Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Last time we looked at Apple’s conversion from a computer company to a phone company that also makes computers. We considered why Apple doesn’t give a damn about enterprise sales, which explains their embrace of third-party enterprise components like Microsoft’s Exchange Server. Now we’ll look closer still at what plans — if any — Apple even has for personal computers in its future.

With impeccable timing, Mrs. Cringely last week stood in line four hours at the Apple Store to get her new iPhone 4. The line was cheerful, she said, Apple provided umbrellas to protect customers from the sun, bottles of water, and even pizza. I think the bottles of water were key in this case because the only way I have ever seen Charlestonians be willing to stand in line is if the drinks are free.

Her iPhone 4 is significantly faster, the screen is pretty and the unit feels heftier in the hand but we can’t say much else yet. It’s too soon. We can say plenty, however, about how Apple managed to create a publicity frenzy by faking a product shortage that turned out not to really exist.

In retrospect Mrs. Cringely wishes she’d stayed home and bought the phone at her leisure a week later.

An integral part of iPhone 4 mania, of course, is the new operating system — iOS 4. Remember how important it once was for Apple to claim that the iPhone was running OS X? What happened to that? Is iOS 4 a version of OS X or not? And what does this apparent OS bifurcation mean for the non-portable product line? Is OS X going away?

OS X is here for now, I’m told, and iOS 4 is still OS X but specifically for the new A4 chip and others of its family that will shortly appear. We’ll see non-portable A4 products from Apple and they’ll run iOS 4, too, establishing it as a kind of consumer electronic operating system for the company. This bifurcation and differentiation is key to understanding both Apple’s strategy and the philosophy — yes, philosophy — that underlies it.

One of the first non-portable iOS 4 devices we’ll see, I predict, will look a heck of a lot like the new Mac Mini. Steve Jobs, who loves to play language games as long as he controls them, says there are no plans to update the AppleTV. Yet Engadget is all aflutter with talk of an iOS-based AppleTV (essentially an iPad without a screen). I think the new Mac Mini effectively is the next AppleTV. Notice they never did call it the MacTV. With the new Mac Mini already sharing a common form factor with the AppleTV, I can imagine an A4-based version appearing shortly at a $299 price running iOS 4. Expect to link an iPhone or iTouch to this A4-based AppleTV as a remote control device.

And get ready for a big leap of strategic thinking from Cupertino.

The number one game console in the USA is Nintendo’s Wii, primarily because it has a Bluetooth-connected motion-sensing remote control. Well iPhones and iPod Touches have Bluetooth, too — and WiFi, accelerometers, and now even gyroscopes. A Mini-turned-AppleTV controlled by the installed base of tens of millions of iPhones and iPod Touches is a game market waiting to be exploited. Yes, the “console” costs more (for now) but thanks to the App Store the games can cost less, making the total user expenditure the same or less. It’s the old Return-On-Investment (ROI) argument only applied to games.

Video games are the one huge market Apple has yet to touch and the last one where Microsoft can still pretend to contend for technology leadership. A $299 AppleTV that has a serious content strategy, HD-Wii performance, and good games priced from $2.99-$6.99 would kick ass at Christmas. Yes, it is too expensive and the games are too puny for real gamers, but not too expensive or too puny to sell the 2-4 million units Apple likes when entering any new market.

That’s $1 billion in easy Christmas revenue for Apple from what’s essentially a marketing head feint.

Phones, games, TV’s — Apple’s future clearly lies with consumer electronics, not with personal computers as we have long thought of them. With Windows 8 reportedly aiming directly for OS X, Apple needs to be where Windows is not — which is in the home in consumer devices too cheap for an effective OEM strategy.

Apple needs to distinguish itself yet again in a world moving very quickly toward computer ubiquity.

How ordinary.

And so the PC business is no longer of any real interest for Steve Jobs because he sees no future in it. Steve isn’t one for sentimentality, especially when there are competitors to be crushed.

If Apple can no longer show a discernible difference in user experience between OS X and Windows 8, then much of the Apple magic will be gone. So he has to move ahead before he is left behind.  There is room for neither sentimentality nor inertia.

The digital kids of today are growing tired of things the way they were. So Apple is using the iPhone and iPad to move information, content creation, and entertainment out of the old world and into a new one. The way Steve prevents the logo on the box syndrome is to leave the box behind. Its both brilliant and inevitable.

Competitors that still think strictly in terms of individual features and form factors won’t grasp the significance of what’s going-on here. Steve is out to make them obsolete. Apple has mothballed the whole notion of vying for computer market share and is instead moving as fast as it can to redefine the whole computing model for consumers using networked mobile devices.

Remember when Ballmer talked through his hat a few years ago about how Microsoft was headed to a model of Windows based primarily on ad revenue? There’s no way in Hell that business model can be sustained for Windows or the PC (or for Macs, either). But make the platform cost $199 and be replaced every 24 months, build-in mobile subscription revenue, MobileMe subscription revenue, content revenue, app revenue and ad revenue, with none of those involving much effort or expense on Apple’s part at all and the future becomes clear.

And Apple plans to own it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

In January, 2007, just days before announcing the iPhone, Apple Computer dropped the word “computer” from its name. Pundits noted the passage though it didn’t seem like much at the time. But we were wrong. Apple had consciously and very deliberately entered a whole new era without our even noticing. It was a change toward phones and content distribution and away from computers. We couldn’t know it at the time but Apple was also forsaking the professional customers who had kept it alive in the company’s darkest days — those desktop publishers, artists, musicians, and moviemakers. Apple was no longer their company.

Mac sales today represent just under 24 percent of Apple revenue with 40 percent coming from the iPhone alone. Apple is a phone company that makes computers. It is also the largest music retailer in America and one of the largest video retailers. The implications of these changes are being felt throughout the company.

We will probably never again see a Mac Pro computer release on the Apple home page. In fact I expect this current Mac Pro form factor to be the last tower they make…… ever. The lineup will be iMac, Macbook Pro, Macbook, and Mac Mini. Firewire will die when USB 3.0 arrives, though I’d much prefer Apple embrace eSATA, but probably not.

USB 3.0 is a big deal for Apple because if you are going to embrace generic hardware that hardware had darned well better keep up with the competition. So the next generation of Macs will come with USB 3.0, from the top of the line to bottom. Apple simply can’t allow their competitors any significant lead in USB 3.0 deployment. Customers complaining that their daughter’s Dell has USB 3.0 and their MacBook Pro does not won’t be allowed to happen.

As for software in this emerging era, Final Cut Studio will run just fine on a quad iMac — well, most of it at any rate. Apple can work out the kinks once they decide how much they want to advance forward with the next version. What I wonder is whether that version will be more — or less — capable than the current?  Remember how they’ve dumbed down iMovie?  Expect more of the same.

For video users, Apple’s Intermediate Codec will go away in favor of editing AVCHD movies natively like iPhone 4 does already. Log and transfer will come with the choice of using ProRes transcoding or not in the next version of Final Cut Studio. Customers — the great unwashed masses of consumer and prosumer customers, not Hollywood — are tired of not being able to just plug in their camera, drag over their clips and go to work. iMovie will go AVCHD-native, too.

Apple is trying to push Final Cut Pro into a more consumer space. That’s clear from the video clip of Steve Jobs, above. Apple has been dropping their pro apps prices for a while and now we know why. Getting more and more individual users instead of enterprise users (organizations) is the goal. So as long as the Pro Apps can somehow mold to Jobs’s romantic ideal of a consumer user base, they get to stay. Otherwise, who knows? He likes FCP users as individuals but appears to no longer have any interest in production houses or TV stations.

They just aren’t his bag.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Accidents happen to the best of companies.  It is how those companies respond to big industrial accidents — how they learn and change as a result of those lessons — that shows the quality of an organization.  One of the many readers to comment to me this week on BP’s situation in the Gulf of Mexico put it in the context of his own experience working as an engineer at Monsanto Chemical.  His lesson is so compelling that I have reproduced it below in its entirety — Bob.

In 1947 a tanker blew up in Texas City harbor, ironically the same city where BP had a big refinery accident in 2005.  The 1947 explosion leveled Monsanto’s plant, killed hundreds and destroyed thousands of homes.  It registered on seismographs as far away as Denver. While the accident was not Monsanto’s fault, it alerted management to the destructive power of a chemical process and provided the motivation to get super serious about safety.  Of course back then most of the company’s management had engineering degrees and thoroughly understood the chemistry and physics involved.  That, too, is probably a big difference with today’s industry.  Few executives today have engineering or science degrees.

When I joined Monsanto in the late ’70′s they put their new hires through a three day course on the company.  A couple hours were dedicated to the 1947 Texas City disaster — what happened, what the company learned, what the company does today.  Industry often deals with dangerous processes, hazardous materials, and tremendous amounts of energy.  The slightest mistake can cause a disaster.

Monsanto established a very effective safety culture after Texas City.  They developed technology to better control chemical process.  They developed standards to built safer facilities.  They didn’t do this alone.  They worked closely with other chemical companies.  The whole industry invested in best practices and shared what they learned.  When I started my job I was given a set of “standards” consisting of 3 binders, each 6 inches thick — serious reading.

A couple months after Bhopal we were given a briefing.  A team had reverse-engineered Union Carbide’s process and from the press reports managed to piece together a pretty complete picture of what happened.  After the briefing an existing company policy was reiterated — all plants are to be built to USA or local country safety standards, whichever is better.  Even if the local country does not have safety standards, Monsanto’s are to have world class safety.  No exceptions.

About a year after Bhopal a blue ribbon team had just finished a company wide review of Monsanto’s operations.  They identified and rated all hazardous operations and materials used by the company, and assessed the risk if an accident occurred.  The result of the study was sweeping changes in how much material was stored in each facility.  Many processes and lines of business were deemed too risky to continue and were shut down.  Monsanto walked away from tens of millions in business to reduce risk and improve safety.

Months later the CEO implemented a number of new programs.  For the first time in the industry, Monsanto invited the local community into its facilities to show them what the company did.  What materials were used.  What products were produced.  They equipped and trained local emergency response teams and hospitals to be better prepared for an accident.  The CEO announced a plan to further reduce emissions by 90 percent, far exceeding EPA rules.  If a process could not meet the new company rules or was too expensive to retrofit, it was shut down.  Again the company shut down tens of millions of production.

The message was loud and clear.  The company would be a good citizen.  It would operate its plants safely.  It would constantly try to reduce emissions.  And if it couldn’t it would rather shut down that business.  The emphasis was on results, not words.

Now, what the heck is BP doing?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Readers reacted strongly to yesterday’s column about how to use Google AdWords/AdSense to punish BP through its web advertising effort aimed at influencing public opinion. Rather than respond through the comments I think this subject warrants a column of its own because I’d rather address the AdWords/AdSense click fraud aspect of the subject and leave BP and oil spills out of it for now.

The crux of reader concerns come down to the idea that a publisher asking readers to click on ads violates Google’s terms of service and risks that site being banned from AdSense. It probably does violate Google’s terms of service, but then so do many things that happen on the web and frankly I don’t particularly care.

Look at the ads on this page, for example. I have no idea what ads you are seeing or even who the advertisers are. The ads on this page are served by IDG Technet. But your clicking on those ads pays private school tuition for my three sons so I hope you will click on any ads you find interesting.

Hey, did I just violate Google’s terms of service?

Yes I did, just like tens of thousands of other sites do that dare to refer to the ad content of their pages.

I doubt that Google will punish me, though. And I frankly don’t care that much if they do because Google isn’t the only game in town when it comes to Internet advertising, though we all act as though they are.

Google’s AdSense policy of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell is hypocritical, but then so too are most of Google’s other opaque policies. Everything with Google is algorithmic yet the algorithm is never defined. Enforcement, too, follows yet another unpublished algorithm. Google seems open to the idea of its partners being a little bad while never defining exactly how much bad is too much bad. Presumably we’re deemed not smart enough to understand.

Google benefits from click fraud so it tolerates it to some degree, with that degree never being fully defined, either.

My kids play free game sites that require clicking on an ad before the game will play. Is that click fraud? Given that it is the modus operandi of the entire site, I think it can’t be. Certainly the must-click policy isn’t hidden from advertisers.  But by some definitions — and even some laws — it is click fraud.

What model counts in what situation? Nobody knows.

All of this works to Google’s advantage. They control the game in part by refusing to openly define it. We accept without question their de facto regulator role. And pages like this one that question what the heck is really happening behind the scenes are viewed as arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

If we are going to have rules then define them clearly and enforce them firmly.

But that will never happen with Google running the show because firm rules can’t be optimized and Google is all about optimization.

If the rule changes day-to-day or hour-to-hour then defining it clearly and enforcing it is too hard. And Google, seeing itself as playing in a dynamic competitive market, doesn’t want to do anything hard.

It’s easy to blame Google and easier still to blame Google for its lame algorithmic defense which wouldn’t fly with your Mom or mine. But what I have realized just recently is that there is a particular basis inside Google for this behavior: not enough normal people work there.

I was tempted to write “not enough dumb people work at Google,” but that’s not the real point. The point is that if you have too many geniuses things get skewed and distorted and here we stand as a result with Big Brother Google. They just need a little bit of normal thrown-in but can’t bring themselves to do that because it isn’t like Google.

“Don’t be evil” is a glib corporate tagline for Google but it doesn’t get to the heart of the company’s problem in dealing with its billions of customers. There simply isn’t anyone working at Google who can effectively relate to those customers — to you and me — because we fail to share any common frame of reference, which Google as an organization sees as being beneath it.

Here is an example of what I mean. I wrote a couple years ago about problems I was having with Google Sites, which was previously called JotSpot. JotSpot was far easier to use than Google Sites, which was supposed to be the improved version. Because I influence a lot of thinking Google reached out to me and offered assistance in using Sites. Surely with a little instruction I’d see the beauty of the new architecture.

Nope.

The improvements to JotSpot helped Google but didn’t help me. The developers and testers at Google didn’t share my difficulties because they were too close to their work. What seemed obvious to them wasn’t at all obvious to me and I’m not stupid, just busy.

I know this is a long way from click fraud or BP, but it speaks to the essential nature of what’s click fraud and what’s not in the context of today’s Internet. As a publisher I can refer to ads on my site, pointing out that they produce income for Mrs. Cringely. If that’s click fraud then I am guilty.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Financier George Soros became famous for breaking the Bank of England. You can do the same thing right now to BP and help clean oil-covered birds in the process.

Soros’s gambit took place on September 16, 1992. At that time there was a huge spread between British and German interest rates which ought to have forced down the value of the pound sterling. But the Bank of England was determined to defend fixed exchange rates. The head of the Bank said he would spend up to $15 billion buying pounds to accomplish this. Soros saw this as the bank metaphorically spitting into the wind.  So he took the bank up on its threat, selling short $10 billion worth of British pounds, which proved more stress than the Bank was willing to endure. When the Bank that day stopped buying, the value of the pound crashed and Soros was able to cover his short positions (buy back at a lower price the pounds he had previously sold) making a $1.1 billion profit on the deal.

Not a bad day’s work.

Jump now to BP.  According to news accounts everywhere, BP is right now trying to influence public discussion of its wild well spewing oil in the Gulf of Mexico by purchasing Google AdWords like “oil spill, ” for which the multinational oil company was recently paying Google $1.48, according to NPR. Web sites about the accident, news from the region, environmental or energy policy, or about oiled-up sea birds should notice BP ads appearing on their pages.

BP pays Google AdWords and Google AdSense, in turn, pays a discounted sum to the owner of the web page on which the ad is displayed — but only if a reader actually clicks on the ad.

BP isn’t the first outfit in trouble to try managing its PR through AdWords. Former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay did it first back in 2005.

BP is reportedly spending upwards of $10,000 per day on Google AdWords.

Why shouldn’t some of that money go to you?

Say you have a web page promoting your volunteer operation cleaning oil from wild birds in the Gulf of Mexico. Your site participates in Google AdSense and your content, naturally, is about oil spills and environmental damage. Then a BP ad is more than likely going to be right now at the top of the ads on your page. What you need to do to make this process punitive — make it hurt BP –  is to change the system by finding a way to get more people to click on that BP ad.

I say ask them.

Here’s the copy I’d put in a bold font on my web page: “See that Google ad from BP, there on the right? If you click on that ad up to $0.88 of BP’s money will go to help clean oil-soaked birds in the Gulf. Go ahead, click the ad. It costs you nothing.”

This is not click fraud. Real Internet users interested in real environmental issues would be clicking. BP would be accomplishing its goal and should be happy. Except of course the click-through percentage under this scenario would soar, costing BP a lot more money than the company expects to spend.

Like the Bank of England in 1992, the question is not whether BP would eventually give up its policy but how much pain they are willing to endure before giving up. There’s always a chance that BP has an unlimited budget for this stuff and won’t even notice until a few million dollars are drained and a few thousand birds are saved. And unlike Soros, this arbitrage requires no money other than BP’s.

For those willing to take some risk there is a second approach to this scenario that might well involve click fraud. That would be to augment normal clicks with Robin Hood clicks (take from the rich and give to the poor clicks) generated by CloudCrowd or Amazon Mechanical Turk virtual workers. Paying these services a couple cents per click in order to make 88 cents would be a no-brainer and one heck of a business for the few minutes or days until BP runs out of mad money.  That is if it can pass a Google click fraud audit.

Please let me know what happens if you try.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

BP — the company accepting responsiblity for the current environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico began as Imperial Oil, became Anglo-Persian Oil with its discovery of vast reserves in present-day Iran, then Anglo-Iranian, then British Petroleum, and now just BP — a huge multinational company that includes two of John D. Rockefeller’s original Standard Oil companies — Amoco and Sohio. BP has a lot of America in it but remains in many ways a very British concern, which is to say plodding and bound by bureaucracy. They tend to rely too much on tradition and good luck.

I claim only modest expertise here, having for a few years written about energy and oil in particular. I worked in the Middle East covering OPEC in the 1970s and knew lots of BP folks back then. Some of those contacts are still active. I also know something about industrial accidents and environmental disasters having investigated the Three Mile Island nuclear accident for the Carter White House. God I am old.

Remember at Three Mile Island the reactor operators were taught how to pass the license test, not how the reactor actually worked, so when they were faced with unknown conditions they made uninformed — and bad — choices. The same sort of behavior seems to be happening in the current oil spill.  We have already in this accident a record of people guessing too often when they should have known. Much of this is an artifact of bureaucracy.

Did you know that oil was discovered in 1943 in Sherwood Forest? The prospect of even a small domestic source of oil was a big deal in wartime England so drilling crews from Anglo-Persian were quickly set to work. But the drilling itself was slow — so slow that replacement drillers were eventually brought in from Oklahoma. The Americans quickly finished the wells while apparently also making quite an impression on the local girls.

There’s a lesson here, so stick with me.

The British drillers followed company rules that said a drill bit was good for a certain number of feet then needed to be replaced. Each drill bit replacement required pulling hundreds — later thousands — of feet of drilling pipe out of the well then replacing it along with the new drill bit. Drilling went slowly because most of the time was spent not drilling but pulling or pushing pipe.

The drillers from Oklahoma, in contrast, used one drill bit until it stopped being effective no matter how many feet that took. In Sherwood Forest they could go 15-20 times as far with each bit as the British crews had, which means the well was finished 15-20 times faster. There’s more to this story than just nationalism; it shows a generally poor approach to both resource utilization and problem solving on the part of BP.

Remember BP had a catastrophic Texas refinery accident back in 2005 that led then to a change in company leadership. The old CEO was lax on safety to the point of embarrassing the company so he was let go a year before his normal retirement.  The new guy, Tony Hayward, whom we keep seeing on the TV news, took over at the start of 2007 but not enough at BP appears to have changed.   Three years isn’t much in the oil business and this new accident proves it. There were plenty of warning signs about this well and BP ignored them all. You would think BP had learned their lesson after Texas City, but apparently not.

There is plenty of bad behavior in this current crisis to go around, not all of it coming from BP. Right from the start, for example, the Obama administration took an optimistic approach. Why? BP was downplaying the problems to save its share value, but why was the White House doing so, too? Among the coverups were the underwater oil plumes which BP still denies exist. Evidence says they are massive yet the head of NOAA said initially that they were very low in concentration. Why?

My guess it is because Obama thinks it is more important to appear cool than to be correct.  We can hope he’s unlearning that lesson now, though there is as yet little proof of that.

We all — BP, the government, and the American people — are looking at this accident far too narrowly.  Looking at the number of failed attempts to cap or slow this well hardly inspires confidence. Yet at heart we’re always told those two safety wells being drilled will save the day, though they will take two months to do so.  Eventually plugging the well with concrete is a sure theng, we’re told.

Or is it?  What about the safety wells and their drilling platforms? Are they in better shape than the platform that exploded and sank?

No.

According to people who should know what they are talking about, BP’s rig currently drilling the first relief well has worse safety violations than did the BP rig that exploded killing 11, creating this enormous mess. Why aren’t we reading or hearing about this? I mean anywhere other than here? (If you are a reporter, this paragraph contains the real news.  Yes, I am telling you how to do your job.)

How could BP ignore all the warning signs before the blowout? They simply didn’t expect it to happen. Thirty years had passed since the Ixtoc-I accident that was the last to happen in the Gulf. Good luck and several changes of BP management bred complacence and ignorance. I suspect the people involved with the well did not even realize how close they were to losing it since they had personally never lost one before.

The offshore oil industry will never be the same again, which is probably good. As the oil slick grows, this could be the end of the deepwater industry in the US. Or maybe this will be the straw that finally gets us an energy policy.  I’m hoping for that at the least.

For now BP is trying to cope, doing whatever they can think to do, but no real lessons will be learned until this is all over… if then. The CEO of BP, Tony Hayward — he’s history. He was promoted specifically to create a safer corporate culture and couldn’t do it in three years. Maybe nobody could. But certainly BP wasn’t — and probably isn’t — prepared for tomorrow.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

One of these men is Cole Cringely

Tomorrow’s column will be all about BP, the Gulf oil spill, and doom-and-gloom, but today we’re getting ready for the Startup Tour, which begins a week from Monday.

In addition to choosing the 24 companies to visit, these days see me still seeking a single corporate sponsor for the Tour, itself. So if your company (not a startup) wants your logo on the bus along with those of the Kauffman Foundation and an unnamed-but-enormous TV network, get in touch with me soon. It’s way cheaper than buying commercials on the series, we’ll hang out together on TV, plus you get free muffins.

During last summer’s RV trip Cole, who was then age five, bitched constantly about wanting to be home. But when we finally arrived home he suddenly wanted to be back on the road. “I just realized we were on an adventure,” he explained.

This summer’s Tour will definitely be an adventure and one of my goals is to write about it every day. That sort of comes with the blogging territory, of course, but this is a rare chance that might well turn into not just a blog, but a book. I had a chance to do something similar a decade ago, blew it then, and have been kicking myself ever since.

Back in 1998 I was working for PBS and riding a popularity wave with Triumph of the Nerds. That included making appearances at member stations, especially during the notorious pledge drives. They’d air my show and during breaks I’d help the stations beg for money. One night I was doing just this at KCET in Los Angeles and it was particularly dreary. The phones weren’t ringing; the anchormen and women sitting with me on the set did not have their hearts in their work. I had to do something.

So I rashly announced that anyone who would donate $1000 or more while I was on the air that night would get all the normal goodies for that donation level plus I would take them out to dinner. We got three takers that night — three $1000 pledges — but only one person actually paid. He was a software guy from Santa Monica and we had a very nice lunch together a couple weeks later.

So far so good.

A few months passed and I found myself in exactly the same position at WNET in New York, so I made the same proposal — dinner with Bob for $1000 or more. Those savvy folks at WNET didn’t accept pledges, just donations paid in full that evening on a credit card. And when the smoke cleared 28 people had each paid $1000 for dinner with me.

Frankly I hadn’t expected that many takers. Based on L.A. I was hoping for half a dozen, maybe 10. Twenty-eight was a logistical nightmare because I lived in California and the dinners had to be in New York. Eventually I spent two weeks and more than $15,000 of my own money in the Big Apple going out breakfasts, lunches, and dinners.

It was expensive, but the people I met were amazing — so amazing that I later realized I should have written it all down and published a book, it was that good.

The common link that bound all 28 of my New York meal companions was they wanted money. There were the usual mad scientists but there was also a waiter from a Chinese restaurant who was trying to be an Internet entrepreneur (I’m sure he succeeded, he was so driven). There was a Hudson River tugboat captain who wanted me to get Larry Ellison to buy him a $31 million sailing ship. And there were two sisters in their 70‘s from the Upper East Side of Manhattan. We went to lunch at the Four Seasons where they revealed that I was supposed to help them raise money for their Broadway musical. After the second round of martinis they started doing songs from the show!

Can you see why I should have written a book?

I survived New York and in early 1999 decided to take a chance on doing the same thing at KQED in San Francisco. The market was smaller than New York so I expected fewer takers. I was living then in Silicon Valley so my expenses would be lower.  What the heck…. The morning after found 18 new $1000 donors to KQED.

It took me a few weeks to take all those people to dinner and you know they were completely different from the donors in New York. None of the San Francisco donors were looking for money. They wanted to talk about ideas. My guests included a noted greeting card designer, several famous and semi-famous nerds, and a couple of single ladies who thought I was kind of cute.

I’d do dinners like that all the time in San Francisco if I could afford it.

Remember that was the height of dot-com fever when everyone in the Bay Area seemed to be rolling in dough. If I were to do it again in 2010 the results might be different, but I’d still expect the currency to mainly be ideas.

My final dinner from that KQED experience was with a guy who worked for DHL on the company’s web site. It was April 20, 1999. Near the end of dinner he called his room mate (a woman) and asked her to join us for dessert. I’m still friends with many of those KQED donors including the guy from DHL. And eleven years and four children later his old room mate is Mrs. Cringely.  We’re still together, still on an adventure.

I should have written that book.

These are the first 100 questionnaires from the Cringely (NOT in silicon Valley) Startup Tour.  Yes, I printed them out and stapled them together.  Sometimes a man just has to do such things, even in the Internet Age.  It helps me to get a visceral sense of an editing job that lies ahead.  Throwing piles of paper around and feeling their heft brings a much greater sense of reality to this job.  These first 100 total somewhere between 900 and 1000 pages and there are close to 200 questionnaires still to go!

The purpose of this post is to encourage those nominated companies that have not yet sent me their questionnaires to do so as soon as they can.  I still have days of reading ahead of me but there will eventually be a cut-off.

As always I am bob@cringely.com.

There are many great companies I have yet to hear from.  So if you have a friend whose company was nominated, bug him or her about getting their questionnaire in.  It really matters.

These first 100 questionnaires ranged from 6-24 pages in length with most around eight or nine.

One questionnaire was reformatted in landscape mode.  You know who you are.  What the heck was with that?

The first 100 show an interesting geographic distribution (below).  I was mildly surprised to see nothing from the Dakotas.  But nothing from Utah?  Idaho?  New Mexico?

If Texas appears sparse it is because of the scale: there are 10 nominated companies in Austin, alone, so they look at this scale like a single pin.

So is this map an artifact of the earliest responders (these were the first 100 questionnaires to be submitted) or does this represent fairly the current distribution of business innovation in the USA?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Next week Apple is expected to announce a nifty new iPhone with true videophone support, so AT&T — for now Apple’s sole iPhone network provider in the USA — has preemptively imposed new smartphone data plans with a lower base price but also what appear to be restrictive caps on the total amount of data users can send and receive per month. While pundits like me are arguing whether this is better or worse for iPhone customers, the real AT&T strategy is being so far overlooked. It’s to get us all using smartphones, stupid.

The old iPhone plan gave unlimited data for a $30 monthly surcharge. The new data plans give users 200 megabytes per month for $15 or two gigabytes per month for $25. Going over your agreed limit in each case is expensive — $15 for another 200 megs for the entry plan whether you use the full extra 200 or not and $10 for each additional gig on the more expensive plan. To put this in perspective that extra gigabyte is enough to download one movie from iTunes over the AT&T 3G network, but to balance this AT&T is throwing-in free WiFi access at 20,000 hotspots for your movie downloading pleasure.

For most iPhone users the new plan will save a few bucks. AT&T claims 65 percent are under the 200 meg limit anyway so they’ll save $15 per month not to mention the free WiFi. Power users may well pay through the nose if they can’t force themselves to do big downloads at hotspots, but this generally involves less than five percent of iPhone users.

If not many people are going to be affected and AT&T’s revenue might actually go down as a result, what’s the point? They’re greedy, right? They want something from us. And that something is they want us all in a data plan and pronto.

Average revenue per mobile subscriber line is now falling for all U.S. carriers. There is too much competition, we’ve all got enough ringtones, and those $1,000 teenage texting bills have become a thing of the past. The only way the mobile carriers can get more money from us is to get us into data plans, which involve a surcharge — for now.

And that’s the point. A mobile phone has a life expectancy of 18 months. Two hardware generations from now — three years — all phones will be smartphones. But the risk in this natural evolution for the carriers is that those smartphones will come without associated data plans and their extra revenue. So AT&T (soon to be followed by Verizon) wants to lock us in to a particular revenue model. They want to force an unnatural evolution by selling us data plans while they still can and then keeping us on those data plans past the point where they’ll make sense.

Network capacity is an issue here, but not the major one.

The endgame is all-IP everywhere with no particular differentiation between data types. But until that happens, AT&T wants to get some extra scratch from us for something that — like long-distance is now — they’ll eventually be giving away for free.