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I ran my own mail server for many years until the end of 1999 when we moved out to the Wine Country boonies where the only broadband service back then was by satellite. I couldn’t run my own server but still wanted a cringely.com address so I fell back on what seemed to be the simplest alternative, which was e-mail through my domain registrar, Network Solutions. What a mistake.

We all have friends who claim to have had a more-or-less continuous headache since, say, 1946. That’s how I feel about Network Solutions mail. It was never very good, but I was lazy and it was better than nothing… until this weekend when they appear to have lost forever more than 200 of my incoming messages.

My e-mail just stopped arriving shortly after midnight on Friday. I waited until morning then called support and was told the problem was a system upgrade that should have taken five minutes but was then well into its 12th hour. I’d been through this with the previous upgrade, which they eventually reversed it was so terrible, going back to the bad old code that at least functioned, however slowly.

No messages would be lost, they said, just delayed, and they’d call me as soon as the upgrade was complete. I’m still waiting for that call.

At the time of that first call to support I simultaneously filed a support ticket through the Network Solutions web site, which promised a human response within 24 hours. Thirty-six hours later I am still waiting.

About 20 hours after the problem began 3-4 messages burped-through. In the same 20 hours a week earlier I received 196 messages. So I called tech support again, explaining the problem for a second time.

“Everything is functioning normally,” they said.

What about that system upgrade, was that problem solved?

“The upgrade is still in process, but that shouldn’t keep you from getting messages, ” they said.

I have all my mail since 1992, I explained, and there isn’t a Saturday in that entire time when I received less than 80 messages. Today I got only four.

“Maybe they are stuck on the server,” the tech suggested. So she rebooted the server. No luck.

“Maybe your mail is being rejected as spam,” she suggested. “Send us copies of all messages you didn’t receive including their IP addresses.”

I am not making this up.

How am I supposed to send them copies of messages I didn’t receive, including their IP addresses? Sorry, I didn’t pay for Network Solutions quantum e-mail, though perhaps I should have.

Was spam filtering changed as part of the system upgrade? I asked.

“No.”

So if my mail is being rejected as spam the change is for no known reason. And if, for that unknown reason, my legitimate e-mail messages have disappeared from people who have been writing to me for two decades, what happens to those messages? Are they quarantined somewhere?

“No. If a message is tagged as spam by the system it is deleted and no records are kept. Such messages cannot be recovered. But this shouldn’t keep you from getting messages,” the supervisor said, making no sense at all.  At least I’d moved-up one support level.

And I suppose she was correct, because messages continue to dribble through, one or two per hour, and about two thirds of those are spam. But the support techs still see no messages stuck on the server.

“We have thousands of customers and you are the only one complaining about this problem, ” they lied.

My wife is having it, too.

“Then we have thousands of customers and you and your wife are the only ones complaining about this problem.”

It’s my own damned fault.

I’ve known since the beginning of our relationship that Network Solutions is a technically incompetent organization. At least that has always been my experience. Their services are poorly designed, prone to failure, and too expensive. Most of the time they have no idea what’s really happening with their own system. I suspect this is because engineering regularly lies to support which then lies to me whether they know they are doing so or not.

They are never proactive, reaching-out to me when there is a problem. They appear never to have support updates for major system problems on their homepage, apparently preferring to pretend such problems don’t exist.

Their answers to problems caused by their own incompetence is nearly always an offer to move me to a more expensive version of the same service, which sounds to me like a protection racket.

Support, which appears to come from India, is unfailingly pleasant but also unfailingly useless.

So if you sent me an e-mail message this weekend and I didn’t reply, now you know why. Please resend. But wait a few hours so I can move my service to Google Gmail for Domains, which my friends love and also happens to be free. I’m tired of paying for a service I don’t receive.

My only hope is that Network Solutions doesn’t screw-up the transfer.

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My last column was about Eric Schmidt losing his CEO job at Google and how that company’s failed bid for GroupOn may have been a factor in Schmidt’s demise.  Weep not for Eric, who lasted in the CEO position for 10 years and earned $5.6 billion, which puts every other U.S. CEO to shame, even Steve Jobs. It’s interesting to consider Schmidt’s career arc and how he got where he is (isn’t?) today.

Eric Schmidt started his post-academic work life at Sun Microsystems where he loved all the smart people but was ultimately frustrated by management that he felt was simply not as smart as he.  Remember Scott McNealy was in charge of Sun when Schmidt left and McNealy rightly admitted that Sun’s 1990s server ascendancy with the Internet bubble was a happy accident as was Java.

Schmidt moved-on to Novell, another company filled with smart people but also a company in crisis or they never would have considered a non-Mormon for CEO.  There he slammed into a culture with completely different values, one where he was ineffectual because as an outsider he simply never got it.  Schmidt came away from Novell determined that the best way to find a suitable culture for his brilliance was by building it himself.

When Andy Bechtolscheim introduced Eric to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergy Brin, Eric quickly saw this as his chance to create another Sun from scratch with himself as CEO while avoiding the entrenched cultural problems he had faced at Novell because almost everyone would be a new-hire.  That was 24,000 Google employees ago, so what we see in Google today is definitely a reflection of Schmidt — an intellectually curious but not especially passionate outfit.

I believe it is this lack of passion that ultimately came to hurt Schmidt at Google.

Is this likely to change with Larry Page as CEO? I think it will a bit. Page is more passionate than Schmidt. His view is less stratospheric and he allows himself to be a little more vulnerable.  But this very vulnerability will be his downfall because most of what he does isn’t likely to succeed and that will tell on Page very quickly.

How long again did Jerry Yang last as CEO of Yahoo?

Now to GroupOn, which recently spurned a reported $6 billion buy-out bid from Google. I posed the idea in my last column that $6 billion was too much for GroupOn as a company that seems to have no proprietary (and therefore protectable) technology and a lot of emerging direct competitors.

Then I read this week an excellent paper by the very clever Ahmadali Arabshahi that analyzes the GroupOn business model showing why be believes it is such a perfect fit for Google.  Remember my point wasn’t that the merger was a bad fit, just that it was too expensive and Google should instead build it’s own GroupOn-type service I called GoogleOn, which they now appear to be in the very process of doing.
Ahmadali sees synergy for Google with GroupOn’s Chicago-based sales force.  But he sees even greater potential in what Ahmadali calls “price discovery” — Google’s ability to use what it knows about our consumer behavior right down to MAC addresses and gmail content to individually price each daily offer so the optimal number of us accept its terms.  Remember that’s the basis of a GroupOn — a substantial discount on some local good or service offered for only one day and to be paid for up-front.

The weak spot in GroupOn’s business model, as Ahmadali notes, is that it is hard to scale a single offer per market if you aren’t selling exactly what that market wants at exactly the price it is willing to pay. He thinks the algorithm jockeys of Google could optimize GroupOn and make it even more of a commercial juggernaut.

Against this my friend Ed Kohler from Minnesota raises some very well-informed concerns. The GroupOn sales force may be over-rated, Ed thinks, but more importantly the GroupOn deals aren’t even as good as can be found on sites like restaurants.com.

I didn’t know that, did you?

Add to this the fact that a small percentage of GroupOns are paid-for but never redeemed (the company and its partners surely count on this for substantial extra profit) that GroupOn risks alienating we normally docile consumers.  We may be stupid but eventually we catch-on and GroupOn, having turned-down Google’s $6 billion, might shortly fade as just another Internet fad.

I come down somewhere in the middle of this argument, less concerned about either Google or GroupOn and more concerned about, frankly, me.  This is an old story.  I wrote a column years ago at pbs.org arguing that pages like this could be easily paid for not by advertising but by readers throwing coins in an electronic tip jar. The very next week PayPal invented PayPal Donate to solve this problem (I still have the e-mail from PayPal thanking me for the idea) but PBS would never let me use it.  Time to start thinking again.

I believe there’s a logical extension of the GroupOn business model to almost any affinity group, an example of which could be the readers of this rag.  What if I eliminated ads entirely and replaced them with a quarterly chance to buy something at a huge volume discount?  It would have to be something most of us would like to have and the discount would have to be very real (you tell me what that would be).

If a few thousand of us were captivated by the offer this space could be easily sustained ad-free.  It’s an idea I have toyed with in many forms for the last couple years. Not long ago I came up with the idea for a new form-factor PC I thought could serve as the first offer. I’d sell them under the CringeCo label, I thought, though they’d be made, like everything else, somewhere in Asia.

Alas what I thought I’d invented was essentially an iPad. I had a couple advantages but not enough to really compete, so the offer never happened.  Yet the business model I think could still be a success for mid-size web pages like mine.

Let a thousand GroupOns grow.

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No, Eric Schmidt didn’t step down from being CEO of Google to take Steve Jobs’s position at Apple. I’m fairly certain Schmidt was demoted. Or if he wasn’t, then he should have been.

From a strict business perspective I suppose it’s ridiculous to criticize Schmidt’s performance at Google, but that won’t stop me. The guy has done a fabulous job of optimizing search and web advertising but nearly everything else he and Google have done has been a failure. What else does Google make money from other than search and ads?

Nothing.

Yeah, but YouTube is almost profitable, right?

Hardly. While YouTube may be operating at near break-even that completely ignores the minimum $5 billion sunk and lost in the video sharing venture over the last several years. YouTube is still years from breaking-even on a net-net basis.

But the real killer for Eric Schmidt — the bonehead move that would have gotten him fired had I been on the board — was that $6 billion offer for GroupOn.

Here’s what Google could have done — should have done. First, take four top engineers and set them up like a startup in a rented apartment, denying them any access to the Googleplex. No free massages and definitely no unlimited Froot Loops. Google has grown to the point where it is virtually impossible to get anything done. So just like IBM did with the PC, a GroupOn clone would have to be done as a completely separate renegade operation. Four engineers, two months, and GoogleOn would be ready to go.

Then simply pay every adult in America $10 to join.

That’s about 100 million members or $1 billion. See, I saved Google five billion dollars.

It’s actually even better than that since GroupOn has only 50 million members.

Buying companies yields far more instant advantage than building them, I know. In Groupon’s case Google would get effectively irrelevant, copyable technology along with their entire user base. But $6 billion? Really?

My plan is way better.

Trying stuff that “doesn’t work” until “something does” is awesome. But seriously, when will the “something does” part begin for Google? The company is so financially successful because of its one trick, but at some point even at Google there is ultimately someone to blame. In this case that’s Eric, not so much for offering GroupOn $6 billion, but for getting turned down. The offer stinks of desperation and impotence. And to be rejected makes it even worse.

We can definitely say Eric did not screw-up search, but can we say anything else? Remember when Microsoft “missed” the internet? Well Google “missed” the Facebook.

Now understand that for all my complaints Google is going nowhere but up, with the economy slowly recovering and with that Internet advertising. But I’d say Eric had his shot. Unfortunately Larry Page probably isn’t the hammer Google needs, either. Google has super people but a lot of them seem to be in a rut. If Larry could have changed that, wouldn’t he have already done so?

I don’t know who should be the next CEO of Google, but I know who I’d hire to be the next head of Google HR.

Yahoo’s Carol Bartz.

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At the Vatican, white smoke coming from a chimney at the Sistine Chapel indicates that a new Pope has been selected by the College of Cardinals. Well despite yesterday’s news of Steve Jobs’s departure again from Apple for medical reasons there is as yet no sign of white smoke in Cupertino where Jobs remains firmly in charge.

Readers expect me to comment on this news and I will, but frankly I’m still trying to figure it out so here are a number of random thoughts.

I sent an e-mail to Steve Jobs early last week and he didn’t respond. That’s not in itself such a big deal because Steve periodically ignores me. But other folks at Apple were copied on the message and they didn’t respond, either. That is telling. What it tells me is that this medical leave was no last-moment thing, that it was well on its way 10 days ago.

Well sure, you say, what’s the big deal with that?

The big deal is that Steve Jobs was supposed to participate with Rupert Murdoch later this week in the announcement of The Daily — News Corp’s electronic newspaper for the iPad. Suddenly that announcement has been pushed-back, supposedly over subscription prices. Yeah, right. It’s pushed back because Jobs was no longer available. But until yesterday Apple was quite happy to have us all thinking Steve would appear in New York later this week.

There’s a lot of slick timing at work here. First the Verizon iPhone then killer earnings followed by the Daily, but then that all went kerblooey so when do you announce the bad news while keeping the damage — both legal and financial — to a minimum? Yesterday was the best they could do. thanks to Martin Luther King.

I have no idea what’s going on with Steve’s health. He could be having a whole-body transplant for all I know. But he’s neither a fool nor a sentimentalist — just a narcissist — so I am sure he’s been giving a lot of thought to the succession at Apple. And it is my guess the next Apple CEO won’t be Tim Cook, not because Tim isn’t a good executive but because he isn’t Steve’s creation.

When the white smoke finally drifts over Cupertino that new CEO is going to be a surprise to everyone.

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Last week’s murder of six and wounding of 14 in a Safeway parking lot in Tucson has led to a lot of discussion in both the blogoshere and the traditional press. Did heated political rhetoric in the media fuel the confrontation? Why didn’t the clearly erratic behavior of the alleged gunman tip-off authorities? I can speak from some experience in the latter case and feel that — for better or worse — teachers and administrators simply don’t extrapolate beyond their own social groups when assessing possible damaging behavior. I know I didn’t.

Thirty years ago I was teaching at Stanford University. One of my students was in a graduate program in the School of Education. He was, well, erratic at best. Both his attendance and his work were inconsistent. He either sulked in class or was prone to outbursts. Several of the women in the class told me he made them uncomfortable; he was too much in their faces and very aggressive about asking them out. Then one day he submitted a paper I had seen in the same class the year before.

Making women uncomfortable and being late or argumentative in class don’t cut to the heart of the educational process the way plagiarism does. The former are often issues of style and poor taste, but cheating is cheating, so I went to my department chairman for advice. He told me to continue as normal but privately confront the student and get him to rewrite the paper. Either that or we’d have to turn him in to the academic council, which would probably expel him for violating the Code of Conduct.

During the next class I asked him to stay after and speak with me. He didn’t. The class after that he came five minutes late and left five minutes early. This went on for a couple weeks so my chairman finally called the head of his program at the School of Education.

This was 30 years ago, remember, but those folks over in Education didn’t appear to know what they had on their hands, nor did they seem particularly inclined to learn about their problem student. He hadn’t seen his academic adviser in months. Weeks passed while they were doing what appeared to be nothing. Finally, two weeks to go in the term — two weeks before graduation for my student — the Ed School told him in a letter that they were kicking him out.

That’s when he finally showed up in my office. Some people smoked in offices back then and he was a smoker. I remember him, unkempt and nervous, unable to look me in the eye, sitting next to my desk smoking one cigarette after another using each to light the next. He could smoke an entire cigarette in about a minute, he was so nervous or high.

“Can’t you just give me a D? ” he pleaded.

I told him a D was the best he could hope for, but only if he rewrote the paper to my satisfaction. I wanted to know, too, what his plans were after graduation? He was going to teach at a middle school. Was the school aware of his issues?

No.

I couldn’t see sending him alone into a crowd of teenage girls so I added to my conditions that he find a different job — one where they knew what they were getting.

A suitable internship was available and he took it. The paper was finally finished the night before graduation, and one more Stanford grad went out into the working world.

And about three months later he started writing me hate letters.

I had ruined his career and his life. I was responsible for his lack of success after Stanford. If I hadn’t been so demanding and unreasonable in my assignments he wouldn’t have had to cheat.

So I deserved to die.

About this time a Stanford math professor was killed by a former graduate student who found him working late in his office, killing him with a hammer. That former student didn’t really have much to do with the professor, as I recall. The professor just happened to be the department chair and therefore represented the institution, I guess. My buddy Kirk, who was Doug Engelbart’s research assistant at SRI, rented a room in the professor’s house and I remember him quickly harvesting his marijuana crop when the cops said they were coming over to interview him.

I worked late at night back then in creaky old Redwood Hall. Sitting there grading papers at midnight every sound seemed to be an unwanted footstep. The math professor didn’t get any hate mail, to my knowledge and here I was getting a letter nearly every week.

Then they stopped.

My former student had taken his life, parking his car in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge and jumping to his death.

I felt only relief.

If there is a lesson here in the context of last week’s events in Tucson it’s that I thought of my student and that student’s career, I thought of the values of the university, I thought of the safety of those middle school students, and I thought about myself, but it never occurred to me that my problem student would get a gun and shoot 20 people in a Safeway parking lot, killing six.

It’s hard to think more than a step or two beyond our experience. The fact that the teachers and administrators at Pima Community College didn’t see their guy being a mass murderer shouldn’t be surprising. On the other hand I suppose that they — and I — played the odds to some degree.

Much of this comes down to not really knowing people. The Education School accepted my student not knowing what he was like, nor did they seem to put much effort into knowing him once he was there. They were incredulous that I even cared. So too this guy in Arizona. Maybe he had long been on this path but nobody knew it because nobody cared.

That’s the way it is with people who are pains in the ass, and all the more reason to know them best of all.

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Next month an IBM computer called Watson will go head-to-head against the top two human Jeopardy champs for a prize worth $1 million. Whether Watson wins or not, what I wonder about this contest that was four years and untold millions of dollars in the making is how it squares with the image I’ve presented here over the last several years of a penny-pinching, greedy, avaricious, and not particularly smart IBM? The answer is simple: IBM has a split personality.

IBM values research and development. The research organizations like the one behind this Jeopardy stunt still share in a specific percentage of IBM’s gross sales. That’s how IBM keeps coming up with the amazing technologies we read about in Scientific American and Wired. Those divisions have not been looted and continue to operate.

So we can expect many noteworthy research innovations from IBM in coming years as well as more publicity blitzes like this Jeopardy thing that are substitutes for actual marketing because they involve no real products.

As for the rest of IBM, the product teams are small and still enjoy some level of autonomy and power. They have many constraints in their jobs — limited funding and the fact anyone in the company can veto their plans — but they still get stuff done.

It is the really big IBM teams like strategic outsourcing that are under constant change, constant threat (of resource action), under constant pressure, horribly over-managed, and badly managed. They are under attack from three sides — ridiculous budget constraints; very troubled contracts; and a sales organization that can and will sell anything at any price, no matter how much it damages the company.

So IBM will continue to roll out new hardware and try to get top money for it. IBM will continue to sell lots of software, but put very little money back into that business. IBM will continue to loot and damage its services business. The effects on the services business are now beginning to show up in the quarterly reports. It will take years, though, for the collateral damage to become apparent. By then the executives who did the damage will be long gone.

IBM’s competitive advantage over HP and Sun was IBM had a services business. Then HP bought EDS. Sun was swallowed by Oracle. While IBM understands it needs a services business it is mismanaging and damaging it. In doing so IBM is not only hurting one part of its company, it is souring its relationship with customers. An upset customer will be inclined to not only drop its services business with IBM, but also its hardware and software business too. In time IBM’s services business will become a detriment to the company.

And that’s IBM’s real jeopardy.

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Apple has a long history of milking early adopters. Even the crappy products (remember the Newton? the Mac Cube?) would sell a few hundred thousand units to the faithful before those faithful learned the sad truth. But just as they were learning that truth, along would come Steve Jobs (okay, not in the case of the Newton, but generally) gleefully proffering the real fantastic product people had been expecting months before. Then those same early adopters, reenergized, would buy all over again, whether it was an iMac, iPod, MacBook, iPhone, whatever. Why should we think this week’s Verizon iPhone announcement is any different?

Where’s the Long Term Evolution (LTE) network? Where’s surfing while talking? Where’s the damned white case?

June.

We’ve been here before, remember? The first iPhone worked only on AT&T’s slower Edge network so the early adopters all upgraded to 3G a few months later, paying again. Worse still there was that big price drop only weeks after the original iPhone introduction when Apple clearly intended to punish the faithful for being, well, faithful.

What will happen if, come February, AT&T drops its iPhone 4 price to $99? Verizon will follow suit, that’s what, and a million early adopters will have been burned.

Steve Jobs can’t help himself. It’s in his blood.

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Verizon announced its iPhone 4 today, as expected, but it was CDMA, not LTE, and it wasn’t white, which would seem to defy one of my 2011 predictions made only last week — that Verizon would get an exclusive on white iPhones. Rather than capitulate, though, I’ll tell a story about the invention of the nibble copier, followed by some dirt about Verizon’s LTE network that might be a big concern for corporations.

Steve Wozniak invented the Apple ][ disk drive with its Integrated Woz Machine (IWM) controller, which was revolutionary for its time. And unlike competing disk drives (these were floppies, by the way — hard drives and optical drives had yet to make it to PCs) the Apple drives had copy protection built-in. That is until Woz decided to defeat his own design by inventing the first nibble copier so he could copy his VisiCalc disks.

Competing floppies of the time used hard sectors determined by little holes punched in the disk. Copying those floppies was easy because it was simple to see where the sectors were. But the IWM ignored hard sectors completely, using its own sectoring scheme that could be varied by a command embedded on the disk and read by the IWM firmware. This copy protection was finally defeated by the nibble copier, which also ignored sectors and simply made perfect copies of an entire disk, one little nibble (half-byte) at a time.

Having invented the nibble copier, which was sold under the name Locksmith, Woz then went on to defeat it, again undermining his own design. His motivation in this case was two-fold: 1) to have fun, and; 2) to keep Locksmith disks, themselves, from being copied. He did this by embedding a sequence on the Locksmith disks that effectively said, “do not copy this disk.” It helps when you control both the software and the hardware upon which it runs, eh?

Eventually Woz and Henry Roberts developed a further copy protection scheme that hid the sector information in a pseudo-random number. That was about 30 years ago and last we heard Woz was trying to defeat himself again by using heat from a laundry iron to essentially push bits from one floppy through to another, again making a perfect copy.

Here is where we return to the present. Andy Hertzfeld, who told me this story, predicted that Woz would never be able to copy a floppy using an iron. But Woz has yet to capitulate on this, claiming that — 30 years later — he is still trying.

And so it is with me. I still believe the white iPhones will come from Verizon, but they’ll be LTE models that we’ll see later this year.

And speaking of the Verizon Long Term Evolution 4G network, customers are learning that it won’t support certain Cisco Virtual Private Network (VPN) devices. This came from a corporate Verizon customer now stuck with a boatload of useless Cisco gear and was confirmed by another such customer when I reached out last night.

Verizon engineers, by the way, say nothing is wrong. Now that pisses me off.

There’s this disconnect that takes place sometimes where users and service providers see a problem completely differently. In this case customers are clearly being inconvenienced yet Verizon engineers are saying, “no they aren’t,” which actually means, “there shouldn’t be a problem and if there is that problem is on the customer’s end, not ours.”

Who is right?

The customer is always right. If Verizon doesn’t get that, then Verizon is headed for trouble with all those dissatisfied iPhone customers they are expecting to grab from AT&T. Chronic complainers will be the first to jump ship.

Here’s the question nobody asked (but should have) at today’s Verizon iPhone event in New York: “Why don’t corporate VPN’s work on your 4G network?” Had someone asked that question I’d bet by Monday the problem would be fixed.

But since it wasn’t asked, Verizon will remain in denial until thousands of customers are inconvenienced and the carrier is finally forced to admit that yes, there is a problem.

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All the top movies are appearing in 3D versions and the Consumer Electronics Show last week was full of new 3D TV’s. Why isn’t anybody buying them? We already bought our big-screen TV’s, thanks.

Suddenly 3D content is everywhere. Movie studios are using it more than ever and consumer electronics companies are even subsidizing 3D for TV programming and home video. But for all the 3D content, 3D TV sales have yet to takeoff. There are many reasons for this, but according to Conor Schutzman, who thinks a lot about such things, it mainly comes down to conflicting motivations for producers and consumers.

Content producers like 3D for two reasons: 1) they can get a 3D premium on ticket sales in theaters that effectively pays for the 3D conversion, and; 2) 3D movies are almost impossible to pirate. Notice that neither of these reasons has anything to do with your TV or mine. That’s important.

The movie industry likes to complain that they are getting killed by piracy — everything from perfect digital dubs to the more common pirate shooting the movie with a camcorder from his theater seat. Neither of these works for 3D movies, effectively killing piracy. And since 3D is made more-or-less free to the studios by our willingness to pay more to see movies in that format, doing 3D versions of most movies is a no-brainer. In fact, if enough theaters were capable of showing high-quality 3D, my guess is that we’d see all movies released in 3D (no more 2D).

That explains all the 3D content that’s appearing, but there is not much of a unified 3D home video strategy to go with it. Most of the companies have a plan for 3D but they are also in competition and want their plan to be the one to succeed. That implies a Beta-versus-VHS market confusion problem, but that’s not really what’s keeping people from buying 3D TVs. It’s more fundamental. What’s keeping them from buying is that they already bought a new TV or three during the recent digital transition. More than 100 million people in the USA alone bought a newer, generally more expensive TV over the last two years. But now that they’ve bought, new TV sales are mainly covering replacements caused by unit failures, and those only happen about every 10 years.

We have no real incentive to buy. Rooms are getting smaller, not larger, in the current economy, so the push for ever-larger screens has waned. Vendors have been trying to lure us with LED backlights and faster frame rates, but anything over 120 Hz is either: a) impossible to even notice for older eyes like mine, or; b) feels actively uncomfortable for folks raised on 24- or 30-frames-per-second. Leave it for the next generation to reach adulthood and thrive on 240 Hz TV.  They can pay for it, too.

So 3D TV’s are likely to flop, though Moore’s Law suggests that we’ll see plenty of 3D technology rolled into future sets anyway because it is already developed and because they have to use that silicon real estate for something.

But whether 3D TV’s are a success or not, 3D movies — with their completely different reasons for being — are here to stay.

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My last prediction laid out a pretty aggressive 2011 computing strategy for Apple.  But it is just that — a computing strategy — not a media strategy, and Steve Jobs is clearly the most important media mogul on the planet right now, and maybe the most fragile.  This latter point is important, because Steve sees himself as having both a unique mission and a frail constitution.  He can’t wait to get things done, which is why the next couple years will be probably the most important in Apple’s history.

Who needs a 1,000,000 square foot data center? That’s big enough, I calculate, to support 800 million simultaneous users.  Who the heck needs a facility like that?  It’s overkill for even the bold Apple plan I laid out in prediction #9.  But go back to the beginning again and think about bufferbloat, which I think will be the defining technical issue for the next couple years.

Bufferbloat stands between Steve Jobs and media domination.

Then remember prediction #4, that your cable ISP probably won’t fix bufferbloat because it protects two current profit centers — TV and IP phone service.  This will limit the success of Netflix and Hulu and other TV competitors.  It will limit Apple’s Carolina strategy, too, unless Steve does something very bold to circumvent the problem.

What do you pay today for cable TV?  Let’s guess that Apple will use that new data center to serve audio and video streams carrying music and TV and movies maybe for a flat subscription fee.  I predict there will be price tiers based on resolution and some content and/or earlier access will go for higher prices.  Apple trailers, for example, come in 480p, 720p, and 1080p, so those tiers become no-brainers ($59.95, $69.95, $79.95 per month possibly — remember this is Apple). And 1080p-60/7.1? That’s $99.95.

And how does Steve introduce this service?  I think he takes some of that $50 billion in cash, buys an existing cable TV company and essentially shuts it down.  He only has to buy one to make the splash he likes — a splash that is also a kick in the face to Google with its metro gigabit networks.  Once the people of North Carolina get the real Apple TV, how long before other cable subscribers simply give up their TV services, forcing their cable companies to become pure bit-schlepping ISPs for Apple?

Apple’s data center is in Maiden, NC, which is served by Comcast. No luck there.  But it isn’t far from Time Warner, which I believe Steve would see as an acceptable purchase costing around $30 billion.