The problem with this is what can you actually DO on a phone?

I’ll tell you what’s going on here. I’ve been in the business and the IT world (and have worked on both sides of the fence) for a while, so it’s pretty obvious.

This guy owns a company that attempts to create and market native phone/mobile apps to businesses. But by “businesses” of course this means executives because they are the ones who make the decisions.

Most regular workers have absolutely no use for the the types of mobile apps that would interest executives and never will – can’t get any real work done on a phone.

But executives though they look busy don’t actually do work as most people think of it. Trust me, I have been one so I know very well that this is true.

Executives care about looking (mostly glancing) at other people’s work, keeping track of schedules and appointments, reviewing Powerpoints and other presentations, and perhaps glancing at a PDF. And oh yeah, being on endless conference calls. All of these things can be done on a phone. Some poorly, but they can be done.

If I’d just had an executive title only I could’ve done my entire job on a phone. So could most other execs.

But regular workers just can’t.  That doesn’t matter, though, because in a company it’s the execs who make the decisions. The writer of this article – and who knows why the hell it got published in Wired – only has to convince executives that there is a new paradigm, that everyone can use phones to get all their work done, that PCs and the evil IT* department can be banished forevermore!

Of course it’s not true but the writer of the article doesn’t have to care about true. He just has to care about making the sale for his company.

So that is what’s really going on there. Why some self-interested marketing tripe like that got published in Wired, I’ll never know.

*Though IT departments can be restrictive and small-minded, most people have just no idea how much most IT departments prevent absolutely fucking harebrained schemes cooked up (in a meth lab, apparently) by MBA executives from being inflicted on the company. Just no idea.

I’ve seen several people in the past arguing that the media company’s responses to online piracy – suing their best customers and making content harder to access –is rational.

Another of those strange definitions of rationality.

This article isn’t one of those types luckily, but it does go too much for the typical journalism “fair and balanced” sophistry.

“It is difficult to compete with free,” he added.

No, it’s actually really really easy to compete with free.

Offer a service with no DRM, no monitoring, and not tied to a single device with – most importantly – all the content there is and people will sign up for it in droves. In absolute fucking droves.

And pay for it. Hell, I’d pay quite a lot for that. Probably $100 a month if it included music, movies and TV shows. I’d rather pay less, but there you go.

Someone in the article to which I linked though really gets at what drives piracy.

There is another obstacle to stopping illegal downloads, said Andre Swanston, the chief executive of Tru Optik, the media analytics firm. People want access to everything, anytime, and there is little to stop them from having it. “Even if you added Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Prime, Sony Crackle and everything else combined, that is still less content available legally than illegally,” he said. “The popularity of piracy has nothing to do with cost — it is all about access.”

Hard to buy something if ain’t nobody selling it! If you pirate something, you can almost always find it. And it’s more convenient and just works. Quite the opposite when you look for something “legal.” Then it’s a nightmare of DRM, streaming woes and unavailability.

It’s as I said actually really easy to compete with free. Just these companies don’t want to do it.

What’s puzzling is that they could make money hand over fist, far more than they make now, just by making a few rational decisions (not the “rational” ones where they sue their own customers). But they choose not to. Why? I understand the profit motive. But I don’t understand this.

I’m going to mourn when I must use the new Google Maps, when they finally  disallow using the old interface.

I’ll probably still use the new version, though I’ll try to use Bing Maps and others when I don’t need Streetview data.

The new GM interface is just so terrible and user-hostile. Of course, it’s not for me – it’s to make life easier for advertisers and therefore more profitable for Google.

Google is now so dominant they can do whatever they want, so they will.

Calling copyright infringement stealing is like calling killing a video game character “capital murder.”

Propaganda works, folks.

If I didn’t love a lot of the work that comes with IT, there’s no way I could do it.

Let’s face it, reviewing the procedure that EIGRP uses for “deciding” how to route traffic in a network is pretty boring. As is a lot of the rest of IT.

I’m renewing some of my old and expired certs and that’s just part of the process. Has to be done.

But it’s cool building new things when you get the chance to. Not many people realize it but  when you build a new network and server architecture and all the associated other bits of infrastructure to go with it, if it’s more complicated than just a few devices you’re often creating something that no one has ever built before in just that way.

It might not be glamorous and if it works well no one even notices, but what you’ve built is most likely unique in the world.

That’s the less egotistic part.

The other part I enjoy is having seen enough and learned enough to stroll into some place where smart people have been working on a problem for hours or days and then I fix it in five minutes.

Having a really good memory and knowing enough to actually realize where the problem is (and being great at ignoring irrelevant details) allows me to do that bit of conjury at better than the rate of chance. And I like it when it happens, I’m not gonna lie.

Everyone should get to feel like a superhero once in a while, right?