Really? Firstly there’s a trillion dollar mixed metaphor here: specific products versus categories. Facebook was obvious? Sure it was. So was MySpace and 500 other social directories dating back to AOL’’s Personal Home Page in the mid-90s. If anything the sheer obviousness of the idea was a death knell for hundreds of entrepreneurs and larger businesses until finally (for one) it wasn’t.

Google search was obvious? Of course it was – dozens of prior search engines solved the “obvious problem”. So why does Google rule search while AltaVista, Excite and dozens of others inspire chuckles, relics of our lifetime’s equivalent of the Tulip bubble. Because Google a) finally figured out a monetization model (Adwords) that was awesome and b) because Yahoo didn’t realize how important (and obvious) search was. Google was able to gain the necessary traction (as Yahoo’s search engine partner) to create the network effect needed to prime the pump and make their monetization model work. It was an obvious idea that one company out of a hundred had the smarts, timing, technology and serendipity to pull off.

Going to category versus brand, MP3 players were surely obvious – yet the category is littered with almost as many losers as search. Did the winner, Apple, have (in the authors words) “a certain zen-like ability to pay attention to what is real and authentic and timeless in the human experience.” Absolutely – in fact that was Steve Job’s strong suit. Is that why the iPod was successful? Err, no, not exactly.  Apple had something more important that lovely technology – a strange and privileged market position (a distant also ran in the PC market that normally would have been crushed by the market leader which was instead kept alive purposely by said leader to avoid being considered a monopoly). As such Apple could take their (obvious) vision of simple access to music and make it a reality over the course of many years – not via technological innovation but by staying power, deep pockets to pay lawyers, and the unique charisma of a man that allowed him to eventually win over some of the most backwards and recalcitrant executives the world has ever seen.

So back to Google Glass. I have mixed feelings on this particularly product. On the one hand, I don’t see myself wearing them, and I also really don’t think I like the idea of conversing with people who are (and thus augmenting their intelligence surreptitiously). The flip side is it’s the most obvious product I can think of – in a world where everyone carries an information access device with a screen the most obvious thing I can think of is putting the screen permanently in front of our eyes, and making the device wearable to avoid all the issues attendant with lugging around a device.

So I guess what’s obvious isn’t really obvious at all.

(and BTW the app my cousin is working on is obvious, non-creepy, and something I’d use in a heartbeat).

In the days of door to door, sales “territories” were a rep’s geographic patch. Obvious for outside reps; less so for inside but it was (and still is) a convenient method to segregate responsibilities and avoid duplication in prospecting. For inbound sales, geography is theoretically meaningless since a rep’s responsibility is to prosecute all assigned leads. Round-robin is commonly used to distribute them, allowing equal lead quantity and presumably over time equal quality so that a reps performance can be fairly graded versus his peers.

In traditional B2B sales and marketing only 20% of qualified  leads might be marketing sourced meaning the vast majority of the funnel is aligned to each rep by default via the reps prospecting activity. But when over half of the funnel is filled with marketing sourced leads (either by advertising carpet bombing or precision-guided integrated marketing), there is no default lead-sales alignment. Integrated marketing tools like Hubspot and Marketo increase the ratio of marketing sourced leads, but don’t address assigning them. There’s nothing wrong with round-robin, nor anything particularly right about it. Skills-based routing is common for call centers, but it only covers calls, if it’s used at all for sales it’s usually only for language or product. So there’s a very likely opportunity to improve revenue performance via a more sophisticated assignment method than round-robin.

What are more optimal methods? They’ll vary by product and sales force; the answer will be in the CRM data (assuming the lead origin, descriptive data and win/loss data is tracked and valid). What might they be?

• Geography – yup, geography still matters. The combination of a familiar accent on the phone and local knowledge greatly helps in building rapport.
• Industry – vertical segmentation is very powerful; accrued domain knowledge and personal reference stories in a prospects industry are a massive credibility advantage, and lead naturally to a solution focused sale even with reps who aren’t trained in a SS methodology.
• Non-vertical domain – an understanding of the buyer’s role based on job title is helpful, particularly in Enterprise sales where a specific organizational buyer can be a key player in the selection of horizontal technologies (eg VP Sales when selecting screen share services).
• Heat – a rep who is weaker on rapport building but stronger on closing might struggle with ice cold leads but excel with warmer ones that have a referral connection built in.

These are a few relatively obvious ones – there are more subtle ones as well, specific to each industry or product.  As an example sex. Political correctness aside it often matters. Managing it is tricky; even trickier because it can work either way. Some buyers in male dominated fields have a credibility bias against women (but this can work in the favor of a woman who can overcome it).  With other products the natural male-female dynamic works in favor of female reps.

Since every company wants to sell more at lower cost, improving sales effectiveness is universally desirable. But its deeper than the intuitively obvious benefits because the sales close rate is often the highest leverage point in the entire prospect/customer life cycle.  The financial benefits of optimizing the sales process ripple throughout the P&L and more every day because social media increases this leverage via a winner take all effect (particularly in the SMB space where business owners are often intimately involved in purchase decisions). Every prospect that purchases an alternative product becomes a likely advocate for that competitor, and SMBs are particularly active in seeking recommendations from their trusted circle.

What are the hard numbers?  The difference between poor, average and stellar close rates on qualified leads can be over 2.5X: 15% at the low end to 40% at the high end – with the same product.  That translates to an opportunity to double revenue growth or add 3% – 5% to EBIT ( in a company that spends 15% of revenue on sales and marketing).

That’s worth a scotch and cigar!!

Every now and then you see an article with Congress’s approval rating which has hovered, for the last few years, between 10% and 15%. My response to this is “who are these 10%-15% who think they’re going a good job?”  Before last year’s state of the union address I was at a gathering where the conversation turned to the SOTU and someone opined that the best result for the future of the US would be a massive bomb strike on the Capitol which eliminated the entire sitting Congress in one fell swoop – and nobody including me could disagree. This wasn’t a Tea Party or militia meeting but a group of executives and entrepreneurs. Pretty ghastly.

Well, for what it’s worth, after listening to Senator Warner, I have a different feeling today. The Senator is a successful, funny and gracious man which made his session very entertaining. But more to the point, it was clear that he was someone who a) truly understands the gravity of the issues this country faces, b) is serving not for personal gain as it seems so many of our leaders are but truly as a matter of public service, c) wants to do the right things, not the politically expedient things, and d) is a patriot, not a partisan. In particular, the need to unleash the entrepreneur to create jobs and innovate solutions to our pressing problems via intelligent regulation that unfetters small business. As well as patent reform and reshaping fiscal policy to not only reign in Federal spending but address the gross macro-level misallocations of capital which our current fiscal policies promote.

I know many of those in attendance last night share this view. As I said, my original thought was I wished it was our usual intimate gathering; now I only wish more people could have been there. The Senator closed by paraphrasing a Churchill quote that I was familiar with, but worried was a vestige of an earlier time: “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.”  Thank you Senator Warner for restoring my faith that it still may be true.

PS – I am not long Senator Warner, have not donated to his campaigns (but likely will), and am not lobbying for his support on anything other than doing the right thing which he appears to be trying his damndest to.

A year back there was a lot of angst about Groupon’s marketing spend at around 50% of revenue. Now that’s dropped to around 10% in North America, higher internationally (where they anticipate much of their future growth). They deserve credit here – they projected spend to drop to 20%, and they over-achieved it within the span of a year.

What intrigues me is their sales force and their core customer: the merchant. Again, back to my post from last November. Kudos to Forrester ‘s Sucharita Mulpuru, quoted in the NY Times: “They think their customer is Joe Smith who buys the Groupon,” Ms. Mulpuru said. “But the customer is the merchant. They have been focusing on the wrong person.”

Exactly!!!

Looking at the US, Groupon has about 1,000 sales people and in Q4 2012 generated $166M in revenue on $509M in merchant sales. The gross margin on revenue was 84%. Fabulous!

The problem (or potential problem) of course is that with take rate declining, SMB’s facing tail winds (the number of employer SMBs continues to drop – back to my prior post about Goliath being on a roll), deal fatigue, and lack of recurring revenue from individual 3rd party merchants, maintaining this business snapshot looks problematic.

I’m not privy to Groupon’s internal sales metrics but back of the envelope math says each rep was responsible for about $53,000 a month in gross revenue (at aforementioned 84% margin). These are very familiar numbers to me – it’s about exactly what a decent SMB focused cloud communications business looks like! Again – a fine (actually spectacular) business – as long as your market is growing, you have recurring revenue from your base, and can control the marketing portion of your customer acquisition spend.

Marketing spend dropped as projected, but SG&A still hovers around 50%. Going back to the cloud communications metric, I don’t think that’s a healthy number.  40% max would be –  and given the nature of what they’re selling 35% seems doable.

And so that’s where I think the rubber hits the road in the future for Groupon and Living Social. They’ve built an amazing business in some ways but with a core business model that appears perishable. Yet they have an incredible asset – a huge base of SMB businesses that are IMHO their real customer and a professional sales force to sell to them. Sales forces are very expensive to maintain, and SMB’s don’t spend a lot of dough. That (and the macroeconomics noted above) is why virtually no-one cares about the micro SMB anymore. But both Living Social and Groupon have boatloads of them and a sales force to service them, and to me that’s their greatest untapped opportunity and potentially most valuable long term asset.

• Information technology has allowed big players to travel further and further down the long tail to fill niches they’d otherwise ignore as table scraps
• Communications technology has vastly increased the potential span of control for a given organization
• Capital is both cheap and easily available for large businesses but inaccessible or frightfully expensive to smaller ones
• Greater economies of scale created by all of the above

So, the question for entrepreneurs and those looking for the outsize investment returns that come when small wins, when can David beat Goliath?

As in many things, Fred Wilson has a very interesting take on this:.

After reading it, it really resonated with some of my personal experiences:

• When we created InternetMCI, we used Yahoo (with their directory of 25,000 web sites) as the content “portal”. MCI had the opportunity to buy Yahoo at that time for, as I recall, $3 million dollars. We at Proxicom said we could build the directory for under a million. Ultimately, though, the decision was to do neither in favor working with existing old media directories like TV Guide and various yellow pages since those were presumed to be the ultimate winners in monetizing context. This helped Yahoo build their credibility and critical mass.
• Once Yahoo became big and the iconic brand on the early web, they scoffed at the idea that consumers would embrace search rather than a directory. But to cover their bases they added a search option – using Google. This helped Google build their credibility and critical mass.
• When we did Borders initial web store, we knew there was an upstart called Amazon that was planning a million title bookstore. Borders was very concerned about their brand and didn’t feel the web could duplicate the Borders in-store experience, and they scoffed at the notion that a web-based upstart could be a serious threat. Given that we suggested they put their “deep” catalog of special order books on the web store to start – that way consumers could get the best of both worlds. Rather, they chose to only put the NY Times best sellers on the web (books that you could not only get at Borders but often in supermarkets and department stores). Unlike many other retailers, Borders wasn’t taken by surprise by the web – they were there day zero, even before Amazon. They just scoffed at the idea that a web-based upstart could be a meaningful threat.
• When Twitter first appeared it was basically an SMS blast service. Any one of the wireless carriers could have put them out of business instantly by offering cross-service SMS blast. But they scoffed at the idea that there was any real value in this (and to be fair do did I).
• Conversely, once VoIP became a viable option to replace landline voice, the RBOCs realized their massive and massively profitable wireline revenues were in serious jeopardy. They didn’t scoff at it. Rather they fought back – hard. But they did it in their fashion – not though product innovation, but via litigation, obfuscation and lobbying for protective legislation. And so they basically bludgeoned the competitive industry either to death or into a coma, long enough to create a soft landing strategy for their wireline businesses and replacement revenue streams in connectivity, wireless, and in some cases content.

And so I think Fred Wilson hit it on the head when he wrote “The more I hear people laughing at, deriding, and dismissing something the more I think it is likely to be a big deal.” When people are sneering at David, he might just be able to bring down Goliath.

iTunes Match is a bit different – it’s a paid subscription ($24.99 a year). But it’s a consumer content service, so not mission critical (unlike say actual TV service when there’s an important football game on).

B2B is a different story. In the salad days of competitive telecom providers used to trumpet their reliability – partly because there wasn’t any other way to differentiate “quality” in a commodity service, and partly because their customers actually cared. They say hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. A close second is a business that loses its phone or internet service. If you haven’t lived it, trust me you don’t want to. Except if you’re in the software business, you’re going to have to.

In a modern software company with agile development new product iterations are measured in weeks, not months (or years like they might be in telecom). And with competitive pressures based on features, a short dev cycle has historically been a key performance vector for early stage enterprise software firms, and a competitive advantage over their larger competitors. However, short dev cycles means more upgrades, and more upgrades means…..more potential for service outages. And they will happen.

So the cloud brings up a paradox:
• availability is a key service metric and customers will consider perfect reliability table stakes
• it enables far faster implementation of new features, increasing the competitive pressure to roll out new features , presenting a major challenge to reliability.

Which is why I think anyone who’s worked in VoIP for the last decade is uniquely positioned to navigate this paradox and win in the cloud. They’ve addressed this issue head on – delivering software as a service where the standard of excellence is near perfect available (the one saving grace of plain old telephone service). If they’ve been in the business for any times they’ll have the tire tracks on their back to prove it

I actually am a big fan of the daily deal model that Groupon rode to its’ stellar growth (and hat tip to Living Social, their local competitor). In fact I kick myself for not doing it right about the time they (Groupon) did. Because I, and a few others, had already seen the irresistible power of uber-deals combined with variety and good content – over 10 years before Groupon was founded (as The Point, prior to their group buying epiphany). Back in the absolute earliest days of the web when Office Max was getting a cash register ring a week online, a weekly deals site called Andy’s Garage was killing it (relatively speaking). Each week Andy’s sent out on an email with massive discounts on a huge variety of merchandise which were overstocks and returns and such from the Fingerhut catalog. The deals were all over the map – comforters, lamps, coffee pots, whatever. The beauty of it was that a) the prices were really low, b) you had no idea what would be in the next email, and c) the stuff in many cases was the sort of stuff your Grandma would buy, but really good copy gave it a camp feel that won the “kids” over with the kitsch –they’d buy the toaster cozy even though they didn’t have a toaster. Cause it was a six-pack cozy!

(Props to Matt Smith for the vintage pic)

Of course, killing it was relative. Nobody sold enough of anything in the 90s to move the needle for a major brand. Some kept at it and invested heavily knowing it was the future, willing to pay for the education. Others, like Fingerhut with Andy’s garage, didn’t have the attention span to keep at it.

At the same time there were all kinds of other wacky online “businesses” focused on gaining subscribers. Eyeballs were the coin of the realm of the time (for idiots anyway), and so lots of schemes were hatched to attract them. Including selling stuff for below cost. Cause you know, you’d make it up on volume. The logic of course in many cases was that you’d make it up with advertising revenue. Except prior to Google and AdWords, online advertising didn’t actually work. So instead you just burned wads of venture capital subsidizing loss leaders (and great parties, and Super Bowl ads).

So, what’s different about Groupn and Living Social? They’re not subsidizing the loss leaders – their merchant customers are! In fact, they’re profiting handsomely (at least in gross margin terms). Now of course this isn’t sustainable if the merchants aren’t benefiting, and therein lies their current predicament. The rap is that daily deal shoppers are exactly that…….deal shoppers. So rather than becoming loyal repeat customers that the merchant has paid dearly to acquire via their steep discount and the huge vig to the deal site, they just move on to the next deal. True? Depends who you talk to.

Notice Groupon has rocketed to become a $2B plus company but only now with these latest cuts have they become profitable, and only just. So where’s all that money going – as great as your parties may be even the Sultan of Brunei couldn’t burn a billion dollars in a year on them. The money is of course funding a sales force – a massive one. 6,000+ reps. And that to me is why there’s a lot to be bullish on (with one macro-economic caveat which I’ll get to).

There are over 7 million small businesses in the US, and over 20 million if you count SOLO home based businesses. A massive market – but one that is notoriously hard to reach and serve profitably. I know – I’ve spend the last decade doing it. There are lots of reasons why it’s so hard. These businesses are spread out everywhere. In most cases they’re counting every nickel that comes in and doing everything they can to spend fewer of them. They’re capital constrained. And they buy with a cost-benefit paradox that’s hard to understand unless you’ve served them – they’re absolutely loathe to spend, even on things that are almost certain to improve their bottom line, and have a huge bias to inertia even when offered the opportunity to save money. And they expect to be served like Enterprise customers while paying like consumers. A repair shop owner who pays $150/month for his home cable bill will staidly wait half an hour on the phone when he has a home service problem. But for his $150 business phone service if you don’t answer his call within a minute – and resolve his problem within 10 more – he’s threatening multi-million dollar lawsuits over the money he’s lost while his $300,000 a year business was down for 20 minutes.

But if (big if) that business owner knows and trusts you, he will buy from you. In fact, I’ve found that’s the absolute most important thing in making an SMB sale – trusted validation. That was what we leveraged at ACN – the relationships of over 100,000 independent reps. We didn’t want the reps selling relatively sophisticated business services; we knew we couldn’t train and manage them sufficiently well to do that. Rather, all we asked was they tell their SMB decision making friends that they were representing a company that had services that could improve their business and save them money, and then had a trained solution sales rep take it from there.

So, back to Groupon. With 6,000+ sales reps and the infrastructure to educate and manage them, they’re incredibly well positioned (as is Living Social) to sell things to SMBs. With the caveat of course that they can transmogrify their sales reps from one trick ponies to accommodate the broader array of goods and services that SMBs buy. And give them the products and relationship capital to become trusted.

And then there is that macro-economic caveat: SMBs are under economic siege from many angles. Consumers discretionary spending power continues to be eroded by exploding health and basic living costs, and by and large these are now the purview of large companies. And for the discretionary spending that’s left, e-commerce from major brands is taking a larger and larger share – including of course, Groupon.  Groupon’s key growth area is now Groupon Goods, selling things direct to consumers and putting them in direct competition with SMB retailers who funded their growth.  Basically, in the long term, Groupon wants to be Costco. And personally I think they (and Living Social) have a fair shot to pull it off.

Oh, and back for a moment to Andy’s Garage. Fingerhut has had a lot of ups and downs since then, changed ownership a number of times, and changed their name to Bluestem. They’re really less of a retailer than a financial services firm now – focused on customers with no credit history, and selling them goods paid over time (at 24.9 percent interest ). They were about to go public this time last year, but decided the market wasn’t ripe. And their owner? Bain Venture Capital. Score another one for Mitt!

Right out the gate one thing is obvious:  nobody of any importance actually attempted to use the system prior to launch. That’s easy to see since there was no redirect from a regular web URL to the secure one. And approximately 99% of non-geek users will go to a non-secure HTTP address even when instructed otherwise.  There are a lot of things Mitt could have learned from Reagan, although who’da thunk product management would be one of them. But even if they missed Product Launch 101, if they’d have listened to Reagan they’d know you need to Trust, But Verify.

What does this mean in product launch terms? That someone (preferably a lot of someone’s with something of Orca’s scale, including at least one with enough bars on their shoulder to get things fixed fast if they’re wrong) needs to go through the exact same “out of the box” experience as the user before the product is launched. Yes, this can be tough with tight deadlines, and it’s tedious. In Europe we did this every single time, for every new product in every single country – all 16 of them. Each time, we went through the e-commerce purchase experience, charged various local credit and debit cards, checked our bill, checked the card processing, looked at the shipping advisory, and waited till the boxes showed up at friendly customers after which we had them shipped back and had people with local language skills open the box and check the instructions. This always included senior staff, and that often included me (who was running the operation).

The product flaws aside, there was also a stunning omission from the process documentation – they forgot to tell volunteers they needed to pick up their poll watcher certificate, causing many of them to be turned away. They provided an Election Day checklist, but this critical item was omitted – instead, there were duplicate entries for “Chair (if allowed by poll manager)” as seen below.

With the prominence of God in the Republican platform, you’d think they knew God is in the details. David Lee Roth could have taught them about that with his infamous “brown M&Ms” clause in the Van Halen tour contract rider – whereby there needed to be a bowl of M&Ms back stage, with all the brown ones removed. His motivation wasn’t vanity. Rather, Van Halen had nine tractor trailers of equipment they’d take to each show – even smaller venues that were used to, at maximum, three. The scale of the performance meant there were hundreds of details about power capacity and distribution, weight that the stage needed to support, the size of doors, etc. The brown M&M clause was buried in the middle of all of these instructions, and served as a test. If the band arrived and saw no M&Ms, or a bowl of M&Ms with brown ones still in it, they knew the instructions hadn’t been reviewed in detail.

If someone who knew what they were doing had taken a look at the Election Day checklist, they would have easily caught this monstrous error. And having found such an obvious and critical error, if they knew how to launch a great product, they’d have identified it as a red flag for an end to end deep dive. Oops.

A couple months back Mitt said that Tesla made a pretty car but he was sure that the big auto makers would be able to make a better electric vehicle. That was a real head scratcher, given that pretty much every recent tech innovation of importance has come from an upstart or the little guy – like Apple was before they dethroned Microsoft. Well, maybe at least Mitt and the Red team will rethink that now. Apparently the design lead on Orca was……….Microsoft.

Last time I fully understood. While I think McCain wouldd have been a much better president, 8 years of the disaster that was W, a shattered economy, and the Republicans Gone Wild Congress made the promise of something different irresistible. But this time? I don’t see anything about Obama’s record or platform that gives the slightest indication that there’s better things to come.

I think Microsoft versus Apple is an appropriate comparison. Apple makes great products, even greater because they stand (or stood) in such sharp contrast to the Microsoft alternatives (and to be fair in the mobile market many other companies as well). But the latest Apple products, the iPhone5 and iPad Mini, aren’t innovations of the kind Apple built their brand on – just tweaked evolutions of prior products. But unlike those prior products, there are viable and many would say better (certainly on a price performance basis) competitors for these products. And they still generated the kind of enthusiasm any other company would kill for. People waited in line as is now de rigueur, and even threw out perfectly good last generation iPhones to get the new one which at best is a marginal upgrade and at worst is a downgrade (maps fiasco) and requires you to buy all new accessories.

Which brings us to Microsoft. I hear all kinds of great things about Windows 8. Walt Mosberg says it works well and is slick and modern, and the idea of a unified operating system that runs across all your devices makes tons of sense. But would I (personally) consider buying a device that uses it? No way. Not for one second.

Why? Because as good as their new OS might be, I (and millions of others) associate Microsoft with an old way of doing things, poor quality, and frustration. Now the reality is that my Wndows 7 laptop pretty much works just fine. It suffers (albeit less so) from creeping Windows disease where the device inexplicably slows down and gets balkier over time, but then again I haven’t done a thing to it. Because after years of pain and anxiety whenever I added new software or upgraded the OS I’m too scared to change anything. Contrast that to Apple where I upgrade constantly – and while I’m not one of them many people not only are willing to patch and upgrade, but excited to do it.

So, back to the election. I know all kinds of smart, college educated people who enthusiastically support Obama yet who are scared to death of the economic implications of our runaway Federal spending, who fear the nanny state, and who understand the need for rejuvenated private sector growth (primarily in small businesses) to propel the nation forward. People who, like the liberal voters of Massachusetts, would vote for a centrist Mitt Romney (albeit with trepidation because of his background in profit creating but destructive arbitrage) . But they didn’t. Because the Presidential candidate Romney wasn’t Governor Romney. He may be a superb leader with a proven ability to get things done, but that’s not what he represented. Like Windows 8, his “goodness” was overshadowed by his brand – the same fear and distrust that saddles Microsoft. In this case of course it was by the Republican’s scary stances on social issues like same sex marriages, women’s rights, and creationism, and a pervasive sense that they’re willing and maybe even eager to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of national security or to legislate their vision of morality.

Meanwhile, like Apple (currently), Obama presented nothing new, and unlike the current Apple, he has no blockbuster “products” that provide a rational basis for his legion of fandom. But like Apple a decade ago, simply providing an alternative to a legacy of fear, frustration and dysfunction was enough to keep him in business. And a slicker, friendlier, veneer – in Obama’s case understanding the issues of the common citizen, like Apples “it just works.”
Exit polls show over half of voters yesterday think the US is seriously on the wrong track. Yet they re-elected an incumbent with a shocking level of enthusiasm. The lesson is one that all marketing people understand well – FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) trumps all. And the Republican’s lunatic fringe insistence on legislating their vision of morality, combined with lingering uncertainty and doubt about their veracity from their obstructionist behavior in Congress and years of drunken sailor spending under W, was more than enough FUD to cost them a second election.

BTW, in case anyone cares, I voted for Gary Johnson.

In fact, with all due apologies to Apple and their nifty iPhone, the Open Handset Alliance is probably the most important development in wireless in the last 10 years. For all the iPhones coolness, it actually furthered most of the things that suck so bad about wireless: locked hardware, phone tied to a netwrok, applications that even when cool are still separate and unequal from what you use on your desktop every day, and an unnatural wall between voice calling and other apps. In fact, the more I think about it, unless Apple can get out of their 5 year deal with AT&T, the iPhone should soon be relegated to the graveyard of “missed it by that much” devices like the Newton.

The reality is that your portable phone-like thing is just way too much of a phone-like thing than it should be. My 12 year old daughter could care less about whether she can talk on her phone; just don’t take away her ability to text, her camera, and games. Ask her what would be really cool to add on and she’d say access to MySpace. The talking part is just a bonus. She and millions of her generation are as tied to their cell phone and provider as their grandfathers were to their wallets – yet they don’t care about talking. And they can only do what their provider lets them do. It’s pretty bizarre. We all know it shouldn’t be that way. I think Android is the first step to changing it.