The hardware (which is Motorola’s) mostly works. The keyboard is horrible and I’ve never used it, which means that it is a real design flaw given how much weight and mechanical operation it adds to the device. (The software keyboard works well enough that I’ve found it adequate but the other problems with the software make it barely useable.) The camera button on my Droid doesn’t work and never has, so I call up the camera from the home screen. The on-off button is poorly placed for one-handed operation and requires real force to actuate. But this is just version 1.0 issues that Motorola will likely fix next time out.

The software (Google’s Android plus apps both from Google and from other developers) doesn’t work and is unacceptable on a mobile device. First, the operating system doesn’t work well enough to be considered a mobile OS. A mobile phone needs to have an OS that is really tied down and ready to perform at all times, like for receiving phone calls. This one isn’t. The process management in the OS stinks. Press on an app icon; maybe it will come up and maybe the phone will just not respond. Who’s to know why? Try pressing on the phone icon at 70 mph and have it not respond. Then try pressing again. And then get a message something like: “Activity Home (in process android.process.acore) is not responding.” Force Quit or Wait. Oops! I just drove into the guy in front of me when he slowed down and now I’m dead!

I’m not actually joking. The software is so bad that, for instance, when you open the phone app and click on search, there are multiple opportunities for the software to not respond or to respond incorrectly, which means that the phone is not useable unless you are starting intently at it and very, very patient about waiting for something to happen. If you want to search your contacts, you type the first letter and the phone will stop responding for 20-30 seconds. Don’t know why. If you keep typing ahead, you get no feedback about what you’re typing until the phone responds, and then you will likely have typed the wrong things so you have to start over again. It’s very, very unpleasant experience, particularly when you think that the search function must have been made by Google engineers, who have made billions of dollars with very fast, efficient, satisfying search on the web.

I have missed calls, lost calls, misdialed calls, pocket dialed people, and had many other experiences in the last month that have lead me to conclude that the Droid is not suited to its intended purpose as a smart phone.

I have been using my iPhone in parallel (but with a different phone number, of course) and I replaced my Blackberry Tour with the Droid. I can say definitively that the iPhone and Blackberry devices have never gotten in the way of making or receiving phone calls, but the Droid actually makes it harder to make phone calls than the other devices. The phone app crashes or suspends. The bluetooth fails to connect in my car. The camera often overtaxes the device and cannot process the images fast enough to actually capture what you have snapped in about a third of the photos. If you get the picture you want and then went to send it by email, the process of creating the email, finding the address of the person you want to send to, and actually sending the photo can take as much as 5 minutes, including the wait times the phone forces on you. In fact, the first photo I sent of my new grandson from the delivery room was only partially rendered. You can imagine how I feel about my Droid when it caused my very human desire to brag about my new grandson to fail.

I can go on and on, but after a month of using the phone (or trying really hard to use it) as my primary device, I have concluded that it’s a bad product and I have to get rid of it. It is plenty clear that Motorola was so desperate to get it on the market that it didn’t take time to test it properly and pushed or pulled Google into releasing crappy software on it.

I am open to suggestions for what device should replace my Motorola Droid, which has turned out to be a real piece of crud. I want a device on Verizon and already have an iPhone on AT&T. I’m not willing to wait for Motorola to fix the Droid or for Verizon to do a deal with Apple for a new iPhone. I have been thinking that maybe I should port my main phone number to my iPhone and just stop carrying two devices. What do you think I should do?

I’ve been a loyal customer of Eddie Bauer for at least the last decade. I buy the company’s shirts religiously: The LT size fits my torso perfectly. Eddie Bauer Wrinkle Resistant shirts really do resist wrinkles over a long period and many washings. But they still pass as dress shirts (rather than stiff upgrades from the polyester of yore). So every shirt I currently use for work is an Eddie Bauer. (I even experimented and bought a shirt from Old Navy, but it doesn’t fit right, it gets wrinkled even though it’s not supposed to, and it doesn’t feel like real cloth.) I’ve also more recently started buying Eddie Bauer’s pants too, since they fit and have the same wrinkle-resistant and fabric qualities. (TMI, I know, but I still get my shorts and socks from Nordstrom, which does know how to use technology but doesn’t make my kind of shirts and pants!)

I just went to eddiebauer.com, logged into my account and clicked on my order history: Two orders are recorded, one each from September and October of this year. What kind of order history is that? I’ve got at least 20 shirts hanging in my closet, about half of which I ordered from the web site. (Maybe customer records were not part of the bankruptcy sale to Golden Gate Capital?)

Okay, whatever: Now I want to buy two pairs of pants like the one that I’m wearing way too much because it’s the only pair I have that’s exactly what I want. I look at the labels in the pants. Size. Care. Brand. But no indication of what the model or SKU of the pant is. I go to eddiebauer.com and look at the men’s pants. There are Wrinkle Resistant pants called Dress Performance Kahkis and other pants called Casual Performance Chinos. Do I already own a Kahki or a Chino? I don’t know! The pant doesn’t tell me. The web site doesn’t tell me. So I order blind (which was the October order — I wrong wrong and returned the order, none the wiser).

Okay, I’ll go to the goddamn store, of which there are two in San Francisco, two more in the suburbs, and three outlet stores in those outlet malls in the distant burbs. The fun begins. I don’t have a product name to use with the store staff. (Yeah, I should have brought the pants with me.) I do have something called an Eddie Bauer Friends card, but the irony is that the store staff can’t look up my account to see what I’ve bought either! If I do find a shirt or pant that I like but isn’t in the right size, they can’t look up inventory in another store or online and have it shipped to me.

I could be behind on this, since I haven’t tried actually asking for help in an Eddie Bauer store in the last few months, so maybe they’ve fixed these problems. But I’m a regular visitor to the store at the San Francisco Center store as well as an occasional visitor to the outlet stores in San Rafael, Fairfield and Santa Fe, NM. I even pop into Eddie Bauer stores in malls in other cities, when I see one. The reason I bother going to the stores: I’ve discovered that, in the stores (but not online), I can find unique shirts with great patterns that are sometimes in my size. You have to look at the shelves underneath the main dress-shirt display, but I’ve found this works in every store I’ve stopped into around the country, whether in a mall or in an outlet.

In fact, I’ve turned this into a kind of game: Whack The Shirt. I’ve gotten a few really sweet shirts out of the game. (I just love the black one with slight white pinstripes.) But I’m getting tired of playing the game. Why, I wonder, can’t Eddie Bauer’s inventory system keep track of every shirt they put into it. My favorite wine store, K&L Wines, keeps track of every bottle of wine they have, including which store (four in all) and warehouse (three) each bottle is in and how many are left. They can guarantee delivery of what they are selling.

Eddie Bauer’s systems are so bad that they can’t tell you what you’ve bought, they can’t help you buy more, and they find new ways to frustrate loyal customers! The word about the bankruptcy was that the company couldn’t work out of its heavy debt load. I’d be willing to lay odds that they ended up taking that debt in the first place because their IT department couldn’t build flexible systems that delivered products to customers efficiently and happily! (But whatever you do, Eddie, please don’t go out of business and make me go buy shirts from someone else.)

All the press I’m reading compares the Droid to the iPhone. Wrong comparison, for a lot of reasons. I’m inclined to think that the Droid is the first phone to give RIMM a heartache for its Blackberry phones, but perhaps I’m just being persnickety.

First, the Droid: It works. Mossberg’s review and Pogue’s review do a great job of covering the details of the device, both good and bad. The bottom line is that it’s an amazing device. It’s kind of dorky, but Motorola will deal with that over time and the fact is that it’s a really differentiated position from the super-smooth iPhone. Droid is the first device, IMHO, to really deliver on the idea of Android as a smartphone operating system. With both Motorola and Google behind it, it has a good chance of being commercially successful.

Second, if it is, the question is really what is the Droid going to hurt? Not Apple. People who like the iPhone like the iPhone because it so amazingly well designed, stylish and cool. And it has all those cool apps. Apple is a company that has spent more than 30 years learning how to encourage application development, something that Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and AT&T will never figure out and that Motorola will figure out in another 30 years.

The Droid has Google figuring it out and Google is a little more nimble that than those old companies. So I’ve got the idea that Droid is going to sink the Blackberry. Motorola knows how to sell to enterprises. The Droid uses ActiveSync to support MS Exchange, and it seems to work as well as Blackberry Enterprise Server (or better, since it’s free and supported by Microsoft). The Droid has a much better approach to the application business (called Android Market on the Droid) than Blackberry. (My Blackberry, rest its soul asked me to confirm at least three times that I really did want that application and that I really did trust that application, before I could actually install and use it.)

Android Market is open and managed by Google. Whether to charge and how much is up to the app developer. The platform is well supported and easy to make software for. And it’s got its own dorky kind of coolness. So there’s a reasonable chance that Droid (and Android, by implication) will become the second stop for app developers after iPhone, and maybe the first stop for enterprise apps and for location apps that require a multitasking operating system.

Meanwhile, the Droid has anomalies. Its task management is funky, it does produce weird error messages, and sometimes it seems too busy to respond to the user. You need two hands to get the thing to wake up. Blah blah. But I don’t have a Blackberry for the first time in nearly 14 years.

Here is the (urban) dictionary definition of the word, “chillax“.

I did “chill out” and waited another 24 hours. I got the same message just now, which means that my main home computer appears to be permanently locked out of Twitter. In the interim, I sent a plea to one of the investors in the company in an attempt to get my account unlocked. Here is the official response of the company, forwarded by the investor: “Sounds like he changed his password but didn’t change it on a 3rd party app attempting to access Twitter. Since lockouts are IP-based, the hacker would have to be inside his home. *grin*. He should shut all his Twitter-accessing things down, give it an hour and a half or so, and then try again. :)”

Sounds like? Actually, my third party apps (on iPhone and Blackberry) are working just fine, able to update with new tweets and show me the tweet stream. (I changed the password instantly on all my third party apps, since I’m not an idiot.) This condition only exists on the Firefox browser on the computer inside my home (as was so grinningly observed by the Twitter employee), where I have not tried repeatedly to log into my Twitter account (since I’m only here at night). Now that I have changed my password, Twitter is recording multiple failed attempts to log into my account, attempts made by the hacker. *grin*

From the perspective of my 30 years of experience watching companies from a distance, this all looks and feels to me like Twitter is a company that considers its users a nuisance and customer service a real pain in the ass.

Twitter does actually have a problem right now with having its DM (Direct Message) feature hijacked. (I know that other users are reporting the same problem.) When the DM feature is hijacked, the user community recommends that the user change his/her password to prevent further phishing messages being sent out via the DM channel. But, once you do change your password, whoever had previously hijacked it continues to try to use the account (since it’s just a software robot sending the messages) and creates a condition of multiple failed attempts to log into your account. Twitter blocks your account both from yourself and the hacker.

The Twitter employee’s assumption (without any investigation into the situation) that the hacker would have to be inside my house is totally incorrect. Regardless of all the business model and valuation issues that surround Twitter, I certainly hope the company adopts a different attitude toward its users. It’s tempting when you have a lot of users who don’t pay for the service they use to view those users as non-economic or a cost center. But that’s a lousy attitude to have if you really want to build a business with long term value.

But now my new setup has been working for about a month and reality is setting in. And that reality is that Apple’s Macintosh equivalents of MS Entourage on the Macintosh and MS Outlook on Windows has its own symptoms of old age and bad design! Now the email rage that was focused on Microsoft is pointed right at Apple!

For instance, you can cannot paste into the location field of an appointment iCal on the Macintosh. That’s right: No cut and paste in that particular field! So if you set up a new appointment and you want to have the location handy on your Blackberry or iPhone, you have to type it in separately, which means you have to remember it or write it down on a piece of paper if you don’t have a screen big enough to see both windows at once.

For instance, Macintosh allows you to add an email address as a new record in Address Book, but you can’t specify which “group” that record will be added to (which controls how the record will be synchronized to other databases). So to make sure that the record is synched to Blackberry, Plaxo, LinkedIn, and other databases. you have to remember to go to Address Book and copy the record into the right group!

I can keep for instancing, but the point is that the level of dysfunction with the Apple software promises to meet and potentially exceed the dysfunction of the Microsoft software! And we’re talking about Apple, the company that can do no wrong…

Recently, I have two experiences that have damaged my ability to do business. The first time, Apple Mail failed to send a file with two attachments that totaled about 18MB. With the help of our email hosting service, Intermedia, we tracked it to a known and discussed issue with Apple Mail’s inability to reliably and quickly deliver emails with attachments larger than about 4MB. That instance might have cost us a relationship with a new investor, because it appeared to them that we couldn’t respond in a timely manner. The second time, Apple Mail sent an email that was truncated because the attachments were placed inline in the text of the message rather than appended at the end of the text. That truncated email got sent to our limited partners and caused tremendous confusion about what we were communicating; made us look foolish with our investors.

I am completely committed to Apple’s platforms since I switched to Macintosh (in 2006) and adopted iPhone in addition to Blackberry (2008). I’m even more committed now that I bought the Snow Leopard story about Exchange integration. But I’m wondering whether Apple really does know software as well as it knows hardware and whether it can fix the issues in its software faster than Microsoft.

I made fun of the 8830 because it didn’t work in the very first country in the world that I took it to (Peru). Along with that, it didn’t have a camera; it didn’t have WiFi; it had a GPS chip that Verizon had disabled. But I’ll tell you this: It did exactly what it was supposed to do reliably and quickly.

My Blackberry Tour, on the other hand, is a total disappointment. The keyboard is smaller than the 8830 so my big fingers constantly hit two keys at once, which never happened before. Worse, the trackball is a new design — rubber instead of plastic, and it has never worked correctly. It appears to have particularly difficulty going left to right (which is really important when you try to correct mistakes made by big fat fingers). The battery life is noticeably shorter than the 8830, so now my phone runs out of juice around 4pm instead of around 8pm on a heavy-usage day. The Tour freezes regularly, either for 10-20 seconds while its processors try to sort out or in a way that requires restarting the device (which doesn’t have a physical on-off button).

The worst thing of all! Sitting right here in my office, where the 8830 worked perfectly, the Tour keeps dropping calls. I’m pretty sure that Verizon’s signal is just as strong and that they haven’t changed towers or antennas, so that means I have an upgraded device that has downgraded radio and isn’t able to maintain calls as well as the earlier device.

So I have an upgraded, much-cooler smartphone that doesn’t work very well. The processor, radio, and battery are all worse than it’s predecessor. I wonder what happened to Verizon along the way that it decided that it was wrong and it should just throw features into the Tour.

Unlike most people, I have two phones, and my other phone is an Apple iPhone 3Gs. I upgraded both phones in the same week four weeks ago. I now find I can type faster on the iPhone, with its improved keyboard software; the iPhone hasn’t crashed or frozen since I bought it; and it has a better browser, better music player, better camera, and much, much better applications platform and environment. Every time the Blackberry asks me for permission yet again to download, install or activate an application or approve its access persmissions, I keep thinking that maybe I should just say no. Installing more stuff on this Blackberry might make it slower or less reliable.

Of course, what happened along the way was the iPhone, which presented a significant competitive threat to Verizon, one that benefited AT&T and changed Verizon’s attitude toward device design. Maybe I should start thinking about porting my primary phone number to the iPhone and abandon the Blackberry entirely. If only AT&T had a network with the performance and reliability of Verizon….

Most analysts cite that Apple, as a company, sells a few percent of the personal computers sold in the world each year. Apple is selling Macintoshes at a rate of about 10M per year; PC sales worldwide were around 270M in 2008. That would make Apple’s market share around 4%. So this is the truth. But is it truth that actually matters to anyone?

The reason to care about Apple’s market share is to get a clear idea of what impact Apple has in the computer industry. The market share of computers used by people in row 12 of that Virgin American flight was 83%. Big difference between 4% and 83%. Except that neither number tells you anything about what really matters, which is: How many software developers are making Macintosh programs for sale (relative to Windows) and how many web developers believe that they need to support the Macintosh with plug-ins, testing, and design awareness?

I don’t think there is a single factory (probably including the ones that Apple pays to build Macintoshes) that buys Macintosh computers to control the manufacturing process. If that was considered a market, Apple would have 0% market share. I certainly haven’t seen any bank tellers, airline clerks, hotel clerks, or other service people using Macintosh computers. I’m almost certain that the tens of thousands of customer service people we talk to on 800 calls don’t use Macintosh computers, although I’ve never visited one of those call centers.

In other words, I don’t think it is useful to total up every personal computer sold worldwide and call that a “market”, since it is composed of multiple markets, each of which has different dynamics. The market that interests me is that one composed of people who choose, buy and install software on their own computer and of people who use their computer to engage in commercially interesting activities (like buying stuff or searching for stuff).

i’m inclined to believe (but can’t back up with statistics; any researches offering help on this are welcome!) that at least half the computer sold to run Windows in the world are not really “personal” computers. That would mean that Apple’s share of the real market is closer to 10% than 4% (since every Macintosh is bought by a human being).

And, if you imagine that Apple’s sale of Macintosh computer outside the US isn’t quite as broad as it here, you might think that Apple’s share of “the market for computer bought by human beings in the US” is even higher, closer to 15-20%. That makes Apple’s design decisions much more relevant to the current market than it would otherwise appear.

This is a company that was originally hatched in the experience of The Geek, Gilman Louie. Ever since he sold his company, Spectrum Holobyte, to Hasbro, it’s been bugging him that toys didn’t use digital technology more aggressively. When we formed our partnership in 2006, he started playing around with the idea of a company that would do just that. We worked with our first EIR, Lenny Raymond, to outline the business plan for the company. Eventually, we asked one of the team that Lenny put together to become the founder, Jordan Weisman, and he recruited Joe Lawandus to become his co-founder. Jordan is an experience entrepreneur and creative genius. Joe is an experienced general manager and toy executive with experience at Disney Toys and Cranium Toys.

We worked with Jordan and Joe to recruit executives, directors and investors and have ended up with a remarkable team: Steve Arnold, founding president of LucasArts (the game division of LucasFilms); Jim Whims, former market executive for Sony Playstation and Worlds of Wonder; Ryan McIntyre, co-founder of Excite and investor in Guitar Hero; Randy Rissman, founder of Tiger Electronics (creator of Furby); not to mention Gilman himself.

Smith & Tinker raised a significant new financing that includes DCM (Doll Capital Management) and Procter & Gamble as new investors. And now the company is ready to go to market, having introduced the online component of Nanovor and scheduled distribution of the handheld Nanoscope this fall, before the Christmas season.

“By mid-1979, the stock market was sunk in gloom, and orders for stocks, Buffett said were placed “with an eyedropper.” The Dow had languished for a decade, bucking and stalling in snorts and gasps, like a beat-up car with a faulty carburetor. Its latest stall-out took back down to the familiar territory of the mid-800s. Gerald Ford’s replacement in Washington, Jimmy Carter, wore Mister Rogers sweaters to promote energy conservation; it backfired and he seemed to embody the United States’ impotence in dealing with Iran, where the Ayatollah Khomeini had deposed the Shah. The empress would no longer waltz around the dance floor at the Iranian Embassy. A partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant released radioactive material into the atmosphere; inflation galloped at double digits; and lines formed at the gas pumps. Business Week declared “The Death of Equities,” as if no one would ever buy stocks again. A mood of deep pessimism settled on the country.”

I remember the Misery Index, which Jimmy Carter referred to often. It rose from 13% when he was elected to 22% by the time he lost to Ronald Reagan. Right now, it’s at around 11% depending on exactly when you take the measure of inflation and unemployment.