I love the Kindle Fire tablet launched today, even though I have yet to touch one. I love the $199 price, the clever browser (more about that below, it may surprise you), the tight integration, the application, book and video marketplace, the small size, I even like the limited features compared with an iPad.  The Kindle Fire is perfect… for my kids. I’ll be buying three of them for Christmas.

Right now my boys, ages 5, 7 and 9 all have iPod Touches that have served them well despite having been many times lost, spilled on, and in one case very lightly driven over by a car.  But the Touches, which also cost $199 as I recall, are getting old, their batteries recharged so many times to where they now barely last an hour. It’s time for something new, which in the eyes of my boys means something better.

In this instance bigger is better and the Kindle Fire is certainly bigger. My boys don’t need 3G or 4G, they don’t need a camera (I don’t want to see my seven year-old running a webcam business), what they need is a video machine with ebooks, light surfing capability and cool games. The only part I am unsure about with the Kindle Fire is those games, but I also know that Amazon isn’t stupid. Even the limited marketplace is an advantage in my view because it will probably do a good job at vetting content, protecting my kids.

Analysts will wonder how the Kindle Fire will affect iPad sales. It has to. I’ll be buying three Kindles, for example, rather than one iPad. So I’m predicting Amazon will have a hit and Apple will take a hit, but so what?  Wasn’t something like this going to come along eventually anyway?  If Amazon mightily validates the smaller form factor so scorned by Steve Jobs, you can bet Apple will follow with a seven-incher of its own.  Game on!

What I’m not sure I see coming from this, frankly, is any boost for Android, which is hiding somewhere inside the Kindle Fire, potentially generating royalties only for Microsoft.

But this can only be good for consumers and I like what’s good for consumers.  Maybe the aggressive pricing and fair feature set will incite Apple to new greatness. It probably will.

Now about that Amazon Silk browser that is being touted as so revolutionary and key to the Kindle Fire’s supposedly snappy behavior (remember I haven’t touched one): it’s clever, but not revolutionary at all. In fact, for all the gee whiz technical claims of Amazon this exact same technology has been used by thousands of rural Internet users for more than a decade.

The power of Amazon Silk that allows the Kindle Fire to need only eight gigs of local storage is its integration with Amazon S3 storage and EC2 cloud services.  S3 will hold a copy of all data in the cloud for free while EC2 will run a smart application proxy that will cache, prefetch, and transcode data on behalf of the Kindle Fire user with the help of massive computing resources on that backend and gigantic data pipes. Where a dynamic page might require 20 or more DNS hits and data grabs, we’re told, the Kindle Fire will do all that via EC2 making the actual page generation a single grab at WiFi speeds, the page having been pre-assembled in the cloud at lightspeed right down to resizing graphics to smaller sizes that fit the Kindle Fire screen.

Cool, eh?  Yet those features (TCP Acceleration and Web Page Acceleration) were both present in my old Starband satellite Internet connection back in 2000, where they were necessary to make surfing even possible over a 44,600 mile round trip. The Starband equivalent of EC2 was (and still is) a Gilat data center in Virginia. I’m not sure the Amazon Silk team has actually invented anything at all.

So unless Amazon quietly bought Gilat, the owner of Starband, then they are going to have a hard time keeping other tablet companies from copying or licensing these clever browser features.

Amazon Silk is cool, but we’ll see its equivalent on an iPad, too, almost immediately.

This week I’m at NASA’s Green Flight Challenge in our new home town of Santa Rosa, California. It’s a contest for efficient flight using alternative energy that I’ll be writing more about later in the week. Much of the $1.65 million in prize money comes from Google, the subject of this column. I’ve been giving a lot of thought to Google’s strategic path under once-and-future CEO Larry Page and think I’ve got a couple things figured out. Google is right now in the process of changing, well, its process. Page is rebuilding the company but not doing a very good job of explaining himself, so I’ll just have to handle that here.

The image we all have of Google is that of a money machine based on PageRank and AdWords with a huge number of other products and projects thrown-in, hardly any of which make the company any money.  Some of these projects, like Android and GMail, have enormous followings and significant market shares, but they still do little better than break-even. Many of the eternal beta projects seem to be more experiments or simply larks. Google under Page’s predecessor CEO Eric Schmidt seemed to be a hodge-podge company lacking a sure hand at the tiller.

This was, I think, by design. Schmidt (and Page and Google co-founder Sergey Brin) were smart enough to know in those early hyper growth days that the next big thing for Google could just as likely be something they didn’t see coming, so they supported rampant experimentation. Well companies mature and the second coming of Larry Page represents a change in that policy.

The old idea was to let a thousand flowers bloom then throw big money behind the most promising of those flowers. And that worked for awhile, yielding products like GMail, but the maturing of Google as a company and the Internet as an industry is forcing the company into a new business model. This is not to say that engineers won’t still be allowed to spend time on their own projects, but that the company realizes now that it can no longer rely on serendipity to provide its next hits.

If you have no constraints, no limits, then all ideas are welcome and can be equally promoted, at least for awhile. But that’s not the situation faced by Larry Page earlier this year when he again became Google’s CEO. What Larry saw was Facebook’s dramatic success in a market segment where Google had been notably unsuccessful. That’s why Page led with making all Google bonuses partially dependent on the company’s success with social networking products. Larry led with the carrot, then slowly added some sticks.

What we’ve seen is a huge conceptual change in Google with the demise of formerly high-flying divisions like Google Labs and even closing down profitable acquisitions like Slide. The end of Slide, which appeared to happen precipitously a couple weeks ago was actually five months in the making.

Google is cutting all the projects that look like they’d at best peak with $20-50 million in annual profit and concentrating on those that are either bet-the-farm strategic priorities like combating Facebook or promise to yield billions in profits. Gone are the five-man teams operating in separate digs, replaced by thousand-man teams dedicated to specific and well articulated goals.

Think about it. A lot of the criticism of Google here and elsewhere has been about lack of focus, lack of standardized interfaces, oddly positioned products that sometimes conflict with or oppose each other. Google was run as an insurgency. And now Larry Page is determined to turn Google into an army. Each conflict to come will be approached with a Manhattan Project development effort.

Social is the first battle to be fought this war but I am sure Larry has others planned. He’s promoting a new class of generals (vice presidents, I guess) and giving them the power and resources to get their jobs done with thousands of developers and billions of dollars each. Instead of doing a hundred things and making money from two of them, Google will soon be doing a dozen things and making money from 10 of them, or at least that’s the plan. And it’s a good one, because even geeks grow up sometime.

But they are keeping the free food, right?

I’ve already explained why I think Meg Whitman is a poor choice to lead Hewlett Packard. Here’s why Brian Utley would be so much better.

What HP needs most at this point is breathing room and hiring Brian as interim CEO would do that, allowing the company to make a proper CEO search (including a number of good internal candidates) while leaving the company in good hands. Well past normal retirement age, Brian would have no Whitmanesque ambitions to run the company long-term, though I think he’d really enjoy running HP for awhile.

It’s time for the HP board to give up trying to act in fell swoops. They simply aren’t smart enough.

Brian, if you don’t know him, spent his entire career at IBM, starting as a computer repairman in San Francisco in the punch card era and rising through the ranks to run (and a couple of times shut down) whole divisions of IBM — not today’s IBM, but the IBM we all remember. With a solid engineering background and deep business experience Brian is built precisely in the tradition of Hewlett and Packard where Carly Fiorina, Mark Hurd, Leo Apotheker, and Meg Whitman weren’t. He would not only understand HP, he would command instant respect from the troops. We may not have seen that at HP since John Young left 15 years ago.

And let’s be clear about something: Brian Utley is probably smarter and better-grounded than all those other HP CEOs put together. Which I guess makes it impossible he’d ever be hired, right?

Here is Brian’s bio from his current retirement gig as chief strategy officer at wheretolive.com in Eden Prairie, MN:

Brian joins us after a long career in the IT industry. He spent 37 years with IBM and was responsible for the development of many of IBM’s small and intermediate systems including the S/38, AS400 and PC. His influence within IBM impacted virtually all computer-based technologies and resulted in his appointment as Vice President and General Manager of the Personal Computer Division. Since his retirement from IBM, he has assisted a number of start-up companies in the manufacturing and IT industry. He attended Weber State University and San Francisco City College.

Retired IBM executive Brian Utley

Since the consensus view seems to be that Hewlett Packard will today replace CEO Leo Apotheker with board member Meg Whitman, let’s just assume that’s what will happen. Now I’ll explain why it is a bad idea.

Oh getting rid of Leo (or not hiring him in the first place) is a fine idea. Leo didn’t fit the culture or the industry and he arrived with way too much baggage from SAP. Hiring Apotheker was an example of the HP board trying to get ahead of the Mark Hurd scandal by making what it hoped would be a brilliant hire in Apotheker that would silence Wall Street criticism. The problem with that last sentence is the word hoped: hiring Apotheker was actually a giant crap shoot and the HP board of that time wasn’t smart enough to even know that.

I’ve been inside these efforts to make corporate lemonade and they aren’t pretty. You are suddenly without a key leader because of a scandal or because some other outfit hired out from under you and the urge is to pay anything for an alternative name player you can announce over the weekend to make it appear like the guy/gal who is gone was actually fired. The problem with this is the person you hire over the weekend arrives overpaid, their ego over-stoked, and without any proper vetting. It hardly ever works out well.

So good riddance Leo. But if by some chance you manage to keep your job today, let’s have lunch, okay guy?  I’ll buy.

The question that follows, then, is HP doing the same thing all over again by hiring Meg Whitman?  Is this another stupid move to look more accomplished than the board actually is?

I find it interesting that yesterday’s stories had Whitman being hired on an interim basis, while today we’re told she’s the real deal, the long term savior of HP.  Frankly, it feels to me a lot like when Gil Amelio took over as CEO of Apple following the firing of John Sculley Mike Spindler. Like Gil, Meg has a pretty good track record. Like Gil, she is coming from the board. Like Gil, she’s the only person on the board who wants the job. But also like Gil was at Apple, I think Meg Whitman is ill-suited for the challenges of running HP.

Meg Whitman is an extremely smart person, which shows in her ability to drive for the top job in less than a year on the board, hip-checking Leo as I described it back in February. Meg wants (and feels she deserves) her chance to fail. But my fear is that’s exactly what will happen — she’ll fail, or at best muddle along a la Carol Bartz at Yahoo.

I believe this for two reasons: 1) Whitman will have little to no support from inside the company executive ranks, and; 2) she has simply never run a company of this type before.

Leo suffered from the first problem. Talented HP executives were passed over to hire Apotheker. Pissed-off, they weren’t going to go out of their way to help Leo.  Well it’s about to happen all over again. So Whitman can either lead a company possibly opposed to her or she can clean house and get a new bunch of lieutenants who will be beholden to her but who also won’t immediately know what they are doing in their new jobs. Neither possibility is a good formula for hitting the ground running.

The usual trend in these situations is to buy loyalty by giving the passed-over managers new contracts with increased incentives. That’s what happened when Leo came in. So it’s about to happen again?  Probably. And when/if Whitman fails a year or two down the road it will happen again — again. That’s a loyalty disincentive.

But the biggest problem here is just that Meg Whitman has given me no solid evidence that she’d even do a good job as HP CEO.

Here’s testimony from an old hand at eBay who is in a position to know: “I have my doubts. Meg is very good as a driver of quantitatively-inclined operators, when she is armed with a strong business model atop a scalable vision (to quote her about her own work at eBay: “monkeys could run this train”). She is no monkey, but I don’t think she is a visionary, at least she isn’t known to be one. And vision (and the ability to sell that vision to both the board and rank and file) is what HP needs desperately right now.”

So just to really shake things up, here’s my recommendation for HP: 1) promote Meg Whitman to executive chairman of the board and get her coming to work every day; 2) appoint a committee to take its time and find a world-class CEO ideally suited for taking HP back to greatness, and; 3) appoint as interim CEO my friend Brian Utley.

Brian Utley?

Yes, Brian Utley.

What me worry?

Given the news from Hewlett Packard today about the HP board reportedly firing CEO Leo Apotheker and replacing him with board member (and former eBay CEO) Meg Whitman, I could write a new column or take the easy way out and simply reprint my column from February 23rd predicting in some detail both events. Instead I’ll just include a link to that column since it includes 85 very entertaining reader comments that look in retrospect either brilliant or stupid.

That’s what I expect will be my epitaph: “He was either brilliant or stupid.”

If Leo in fact gets the boot today I’ll follow with a column tomorrow about Meg Whitman as HP CEO.

I first met Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings in 2001 at a Maxtor event where I was the dinner speaker. He explained then that the company had always intended to deliver movies over the Internet (hence the name Netflix) but was starting with DVDs because the network infrastructure simply wasn’t ready for digital delivery. They’d eventually drop the DVD deliveries, though I think his estimate of when that would happen was around 2007, not 2011 as the company announced this week. That wasn’t his only underestimation, of course. Hastings also underestimated consumer and Wall Street reaction to the boneheaded way Netflix handled a recent pricing change.

Day traders have to love this, but unless you have your retirement tied-up in Netflix stock and were hoping to stop working this week it doesn’t actually matter much. Still, there’s some value in looking at how Netflix handled the recent changes and how they might have handled them better.

Am I the only person who didn’t see the recent Netflix price change as a price change at all?  We have a streaming-only subscription so nothing changed for us.  As a family with young children, Netflix DVDs would disappear and we’d end up having to pay for them, so it wasn’t a functional service.  We mainly use DVDs while traveling in any case, having finally learned that you can return Red Box videos to any kiosk. No cinephiles here unless you count a morbid fascination with Shark Boy and Lava Girl.

Rather than increase the cost for those who want to stream and continue with DVDs, Netflix probably should have announced the Quikster DVD service, offered current users a choice to stay with streaming-only Netflix or move to DVD-only Quikster, then thrown-in a streaming option strictly for Quikster. This would have been clearer and cleaner messaging but you can see how Netflix might have seen that path as being even riskier than simply adding a surcharge for DVDs on the way to an eventual spin-off.

Wall Street is keyed to total subscriber numbers and anything that causes those to stop growing would hurt Netflix shares. So for Hastings the real question was which move would hurt the company and its subscribers less?

Some level of pain was inevitable, because subscribers don’t like change (unless it involves lower prices) and day traders love market uncertainty exacerbated by throngs of angry torch-wielding peasants upset about...DVDs?

Reed Hastings took his best shot and maybe it was the wrong one. To compensate he threw himself under the bus in a blog post which also means nothing.  Netflix is continuing to follow a path laid out more than a decade ago. And three months from now none of this will even matter, the peasants and their torches having moved on to the next source of upset.

Note — I have written previously about other aspects of this subject here, here, here, and here.  I am not by nature an alarmist about nuclear power or even particularly anti-nuclear. But sometimes truth just has to be told.

Nobody died following the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in 1979. I should know because I was there. But this fact can’t be attributed to any wisdom of the U.S. nuclear industry, but simply to dumb luck.  The two TMI reactors were (and still are) the only such devices ever built deliberately on the approach path to a U.S. Air Force base, now Harrisburg International Airport. An extra 18 inches of reinforced concrete was added to the TMI containment buildings to protect them if hit by a fully laden B-52. No other reactors in the USA had (or have) such thick containment vessels. Had Unit 2 been built to the standards of all its sister reactors like Rancho Seco in California, hydrogen explosions would have breached the containment just as they have in Japan and many people would have died just as they will in Japan.

Notice my emphasis in that last paragraph?  Japanese people, probably hundreds and maybe thousands, will probably die as a result of the Fukishima Daiichi nuclear accidents following the tsunami earlier this year. This is according to old nuclear safety contacts of mine from TMI days currently working the accident in Japan. Those sources tell me there is a coverup.

Why there might be a coverup is pretty obvious. It will take years for people to die as a result of the accidents yet political parties want to remain in power right now and the Japanese nuclear industry wants to remain key to that nation’s energy plan. So men with gray hair who are nowhere near Fukishima and are not themselves in any physical danger are downplaying the accident still and apparently keeping the truth from reaching those who are endangered.

The public health situation at Fukishima Daiichi and beyond is apparently far worse than we have been told.

This is the way things work in Japan and always have. Japan is, after all, an export economy built on the inherent financial abuse of its citizens who can generally buy the same Japanese cars for less in the USA than they could at a dealership in the city where those cars are manufactured. This is seen as the collective price of prosperity. But in this case it will probably kill people.

Just look at the Japanese regulations for radiation exposure, which are right now being rewritten with a new — and higher — number considered to be normal. Soon what’s normal in Fukushima and in fish taken from surrounding waters would be considered unsafe in the USA.

This is, as my Mom would say, a God damned shame, but I can’t see what’s to be done about it, can you?

Moving sucks. Our furniture arrived late last week so I’ve been off the clock for awhile and there is a lot of catching-up to do.  We’ll start with Microsoft and Windows 8, which I’ll argue are going to be formidable competitors in the tablet space, primarily because it’s that or start spending all that cash on diversified investments to turn Microsoft into a Berkshire Hathaway. This is probably Ballmer’s last stand as a high tech CEO.

It was entirely by coincidence that I interviewed both Jon Shirley and Bill Gates in their last weeks as Microsoft CEO. In Shirley’s case it was his final day and I’ve never seen a guy more eager to get out of town. And why not?  Running any major corporation must be a huge undertaking that I don’t ever want to try, though of course I’m perfectly willing to criticize. Shirley was at the end of a fabulous run and knew it.  Gates‘ departure was a little different, since I sensed much of the incentive was to help Redmond’s anti-trust strategy at the time, removing from power the guy popularly (and properly) seen as perp-in-chief. Ballmer’s job taking over from Gates was mainly to not rock the boat while carefully turning Microsoft into a kinder and gentler company that could still crush rivals as needed. But in the process (and this is my point here) Ballmer gave up Microsoft’s ability to turn on a dime.  Now Ballmer has to regain that capability or lose his job.

Microsoft under Bill Gates was defined by his 1995 memo The Internet Tidal Wave. Prior to that time the PC future seemed to be about multimedia and CD-ROM, because that’s where Apple was heading and Microsoft was used to following that lead, having developed resources like its Encarta digital encyclopedia. The Internet surprised Gates, but when he came back from his annual Think Week that year he was up to speed and had both a plan (dominate the emerging Internet era) and a rival to crush in order to achieve that end (Netscape). Microsoft always needs a rival to crush. Now it was just a matter of telling several thousand developers that their jobs had changed.

Gates was able to do this — to turn Microsoft’s development supertanker — by force of will and example. Understand this is a guy who hadn’t written production code since the Tandy 102 shipped in 1983, but he had carefully nurtured and preserved the ability to intimidate shy developers with his Aspergerian bluntness. “I can tell good code from across the room,” and “I could write that in a weekend” still worked back in 1995.

Ballmer never had these cards to play, having ceded to Gates-the-genius all claims of technical prowess. Microsoft geeks saw Ballmer as a joke and that image was perpetuated through all the making nice-nice that followed his rise to CEO as well as by a succession of software architects starting with Gates, himself, who simply didn’t envision it being a problem and saw no need to empower Ballmer. Well it was a problem.

Over the last year or so Ballmer has done a lot of executive pruning at Microsoft, taking more control of the company’s direction. He has tried to mute his Monkey Boy image as the honey-swigging sales chief who rants at company meetings. But thanks to YouTube, that image will remain for a long time.

Last week we saw the first public results of Ballmer’s executive makeover. The version of Windows 8 shared with developers was more refined than many expected, the tablet extensions appear to be well done and the ARM support is sincere. There is work still to be done but it feels a lot like Windows NT did post-OS/2. It has to be good because Microsoft is caught in a platform shift that could see it five years from now a profitable but inconsequential company.

In order to avoid that end (and keep his job, because even as the company’s third-largest shareholder Ballmer can’t escape personal responsibility this time) Microsoft has to really push technology for the first time in years. Redmond has to embrace tablets and even use its enterprise clout to push big customers in that direction, because doing a half-assed job this time doesn’t have the saving grace of most customers just re-upping with high-margin earlier versions of Microsoft products. This time the platform transition is going to happen with or without Microsoft and Ballmer knows that.

I won’t be surprised, then, to see Microsoft succeed. They can do this. But will they?  I won’t be surprised, either, to see them fail, though I don’t think they will.

That is not to say, though, that I agree with the industry analysts who are predicting Windows Phone will eventually dominate. That train left the station a long time ago. But Microsoft has a real shot with the enterprise (notice I say enterprise) tablet market.

And this tablet orientation is going to have interesting side effects. Take Yahoo, which we discussed last week.  What evidence is there that Yahoo has a tablet strategy?  None. They need one. Every Microsoft or Apple competitor does.

This is my promised follow-up to How Not to Run Yahoo, so I suppose this should have been titled How to Run Yahoo, but I’m too much of a smart-ass for that.  I spoke to a bunch of smart people (past and present Yahoos) some of whom even allowed me to print their names, and here’s our consensus view on what the next Yahoo CEO really has to do to turn the company around. I’m sorry it all sounds so negative, but it is toward a positive end, remember.

Yahoo has a bureaucracy problem that I attribute to former CEO Terry Semel, who hired legions of vice presidents to insulate the former Hollywood studio boss from the rude fact that he wasn’t, anymore, a Hollywood studio boss.  Since Semel didn’t seem to get what Yahoo was about, he hired lots of people to keep him from having to personally deal with it.

Here’s how my friend Randy put it: “My beef with Yahoo is that they have way too many layers (I might have the exact titles wrong, but the number of layers is right) — associates, senior associates, managers, senior managers, directors, senior directors, general managers, VPs, SVPs, EVPs, regional presidents. This is absolutely crazy. They have more VP-level employees than you could ever imagine. Their product and engineering talent sits under all of these layers. It’s no wonder they’re not a technology company anymore. That’s what they need to fix first — flatten the company. Firing a bunch of senior execs who can’t get it done and not replacing them would go a long way. No more senior directors, no more GMs, and way fewer VPs and SVPs.”

Step one, then — fire the executive fat.

Step two is all me: reorganize business development and place it lower in the organization.  Biz-dev at Yahoo seems mainly intent on not doing deals, which may be a safe bet for a high tech company that wants to die, but not for one that needs to reinvent itself like Yahoo does. We’re starting to see similar behavior, too, at Google.  Place the decision making authority where the knowledge is, as they used to say at Intel but apparently never said at Yahoo. It’s time to let divisions manage their own deal flow.

At this point I was blessed by an e-mail from Larry Tesler, former head of customer experience at Yahoo as well as chief scientist at Apple and some similarly impressive title at Amazon.com. Larry, one of the smartest and nicest guys you’ll ever meet put it right on the line. His advice for Yahoo is below and it feels right-on to me. If the Yahoo board self-decimates as seems to be expected, I think Larry deserves one of those open board seats. He’d be a big help.

“If I were running Yahoo! with the goal of turning the business around, what might I do? asked Larry, repeating my question. “You can quote any or all of what’s below in that context.

“First, I’d be sure that retention incentives for top innovators and operators were in place. Then I’d embark on a three-year disciplined turnaround. I’d identify a few existing businesses that are profitable and competitively strong, boost them by updating features, user experience and operational efficiency, and sell or shut down everything else.

“I’d liquidate the Alibaba stake, probably a little at a time, to generate cash.

“I’d pick a dozen exciting ideas for breakthrough services. They could come from the patent portfolio, Yahoo! Research and other internal sources. Or from acquisitions of unique, patent-protected technologies. I’d focus the innovators on those and keep the operators away (my emphasis here –Bob). I’d introduce one or two such services a year and invest heavily in their marketing, customer service and product quality.

“At first, I’d focus one third of executive staff meetings on the progress of business exits, one third on the needs of the remaining businesses, and one third on the maturest innovations. Over time, these proportions would change. I’d make long term strengthening of the brand a factor in every major decision.”

If you wonder why Carol Bartz is gone it’s because she didn’t seem to do any of this. Maybe she wasn’t allowed to or maybe she just didn’t get it. Hopefully the next Yahoo CEO will get it.

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, here is my column originally published September 13, 2001.

My smarter and handsomer brother was in Northern New Jersey on Tuesday looking across the water at what was for just a moment longer the single remaining tower of the World Trade Center. A cold front had passed through the night before, leaving the day startlingly clear. The carnage was easy to see even from a distance. Only the rising cloud of smoke and ash marred the sky. And then that tower, too, was gone. The magnitude of this disaster and its sister at the Pentagon in Washington is too great to ponder, so we are left wondering what we could have done to prevent it, and what we could do to keep it from happening again. I’m a longtime pilot, and a guy who used to work in the Middle East. Twenty-two years ago, I was a Fed investigating the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, so I have some experience of how governments approach disasters. It’s not pretty.

The point of terrorism is to leverage the efforts of a small group in an attempt to modify the behavior of a much larger group. I worked long ago as a reporter in Northern Ireland, and left that gig specifically because I began to feel like a pawn of the Provisional Wing of the Irish Republic Army. That 300-member organization was using my stories about their acts to influence people all over the world. I was probably just as much a pawn of the Ulster Defense League, the folks on the other side, but I didn’t want to be a pawn of anyone, so I left. The most important reaction to terrorism that a free society can show is to not give in to it.

But not giving in takes many forms, and I fear that some of the official reactions to the events of this week will take the form of effectively giving in if they also mean that we give up our freedom.

“To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” wrote Mark Twain. In the current, context this means that the organizations charged with reacting to this catastrophe will do so by doing what they have always done, only more of it. Congress, which controls the budget and passes laws, will want to pass laws and to allocate more money, lots of money, forgetting completely about any campaign promises. The military, which is the nation’s enforcer, will want to use force, if only they can find a foe. The intelligence community, which gathers information, will want to be even more energetic in that gathering, no matter what the cost to the privacy of the millions of us who aren’t thinking of terrorist acts. And agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulate, will want to create more stringent regulations. Now here is an important point to be remembered: All these parties will want to do these things WHETHER THEY ARE WARRANTED OR USEFUL OR NOT.

In 1956 two airliners collided over the Grand Canyon and the regulatory response was today’s air traffic control system. The FAA felt that by keeping most planes under positive control — telling them where to go and when — they could avoid future collisions. Yet collisions continue to happen. In 1978 a Pacific Southwest Airlines plane smashed into a small Cessna over San Diego despite the fact that both planes were flying under instrument rules and were under positive control. The FAA response that time was to carve up even more finely the sky over nearly every metropolitan area, controlling the airspace even more stringently with the intent of keeping instrument and visual traffic apart. There was no visual traffic in the San Diego accident, yet we still live with rules that arose from that accident even though those rules would not have prevented it.

So how will the FAA react this time? They will do what they have always done, pass new and stricter rules, and they will do so because it makes them feel better, not because it will actually help.

There is already a restricted area around the Pentagon where planes have never been allowed to fly, yet that didn’t stop this week’s attack. Should we make the restricted area larger? How much larger is large enough? Will we mount anti-aircraft guns atop office buildings? It won’t help. Would creating a restricted area over the World Trade Center have kept a hijacked airliner from entering that space? No, it wouldn’t. New rules will follow, and some of those rules won’t help, either.

It’s not just the government that is guilty of this over-reaction. Tuesday morning, I was speaking to eighth graders at the Pleasanton Middle School in California. The school was abuzz with news from the East Coast, but even more abuzz the next day when the kids had been through a full evening of re-run explosion footage and talking news heads instead of “That 70s Show.” I’m not saying we shouldn’t cover the news, but sometimes the extent to which we cover it creates problems of its own. There has been much made of the terrorists choosing New York as a target because it is the heart of the world financial community, but what made it an attractive target was more likely the city’s role as the very center of world media. That Peter Jennings could grab a shower at home and get right back on the air wasn’t by accident.

And I, too, am just another man with a hammer. My gig is technology, and I keep thinking there must some way to use it to prevent this kind of thing from happening again. The terrorists grabbed Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft because they are very different aircraft, yet share a single type certificate from the government. This means that the cockpits are identical. Learn to fly a 757 and you can fly a 767 too, making for a much larger pool of available aircraft with enough fuel capacity to take out the towers. But having a common type certificate also means the planes have the same autopilot systems, both of which include autolanding capability.

Why, I find myself thinking, can’t we build a system that takes over control of the autopilot, locks out flight crew and hijackers alike, and lands the plane at the first sign of trouble. Well, we could, but it opens a whole new area of vulnerability — hijacking autopilots. Forget I said anything.

So there are no answers, just more questions, and nobody is right. But we can’t give in, because to do so is to become less free, to be no longer ourselves. And above all, what defines us as Americans is our need to be ourselves.