the highest) . Some high-profile tech personalities in Canada went on television to announce that they were going to jump ship (in some cases paying a sizable penalty). Only after thousands of current and prospective customers signed online petitions protesting these rates,  encouraging Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs to put pressure on the company, did Rogers relent with a drop of the highest rate to a reasonable level ($30 per month with a usage limit of up to 6 GB per month), but this rate is available only until the end of August. On the day of the roll-out, Rogers’ registry networks crashed simultaneously with Apple’s iTunes registering system after the new iPhone was unveiled. The Outage lasted into the afternoon at some locations and it wasn’t until the next week before some customers could activate their phones. Rogers representatives said they expected record first-day sales, but declined to disclose how many phones were shipped to stores or how many they had expected to sell. As I write this, Rogers (throughout Vancouver, at least) is still sold out of the iPhone.

All in all it was a highly visible fiasco. Rogers utterly botched the iPhone roll-out in just about every way it could be botched. They could have finally made many current customers happy with a new device and would be seen today as the sole provider of one of the most sought-after tech gadgets. Instead, they generated several days of bad PR, displayed poor planning, and missed immeasurable marketing and sales opportunities. There have been numerous speculations that the reason they ran out stock is that Apple was so peeved at the high data rates that they actually diverted iPhone shipments from Canada to more reasonable European carriers. Whether or not this was true, Rogers’ lack of candor regarding availability, lack of understanding of the product, and complete screw-up of logistics and network volume on the day of the roll-out is something that will not fade quickly from the memory of most Canadians (and probably not by this coming Easter).

It will be interesting to see if the mass exodus from Rogers to whatever new carrier Globalive will fund will be as swift and massive as I expect it will be. Rogers has run their business ‘like there’s no tomorrow’, but in the Spring of 2009, ‘tomorrow’ will arrive.

iPhone Hysteria Hits Vancouver

Despite the protests here that Rogers is charging too much for data (even after dropping the high-end price by a third, it’s still not unlimited), and despite the fact that current customers must wait a week before they can get one, the lines to buy an iPhone are predictably around the block downtown in Toronto and Vancouver.

While I’m not thrilled that I have to wait yet another week, as the coming of higher speed 3G networking, and GPS is a big deal for us, but best of all is actually being able to get software that will not make the phone buggy or suck bits from the net down to the phone while I’m unaware, which was what happened with one of the pirate programs I had gotten a while back. I’m particularly interested in how the new software (most of it free) take advantage of the synergy between the phone knowing where it is and being connected to the Internet at decent speed. Imagine:

• You could take a tour of a museum or garden and had access to not one but several multimedia tour guides all at the same time? Entering an art work’s number might show related works, or offer other biographical information.
• In a bookstore you might get all of the competing prices for the same book after you take a picture of its bar code with your camera. Your current store could offer to match that price if they can keep the sale.
• A special ‘Lunch 4-1-1′ program/network that would not only tell you which friends were near and available for an impromptu lunch, but also a restaurant that all of you had said was either good or they wanted to try out.

I expect a lot of those sorts of applications to show up soon. The best part is that this is entirely an open-ended situation; the limitation is now no longer on the hardware or the infrastructure, but the imagination of developers and entrepreneurs. For Vancouver and its decidedly extroverted blend of tech and love of leisure, cuisine and entertainment, today is sort of a starting gun for a race to the next big social application, and it’s not just Facebook and Twitter this time.

Follow up: According to Twitter and news stories around the web, it was not a very, ahem, smooth launch of the iPhone or 2.0 software. Servers got overloaded, phones got bricked, iTunes version 7.7 took forever to download, and in general the whole process slowed to a crawl. I haven’t heard a story yet that wasn’t full of drama, waiting and headache. I’m sure there are others who can provide more detail. Suffice to say I’m glad that I decided to wait a day or two before dipping my toes in the iWater.

Summer, Finally

Not so Hazy and Not so Lazy

Maybe it’s because we have our first bona-fide day where you could go out without a jacket. Maybe it’s because the sun truly doesn’t set until nearly around 8:30. Maybe it’s because Granville Market is brimming over with sweet local strawberries, most of the spot prawns and asparagus are past, and the heirloom tomatoes are starting to appear. All of the above is contributing to a feeling that we have finally passed into the summer season.

For me, being between contracts/jobs and with some time on my hands, it means that I can enjoy some of this, although I’m certainly not spending my days at the beach. Next week, being the Canada Day and Fourth of July holiday week, both Pam and I are going to get a little summer break, with a trip to Whistler with my brother and his family. We’ve been looking forward to that for a long time.

Planning for the Autumn Demise of Classical Radio in Vancouver

Summer is also the time when a few things end. This morning was the last time that Tom Allen would do his ‘cage match’, a whimsical feature of ‘Music and Company’ where he would pit one piece of music against another and call for a vote. This week’s final cage match theme was: ‘With a bang or a whimper’, since it will be the last one of these bits of fun…forever. Representing an ending with a bang was Chabrier’s ‘Ah Hurrah’ from the Opera, Le Roi Malgre Lui. The opponent (representing a ‘whimper’ or soft ending) was the last movement from Haydn’s clever Symphony No. 45, ‘The Farewell Symphony’ (where one by one, the musicians leave the stage until there are only 2 first violins left to end the piece, a cleverly choreographed hint to Haydn’s patron, the Prince Nikolaus Esterházy that his court musicians as well as his composer were all homesick and wanted him to close up the summer palace so everyone could return home to Eisenstadt).

It was a typical cage match; one part joke, one part serious, one part drama. Like just about everything Tom Allen does on the program, it makes one think a little, and sets up the day. I will sorely miss this along with some of his other regular features. Probably my favourite comes at about 6:30 AM: This Day in… which observes some event in history that shares today’s date. Today’s was the first solo circumnavigation of the globe in a boat by Joshua Slocum, a Nova Scotian seaman who finished the trip that he had begun in Boston three years earlier in 1895 on today’s date. Like so many other ‘This Day In…’s, I didn’t know about this event, and felt the joy I often do from gaining a bit of knowledge just as I’m starting the day.

Without going off on another rant about the stupidity and wrongness of the CBC getting rid of the best classical music morning program in the world, I’ve finally accepted the inevitable and made plans. A couple of weeks ago I picked up (on sale) a curious new device at London Drugs: a BLIK Internet Clock Radio. It’s a standard-looking radio (unfortunately with inferior speakers to the Bose Wave Radio that we’ve been using for the last 10 years or so) that ‘tunes’ to a streaming radio station on the Internet rather than local FM (although you can do that, if the Internet is down). I’ve tested it, and while there is about a 20-second delay while the station ‘resolves’ to the URL you’ve chosen, it will indeed allow you to awaken to over 9,000 different stations all over the world (although in practice the number one would want to tune to is a small fraction of that number). I was able to set the presets to the BBC’s Radio 3 (which I knew well from my days as a Grad Student), the local CBC Radio 1, NPR in Boston, as well as the national NPR station. I’ll look for some other stations, as there are 8 preset slots. As you can imagine, retrieving and sifting through 9,000 stations in a tree-like menu using a terrible LED screen is a bit of a challenge (oh, if only Apple would make one of these- I guess they do, it’s called a Mac Mini with mouse, keyboard, speakers and a small flat-screen monitor running a browser with some preset streaming radio station bookmarks, but even something like that is too large for a night-table). Most of these stations have us waking up at 9:00 AM Eastern on North America, or 68(!) hours ahead in the UK. I fear that at noon 2:00 in the afternoon in London we may not get a completely morning-friendly classical music feed, so I’ll have to search further until I find a new place to tune to. Both Pam and I hope that we don’t have to resort to NPR, which always put me in a bad mood in the morning, particularly now that it has moved so much farther to the Right politically than it used to be (hearing the appalling Cokie Roberts sneer at the Democrats every Monday morning got my blood boiling early in the week - funny, but that was my word, but apparently it’s still what she is doing, defending Dick Cheney on the TV Program ‘This Week’).

While they are getting rid of Classical Music on Radio 2, I do remember the somewhat encouraging news that the CBC said that they were going to add a streaming classical music channel on the Internet. I doubt if it will have the incomparable Tom Allen on it, but at least there will be a Canadian alternative for our move from FM Radio to almost exclusively Internet radio from Labour Day on.

Will the Flickr Founders Return?

Recently  I learned that Stewart Butterfield — who along with his wife, Caterina Fake,  co-founded one of the most interesting and exciting startups to usher in the ‘Web 2.0′ era — has resigned from Yahoo, the current owners of that business. His letter of resignation was posted on Jon Gruber’s Daring Fireball, and I couldn’t resist reprinting it here; It’s a scream:

From: Stewart Butterfield
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 10:57 AM
To: Brad Garlinghouse
Subject: Resignation

Dear Brad,

As you know, tin is in my blood. For generations my family has worked with this most useful of metals. When I joined Yahoo back in ‘21, it was a sheet-tin concern of great momentum, growth and innovation. I knew it was the place for me.

Over the decades as the company grew and expanded, first into dyes and punches, into copper, corrugated steel, synthesized rubber, piping, milling equipment, engines, instruments, weaponry, and so on, I still felt at home, because tin was the core of the business.

After the war, as we continued to branch out in electronics, all manner of aeronautical frames, hulls and bodies, computing and tabulating machines, precision controls, and later, farther afield — real estate, brewing, consumer finance, grain processing, lighting and salty snacks - I took it in stride, for there was still a place for me.

Since the late 80s, as the general manufacturing, oil exploration & refining, logistics, and hotel & casino divisions rose to prominence, I have felt somewhat sidelined. By the time of the internet revolution and our expansions into Web Sites, I have been cast adrift. I tried to roll with the times, but nary a sheet of tin has rolled of our own production lines in over 30 years.

I don’t know what you and the other executives have planned for this company, but I know that my ability to contribute has dwindled to near-nothing, and not entirely because of my advancing age. Therefore, with a heavy heart, I recognize that it is time for me to and the company to part ways.

In my 87 years service, I’ve accomplished many feats, shared in the ups and downs, made great friends, and learned a tremendous amount (who would have thought that Electronic Mail would come to supplant the nation’s own great and venerable post!?) but there is a new generation now and it would be unfair not to give them a chance. Those that started in the make-work programs of the depression, on the GI programs in the late 40s, and even those young baby boomers need their own try, without us old ‘uns standing in the way.

So, please accept my resignation, effective July 12. And I don’t need no fancy parties or gold watches (I still have the one from ‘61 and ‘76). 1 will be spending more time with my family, tending to my small but growing alpaca herd and, of course, getting back to working with tin, my first love.

Your old tin-smithing friend and colleague,

- Stewart Butterfield

(In case you didn’t get the gag, Stewart Butterfield is 35 years old)

It’s worth noting that a Facebook group has been formed, called BringCaterinaAndStewartHome. The Web site Strutta is handling the domain http://www.BringCaterinaAndStewartHome where people are posting photos of our beautiful city and pointing out the strengths of the place, hoping to woo these two back.

Frankly, I’d like to see them return as well. They are, in a way, the prodigal son and daughter of the tech scene here.  Flickr has always been held up as The Great Vancouver Tech Success Story, and I would imagine that it has emboldened its share of startups in Yaletown and Gastown. Since I arrived shortly after they left, I always felt like I missed out on some of the joie de vivre that Ludicorp brought to Vancouver. Indeed, I even had given some thought as to showing up on their doorstep while we were making plans in Cambridge, and I remember my disappointment as I saw the photos of the good-bye party a few months before we were to make the move (Doh!).

With a letter of resignation as witty and clever as that one, and a track record unequaled by most of the techies of Vancouver, we could use a guy like that around here.

A Final Reckoning on WWDC ‘08

Now that I’ve had some time to think about last week (besides the event I reported on in the previous posting), I thought it would be good to offer some lasting impressions. While I’m not a computer programmer, I understand most of the concepts behind the discipline. That said, much of Apple’s Developer Conference was geared toward programmers for whom code is second nature. Many of the sessions I attended dealt with code, whether or not the description of the session said so or not (I was particularly disappointed when a session which was described as ‘Building User Interfaces for the iPhone with Interface Builder’ was really more about when you should load some of those User Interface elements into memory, and how to achieve this in your code.)

I was able to understand nearly all of what was said in the main User Interface session for the iPhone, which was, in a way, more about the scope and scale that one should expect for applications written for it. Not surprisingly, the key concept that so many developers miss now and will miss in the coming months and years is that it makes no sense to bring all of what a desktop application does to the iPhone. Try to do that, and you’ll end up with a product that is hard to use, not all that useful, and full of features that simply don’t fit in such a small footprint (in memory or screen). I don’t think I’m violating any NDAs here when I relate this, because its so patently obvious. Nevertheless, I’m sure there is already some corporation out there that is faithfully trying to cram 20-30 screens of functionality into this hand-held device, because they have the misconception that a computer is a computer, no matter how small.

The overarching principle that Apple made sure was mentioned in nearly every session, was that programmers should use the model-view-controller (MVC) architectural pattern for building their software (I won’t go into much detail about it, but it’s essentially a way of organizing what your software program does, so that you separate the logic and data from user interface, making it is easier to modify either the look of the program or the underlying business rules without one affecting the other. For more information about where MVC comes from and who uses it besides Apple [Java Swing, JSF, Microsoft Foundation Classes - who call it "Document/View architecture", DRUPAL, Joomla, the list goes on and on.], check out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller).

The other thing that Apple made sure was the case in every session: Everyone had to be very well prepared and extremely polished. Unlike some conferences and conventions that I’ve attended, the level of quality control for this one was extraordinary: Nearly every single presenter was an Apple employee, and I learned from one of them just prior to their session that each presenter had several weeks of rehearsals, sometimes twice a week in the months leading up to WWDC. Since nearly every presenter had a lot of information to share, the result was a breakneck pace for all sessions. Forget about trying to duplicate their demos of developer tools, much of this was worked out to the last second without any pauses, with snippets of key programming code at the ready to paste in at key moments, like one of Julia Child’s finished dishes sitting in the oven, ready for the final minutes of the show on The French Chef. Nothing was left to chance; No demo ever failed to work. At the end of each session, the entire team who worked on that piece of software or area went to the stage, and answered questions from attendees, who were directed to 4 microphones at very places in each room. Each and every session, both presentation and all questions and answers, were recorded and should be available as pocasts on the Apple Developer web site for attendees to review (and you can bet they’ll need to).

Besides the sessions themselves, it was an exhausting experience from the sheer number of attendees (as I’ve mentioned before, over 5,000 of them). That meant waiting in line for everything, be it food, getting into sessions (when it paid to be lined up about 30 minutes before the start), tables, desks or chairs through Moscone West, or even the escalators between levels. It was about 95% male, and the standard attire was jeans and black t-shirt. Just about every attendee had a laptop (99% Macbook Pro), and an iPhone. What does a wireless network serving that many wireless customers look like? Check this geek porn out (as usual, click each to see a larger image):

For all but the largest presentation rooms, there were power strips duct-taped to the chair legs at regular intervals, and there were several ‘lounge’ like spaces with beanbag chairs, tables, desks, iMacs (if you didn’t have yours with you), and Industrial-Strength Wireless Network repeaters, set up at the perimeters of the interior of the building like force-field generators you see in Sci-Fi movies.

While I did meet up with a few people I knew (or knew of, by reputation or from getting in touch with them prior to the event), for the most part I was among strangers. I did my best so socialize, but it goes without saying that Software Developers, for the most part, are not exactly ‘people’ persons. Many of them would probably much rather code than chat, or if they do chat, it’s through a keyboard.

The second to last evening featured a huge party at the nearby Yerba Buena Gardens, one of my favourite places in San Francisco. It’s a large open park bounded by the Yerba Buena Arts Center, the Moscone Convention Center, and the Metreon, Sony’s attempt at a sort of Entertainment Mall which is starting to show its age. The food consisted of several stations serving everything from Sushi to Foccacia-Pizza to Chinese Stewed Short-Ribs and Stir-Fried Noodles. The entertainment was The Barenaked Ladies, which must have cost Apple some significant amount of money. Given their success lately, I guess they could afford it. It was nice to see some recognition that they were Canadian, and they made some nerdy jokes about those of us to the north with iPhones being criminals. They started with their arguably their biggest hit, One Week, which even I recognized. I’ll bet they are sick of playing it, but the crowd was appreciative.

In the end, I’m not sure if I’ll attend WWDC next year. While I did get some valuable information, I’d say that about 50% of what I got was in the ‘nice to know’ category, and it’s a pretty expensive (and draining) event for that sort of knowledge. Still, I don’t regret having been to this one, and I’m hoping that what I learned and who I met will translate to some work at some point in the future. You can never tell.