Last week we heard from my new hero Steve, an electrical engineer turned high school math teacher, with his reservations about technology as a motivator for student success. Notice this week I can use Steve’s first name, though not his last name or the name of the school where he teaches. This alone says volumes about the prickly state of teaching today where saying the truth out loud can hurt a career. And I understand why Steve might be concerned, because this time he’s talking not about how technology doesn’t often enable better learning, but how it actually gets in the way.

“Now, consider what happens if you inject into this scenario an iPad into the hands of every student in the classroom,” Steve continued.  “Certainly, for some students who are intrinsically motivated, this will unlock great learning options and it may, due to its more engaging nature, bring in some students who weren’t very interested and help them become more interested in learning.  But many students will not use the technology this way.  Many will choose to use the iPad as just another distraction (and a very compelling one) instead of focusing on learning the class content.  

“I witnessed this myself the last time I took a summer course at my local community college.  I was in a classroom paying attention to the professor, taking notes (on paper no less) and learning, while around me all my peers had their laptops open.  Were they taking notes electronically?  No, every screen was either open to Facebook or to some online game.  These students were convinced that they could effectively multitask and learn while being distracted by the technology, but in the end, of the people around me, I was the only one who got an A on the final exam in that class.”

Steve’s solution for these technical distractions is institutional control of Internet access in the classroom. Limit surfing and apps the way I try to keep my kids doing constructive things with their computers at home. But as we all know, that doesn’t really work. The tools are too crude, the kids are too clever, and who are we to say, really, what’s learning and what’s messing around?

Still, I wish parental controls were better. Understand my control efforts go deeper than most since I have placed limitations on the individual workstations as well as global limitations on the network through my ClearOS (formerly Clark Connect) gateway, which has powerful content filtering capabilities. Kids can’t go to a web page, for example, that my DNS server deliberately knows nothing about. Our gateway is of course named Sergeant Schultz.

Forget the software for a moment, though, and let’s consider what’s at work here with all this goofing off, which is the simple avoidance of academic effort. It takes place at all levels.

From my first job at Triway High School where I taught biology, chemistry, physics, and vocational agriculture to my six years at Stanford I was continually amazed at how grateful students were for any class disruption, with a class cancellation being the best news of all.  It’s like they wanted less for their parents’ money. Some (like John McEnroe, who dropped my class after the second week) would have been happiest with nothing for their money at all.

Education is a peculiar labor market.  As a teacher I managed my students and required output from them (their product) which was paid for with grades from me. But if they didn’t do the work and their product sucked as a result, there was little effect on me as a teacher because their product never truly entered commerce. It was all just a game.

A reader from Sweden, reacting by e-mail to last week’s column, cited Victor Vroom’s Expectancy Theory as governing student behavior. Expectancy Theory (I hadn’t heard of it, either) says behaviors arise from motivations and motivations are based on expected outcomes. This makes sense, I guess, if McEnroe’s expected outcome was an NCAA tennis singles title, not passing my class. The experience wasn’t real for any of us but only McEnroe acted on that knowledge.

I think this goes a long way toward explaining what some folks like Peter Thiel are calling a bubble market for education, where grades are inflated, tuition continually rises, and the real world relevance of any of it is as subjective as the value of 16th century tulip bulbs.

Like all bubbles, this one is aspirational — driven by those who aspire to acquire something in limited supply that they perceive to be of value whether it actually is valuable or not. Being glad that class was cancelled just defines the underlying values more clearly. The term will still end whether class is held today or not, a grade (and ultimately a degree) will still be earned, so let’s all head to the O for a beer.

Where does technology come into this? It doesn’t. I think Peter Thiel is wrong, by the way, as I’ll explain in our third and final section to come tomorrow. Technology is essential, yet so far inconsequential in the calculus of education.

I guess that explains why all these computers haven’t made us particularly smarter.

I received an e-mail last week from someone who is sure to become one of my heroes — an electrical engineer turned high school math teacher. He was concerned about the proper use of technology, especially iPads, in the classroom, and had quite specific suggestions for what to do. We’ll probably get to that in my next column but here I’d like to consider his more fundamental idea, which is that technology in schools can be, in many ways, more a distraction than a solution.

“The problem is that I’ve found that all these things that are purported to improve student learning ignore the number one factor in student success, which is the student’s attitude toward learning and motivation,” wrote my new friend the math teacher.  “The truth is that if students are motivated to learn, they will learn, pretty much regardless of the specific format or technology that is used in the lessons themselves.  Conversely, if a student is not interested in learning, the details of how lessons are presented, technology, etc. don’t matter very much…the student will find whatever way is available to avoid learning…they may socialize with their neighbors, or frequently ask to leave the classroom to go to the bathroom, or simply try to tune out and take a nap during class.  Thus, while we focus on how teachers teach, I’m finding that the real key to student success is not so much how you teach but how you go about motivating students to want to learn, and how the systems you use in the classroom help support and encourage students to succeed even when they are not intrinsically motivated by the subject.”

He’s correct. In an ideal world students want to learn and teachers want to teach and the two meet in a common space where knowledge is transferred. Except how often and how well does that really happen?

It happens all the time in some places, like at Stanford where my students used to chase me back to my office after class arguing over some point or other. But not every school can be a Stanford and even there, as at many research universities, much of the faculty doesn’t really want to teach.

Ironically, there was a time when I taught simultaneously at Stanford and Foothill College, a junior college just down the street and a million miles way.  I used to joke that Stanford students couldn’t write but at least they could read. But you know that was unfair to my students at Foothill, many of whom were just as dedicated and hard working, though with different expectations.

A lot of this comes down to expectations. And our expectations of technology in education more often than not come down to it being a tool for compensation, either working like an instructional Hamburger Helper to stretch teachers across more students or to literally teach what the present faculty cannot.

One sure-fire success would be a truly great calculus teacher in a box. What would that be worth? Maybe $50,000 per year times 5,000 high schools? There’s your educational startup idea.

Which brings us to costs. Steve Wozniak, who spent a decade and several million dollars working two days a week in the Los Gatos Public Schools when his kids were students there, taught me an important lesson about the price of educational technology.  “A desk lasts 25 years, a textbook lasts a decade, and a computer is good for maybe three years: which of those costs the most?” he asked. It was only by putting a decade of educational technology on his credit card that Woz was able to create an ideal environment in Los Gatos, giving every student a notebook computer and Internet access, yet even he would be hard put to say with certainty that it made a consistent difference in student outcomes.

School administrators hate technology, whether they admit it or not, because they don’t understand it and it takes funds away from hiring more teachers. If we go back to our math teacher’s quote, above, you can see why.  Because technology for technology’s sake is a crap shoot while hiring teachers who are known to be good at their jobs of inspiring students to learn is pretty close to a sure thing.

Fortunately two things are happening to change these facts of educational life. Technology is getting cheaper, better, broader, and deeper. It’s not good enough or cheap enough yet, but the school PC of today has five times the utility for one fifth the price of 25 years ago (not Moore’s Law numbers, but this is utility, not cycles, we’re talking about).  That 25-to-1 improvement is a trend that is only going to get better faster, but I’d say we are still a decade away from the critical mass needed for a true educational renaissance, which I’ll describe below.

The other thing that’s happening is parents are changing. I’ve written about this before but it bears repeating. This week I’ll turn 59, but my kids are 9, 7, and 5 and I talk to the other parents — many of them young enough to be my children — as we wait to get our kids from class or band practice or chess club or science club or basketball practice, or Odyssey of the Mind. Parents aren’t the same as they used to be.

These parents all use computers every day. They grew up with computers. They don’t know a world without computers. And so they may be frustrated by technology as all of us are and may always be, but they aren’t afraid of it and they see its potential. A decade from now one of those parents will be running the school system and another will be running the state department of education. Only then will things really change. And the cool part is that’s about when I think the technology will finally be where it needs to be.

A decade from now technology will be cheaper and the lubricity of acquiring knowledge will be dramatically improved. I think time and space will cease to be factors in the educational experience with the result that the best teachers and the best students will have a far better chance of finding each other. But for the best that’s, what, maybe a 10 percent improvement? After all, these are the already motivated we’re talking about, not the kids who need a little help or a lot.  It’s the very normal kids I hope will gain the most from technology, far more than 10 percent.

This goes back to my math teacher quote, above. Motivated students succeed, but since every student is different and every student has a different way to learn best, unless we can design an individual curriculum for each kid, the system won’t be optimized.

My kids go to the best public school in Sonoma County. I know that because I chose my house based on that research. But when Cole finishes his math problems in a quarter the time it takes anyone else in the class, his teacher has him insert a wait state by putting his head down on his desk.  Conversely, when some other kid never quite gets the problem set finished, ever, well he/she never gets a rest and never masters the material, either.

The current system is unfair to both kids.

The only solution I can see is one teacher per student. And the only way something close to that is going to happen is through technology.  And it’s coming.

How many times yesterday did you do a web search that led you to a Wikipedia page that then didn’t load because of that site’s SOPA protest?  I didn’t notice the effect immediately but once I did I was later able to go back through my browser history and see that I tried and failed to open a total of 13 Wikipedia pages so far.  Whether you give a damn about SOPA or public protest, this experience has given me a whole new respect for the role Wikipedia has come to play in my life and probably yours.

As a result I made a small donation to Wikipedia around lunchtime then cursed it the rest of the day for failing me seven more times.

As for the SOPA/PIPA protest itself, I sympathize. But in my view what we have here is mainly a conflict of business models, dying industries, and really, really poor design that will work itself out over time.

Remember the record album — the LP?  Some were great, most were not. Too many B tracks if you ask me. The music industry has long had a problem of value.  The groups I liked sometimes didn’t have many good songs.  The record companies would put one or two good songs on an LP or CD, then throw in 10 more that weren’t so good.  There were no warning labels which matter to me now that I am a parent.  All we wanted were good songs at a reasonable price, which didn’t mean the 15-20 percent yield we were getting from albums.

Then came iTunes and all those problems went away.  iTunes did more than just sell the songs the record companies were pushing: they sold whole collections of music.  As a result, more, not less, music was sold, most of it the good stuff. Music — if not the recording industry — is better as a result. Steve Jobs proved thinking about the consumer is very good business.

Now we have SOPA and PIPA.  I would like to have the same ability to build an online movie library as I have done with music, but there are big problems with this, starting with Windows Media Center and, yes, even iTunes — pretty good products in their own right that protect the copyrights of stored content.  That part is okay.  But they have very little third party support.  Then there is the problem of content.  I can buy only a fraction of what I’d like to get and it is scattered over several suppliers.  If the movie and TV industries think I am going to subscribe to 5-10 services for $10-25 a month each, they’re nuts.

The movie and TV industries are doing now exactly what the recording industry did before iTunes.  SOPA and PIPA will die but they’ll be replaced with something just as bad because lawmakers are stupid and producers are afraid of the future — a future that’s coming no matter what the entertainment industry does.  For the money they are spending on lobbying, a design team could develop a new system that would make more money by exposing more content, not less, enabling new business models in the process.  At least that’s my take on it.

Changing subjects, Jerry Yang recently got his choice of replacement CEOs again (Jerry’s fourth CEO — fifth if you include choosing himself in 2007) then almost immediately bailed from his every Yahoo connection: what’s up with that?  I wish I knew, but I have some suspicions.  An intervention, perhaps?  Jerry was such an obstructionist to Yahoo moving forward in almost any direction that someone on the inside may finally have told him to sit down and shut up, which I am sure Tim Koogle wanted to do many times.

I can see Jack Ma making a preemptive move like that, saying he’ll pay $1 billion more for Yahoo’s Alibaba stake if Jerry takes a hike first.

Nah, sounds too simple.  More likely Yang finally got tired of playing the bad cop and decided to retire to his private golf course.  I’ll be very interested to see what his next career move will be.  Off the board and owning less than five percent of the company (no SEC reporting requirements) it could be trying to make money trading on what’s sure to be a wild ride for Yahoo over the next several months.

Another change of subject — remember my problem just after Christmas trying to upgrade Windows 7 Home Premium to Windows 7 Professional using one of those instant upgrade cards I bought at WalMart? Though I tried to do the upgrade every day, it wasn’t until this past weekend — two and a half weeks after I started — that the Windows Instant Upgrade website was no longer down for maintenance. I’m not making this up nor can I be the only person with this particular problem, yet run a Google News search and you’ll see I’m almost the only person to write about it. What’s with that?

Well it is certainly humbling for me: I’m clearly not the hotshot reporter thought I was or possibly use to be. But it also brings into question the whole idea of viral growth in news stories and why one story gets picked up and another doesn’t.  It beats the crap out of me why it happens.  One thing I don’t suspect, though, is any concerted effort by Microsoft to shape the news other than by simply ignoring me. I certainly felt no pressure from them.

Frankly, I wish I had been pressured by Microsoft.  That would have been fun.

And now that I have Windows RDP service to my thin clients from a brand new Windows 7 server, how is it working out for my trio of young users?  Terrible. Even elementary school gamers overload this system despite first 8 and now 16 gigs of DDR3 RAM. Thin clients (and thick — I’ve tried both) fail the FusionFall test.

multidimensional, get it?

I was watching this Bloomberg video the other day featuring Shawn Carolan, the venture capitalist who backed the Siri electronic personal assistant startup then sold it to Apple. His was the closest I’d heard to a technical explanation of how Siri works and it surprised me because it sounded a lot like technology I remembered from years ago at Excite, the long-defunct search engine.  Please look at the video and then meet me in the next paragraph.  The part that excited me (no pun intended) is about four minutes in.

Okay, he said they used linguistic techniques to map blocks of words against 10 possible domains of expertise to figure out what the heck you are asking Siri to do, with the real breakthrough being treating the entire user question or order as a single linguistic unit.

Now let’s jump back to 1994.  Eighteen years ago the search engine technology standard was set by Alta Vista, which spun out of Digital Equipment Corporation. Alta Vista pioneered web indexing with spiders dragging back web pages and it pioneered keyword searches. But if a keyword wasn’t present, Alta Vista would never return the web page you really needed because Alta Vista wasn’t smart enough.

Today the search engine standard is of course Google which uses PageRank to measure relevance by putting higher in the search results those pages that are linked to by more other pages.  Adding to this (yes, I know I’m over-simplifying — feel free to correct me) Google knows a lot about synonyms and how word meaning changes in different contexts — basic linguistic tools that were probably out of Alta Vista’s reach simply because of the processing power required.

And then there was Excite, which was completely different. When I first visited the company in 1994 it was called ArchiText and was six Stanford students operating from their Los Altos garage. I helped them find their first customer and their first venture capitalist, Steve Coit of Charles River Ventures. Vinod came along later.

Most of the ArchiText boys were semantic systems majors and they took a very different technical approach to search than did Alta Vista or that other up-and-coming search engine, Yahoo, which in those days did the task the old fashioned way — by hand.

ArchiText used spiders, too, and built its own web index, but from the start the company was dedicated to finding useful search results even if they didn’t include any search terms from the original user query — seemingly an enormous job.  Google does some of that through its elaborate algorithm, mentioned above, but Google’s technique is for the most part hard coded and brute force while ArchiText’s was very different and, well, elegant.

Here’s how the ArchiText (later Excite) search engine worked. Every query was stripped to its significant words — subjects, objects, verbs and adjectives — then each query became a vector in a multidimensional space with each unique word being a dimension.  “How do space rockets stay in orbit when they are flying through space?” would become a vector string one unit long for each of those words but two units long for the word “space.”  This bit of semantic DNA was then mapped against an index of millions of web pages that had all been similarly converted to multidimensional vectors.

Finding the most relevant results then became a simple matter of grabbing the N vectors (web pages) nearest to the query vector in that multidimensional space.  It was quick, scalable, concentrated the processing load on the indexing where it didn’t bog down retrieval, and could reliably return pages like “Why satellites fall from the sky” that might answer the question even though none of the same words were used.

Compare that to the description of Siri from the Bloomberg video.  Siri takes the entire query as a single block and maps it against a corpus composed of 10 domains of expertise looking for a fit, or perhaps for the best fit.

Technically it sounds darned similar to me, but then I’m forever condemned to remember old crap like this.

In the long run PageRank was more useful to the real world, Excite got sucked into @Home and the whole mess blew up with the dot-com meltdown, but not before all this technology was patented — patents owned today by Excite@Home’s creditors, which surprised me given that the original inventor, Graham Spencer, now works at Google.

Those old Excite patents, while nearing the end of their lives, could turn out to be very valuable to, say, a Google trying to compete with Siri on Android or even to an Apple trying to defend Siri from competitors.

I expect we’ll see those patents change hands sometime soon.

Richard Alley, a geoscience professor at Penn State, drilled into the Antarctic a few years ago removing a half-mile ice core documenting the last Ice Age, which Alley determined had lasted 10,000 years then came to an abrupt end in only three years. That may seem an odd analogy for this week’s Consumer Electronics Show but it’s what came to mind when I saw story after story suggesting CES, too, might be winding down.  I think it is.  And I further think that maybe the only thing that might yet save CES in some form is Willie Nelson, or maybe Taylor Swift.

Huh?

CES never used to matter much in my world.  The show to attend was Comdex (and before that NCC). CES meant TVs and stereos, but Comdex, well Comdex was about computers. Up to 250,000 people in one place just because of computers.

What killed Comdex, I think, was a combination of 9/11, the Internet, and the end of the dot-com bubble. But then 9/11 came close to taking out a lot of institutions, even me.

It was the simultaneous loss of dot-com largess and the abrupt, but temporary, end to business travel after 9/11 that almost killed my career.  Pre-9/11 I was being paid to speak somewhere twice a month.  Post-9/11 I was speaking twice a year.  Comdex was hurt even more than I was, though, because it was built on voodoo economics.  Comdex owner Softbank retrenched, facing reality, the show closed, and suddenly it made perfect sense to display computers alongside the big screen TVs at CES in January, calling that change progress.

But now CES appears to be succumbing, too, to another era of reduced aspirations. Microsoft is pulling out. Half of the PC people who matter at CES live or work within 50 miles of each other anyway in the Bay Area, so why meet in Vegas?  Why indeed?

It’s hard to see, in fact, almost any big venue trade show that is growing and not in trouble. The only such business I can see that defies this trend is big name music touring, which brings us back to Taylor Swift and to Willie.  With so much that’s synthetic and artificial in our world, somehow the idea of seeing and hearing a real person onstage has gained new allure, a business model just waiting to be exploited through co-marketing.

Having once paid for my kids to see the Moscow Circus sponsored by Huggies, I can imagine a logical music/technology hybrid replacing the traditional techie trade show, a little like Burning Man and a lot  like Steve Wozniak’s old US Festivals where computers and music were displayed side-by-side.

Apple presents U2! (iPads around back).

Why not?

With 10 million IT professionals of one sort or another in America you could tie a tech seminar and a sales pitch to anything from Usher to cricket to Scottish Games, but with no more going to Vegas (and no Justin Bieber — too young). The trade show (and t-shirt sellers) would come to us, just like Willie Nelson does.

Just like Fish.

Write that weekend off your taxes.

Somebody call Live Nation.

When I started this gig in September, 1987 Ronald Reagan was President, there was no commercial Internet, Oprah had been on the air for less than a year, and a fairly powerful PC was an IBM PC AT running at 8 MHz. In September that will have been 25 years and I think 25 years is probably enough.

That’s 1300 consecutive weeks without a break. Honest to God, I haven’t missed a week since 1987. How many people can say that? With more than two million words in print, most of them still available online, it’s like having a time card the entire world can check. No cheating allowed.

I’m not saying exactly when the end will come, just that it will be this year sometime after September. And I have plenty to do between now and then including a couple TV projects, books, a surprise or two, as well as at least a couple hundred more columns.

Nor will I disappear completely even then.  But I’d like to make some changes in my life, like build a boat with my kids and maybe walk the Earth.

Besides, it’s better to quit while you’re ahead, if only barely.

Steve Ballmer has always been nice to me. I can’t say we have much of a relationship, but the half dozen times I have interviewed him have always gone well and he tries to please, which I appreciate. But (there’s always a but, isn’t there?) Ballmer has failed at Microsoft and I believe 2012 will see him replaced as Redmond’s CEO.

During Ballmer’s term Microsoft’s stock has gone nowhere and it lost to Apple its position as America’s most valuable technology company.  While the company is wildly profitable and will remain so for years to come, those profits still come, for the most part, from two stalwart products from the 1990s — Windows and Office — both of which will fade as the mobile conversion proceeds.

Very little else has worked for Microsoft.  I know, I know there are 50 million xBox game systems out there and hundreds of millions of games have been sold, but how much money did Microsoft actually make on all that hardware?  The company would be in a better position today, frankly, had it simply shut down everything but Windows and Office.

Ballmer tried and failed and it is long past being time for him to go. Unfortunately most of the internal candidates who might logically have succeeded him are no longer with the company.  And it is my belief that once you leave Microsoft you don’t come back.

Besides, Ballmer probably doesn’t want to give up the job.

But it’s time, Steve.  You know it’s time.

Now we’ve reached the part of the show where I tell you who I believe will be the new Microsoft CEO.  I could have put it in the headline above but I wanted you to keep an open mind at least this far. Because there’s a cynical cadre of readers who apparently come here mainly to get angry and feel superior and those readers are about to accuse me for the second or third time this week of having jumped the shark.

I think the next CEO of Microsoft will be Eric Schmidt, who happens at the moment to be chairman of Google.

For something this crazy to happen it has to work for both parties and I think this does, so please read to the end.

Schmidt is, at this point, a billionaire drone at Google. Larry Page is back firmly in control and there is little for Schmidt to do but go around the world hinting at new products. Not only that, Page is pointedly dismantling the organization Schmidt built, seeing it as inefficient.

It is no longer Eric Schmidt’s Google.

I’ll get back to Schmidt’s motivations in a moment, but now let’s look at why Microsoft might do this. It’s a tactical move for one thing and Microsoft thrills to tactical moves. Google has been identified as Microsoft’s top enemy and Schmidt certainly knows Google.  Apple is a big enemy, too, and Schmidt knows that company from his several years on the Apple board.

If Microsoft wants to send Wall Street and the technology market a clear signal that something has changed, hiring Eric Schmidt would be that signal.

And for his part I think Schmidt would do pretty well at Microsoft. It’s a very techie company that presently lacks technical leadership and is adrift as a result.  It lacks the cultural problems Schmidt faced at Novell and the cult-of-personality problems at Google, where Schmidt had too much of a free hand with the result being the dysfunctional culture Larry Page is currently dismantling.

More than anything else, though, sometimes just firing the manager can turn a team around. In this instance I am referring to Ballmer.

Now back to why Schmidt would want to even do it.  For one thing he can prove Larry Page was wrong.  For another — and this is vitally important — this is about the only way Schmidt can sell his Google stock, which may be not far from a historic high.  As CEO of Microsoft there’s no onus against selling that stock or putting it in a foundation which then sells it, or maybe even selling it to Microsoft.

Call me crazy but that’s how I see it.  Who would you choose?

Let me be clear about this just in case my clever headline makes no sense: I think the Yahoo board punted by hiring Scott Thompson, who is either a stooge for Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang or a convenient placeholder until the company can be sold.

I have nothing against Thompson, who did an able, if very vanilla, job at PayPal, but there is nothing — nothing — that distinguishes him as a new media executive. With a wildly dysfunctional outfit like Yahoo, he’ll be in over his head from the first day. I hope for his sake there’s a golden parachute rip cord available for pulling.

His best hope — and it isn’t much of a hope — is that Jerry Yang has come to his senses and at least gives Thompson good orders to follow.

You can’t blame Thompson for wanting to take the top job at, as he calls it, an iconic company. Nor can you blame him for thinking he can turn Yahoo around. But I can blame the Yahoo board all day and night for being a roomful of bozos.

Shareholders should throw out the entire Yahoo board.

Companies go public for many reasons but the two that are most common are: 1) to raise capital for further expansion, and; 2) to secure the wealth of the founders. Some companies go public for different reasons, like Microsoft’s IPO back in 1986 that was literally forced by excessive secondary trading of company shares. Gates and Shirley decided to accept the burden of going public because it wasn’t all bad, but they didn’t seek it because they didn’t need the money.

Neither does Facebook.

SEC rules say that once a company has more than 500 shareholders it has to file the same financial disclosures as any public company, which is a pretty big administrative burden and a real hit to company privacy. It’s not the size of the company (look at Koch Industries as an example of a huge company that’s still very private) but the number of shareholders.

Conventional wisdom says that if you have to file all the same reports as a public company does you may as well sell some shares, raise some money, and give your kids an inheritance worth fighting over.  And that’s why companies in Facebook’s position nearly always have an IPO.

But there’s more to an IPO than just filing papers and accepting money from underwriters. There’s a management roadshow where executives run around the country pitching their stock to institutional investors. And there’s the need to accept whatever valuation the market places on your company post-IPO.  Even if you only sell a small percentage of your company to the public, that percentage is used to value everything else, as social game developer Zynga knows to its recent chagrin, having gone public only to see its value drop.

It’s this last paragraph that is important to Facebook and why I think the company will forego an IPO, at least for 2012. The roadshow is a huge distraction and can be humiliating for executives (that would be Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) who have to answer every question, no matter how intrusive or ill-informed.

Then there’s that valuation, which everyone thinks will be around $100 billion, but what if it isn’t?  Zynga has made the market nervous about social networking IPOs and LinkedIn’s $6 billion valuation with 100+ million members makes 800+ million member Facebook look more like a $48 billion company to me.  That’s close to Facebook’s recent valuation for private placements.  I don’t think those recent investors want to see the value of their holdings go down.

Facebook is a profitable company with $3.5 billion in cash so it doesn’t need more money absent some huge acquisition that I don’t think is coming and could probably be used to back into going public if one did happen. Zuckerberg, for all his geeky brilliance, risks being crushed or screwing-up the roadshow. He has plenty of money, too (remember that $100 million he gave away last year?), and no heirs to fight over it.

The company has long forged its own course and I think they’ll do so this time, filing the proper SEC reports but not going public in the traditional sense. There is simply too much at stake and too much to lose.

As longtime Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes said of passing the ball, “only three things can happen and two of them are bad.”

Once Facebook has changed its reporting status and the market comes to understand what’s happening, they can quietly start selling shares almost anytime, but probably not in 2012.

What’s going to happen with TiVO?  The pioneering Digital Video Recorder company is still in business with around a million subscribers and it has lately been settling patent infringement cases with big companies like Echostar and — just this week — with AT&T, but the longer term prospects for the company are dim. Yes, they’ll likely rake in hundreds of million more in settlements from companies including Verizon, but at the same time their subscriber base is dwindling and a point will come when their hardware will simply disappear as the company loses manufacturing economies of scale. That is unless they want to start shipping each new unit with a $100 bill attached — something public companies are generally loathe to do.

So I’m guessing a better end for TiVO would be to sell out, despite (or perhaps even because of) the recent court successes. They’ll find a buyer that covets the subscriber base, covets the IP portfolio, covets the revenue stream from recent and future settlements, and maybe sees buying TiVO as some masterstroke in a competitive industry.

There are only two logical buyers for TiVO in my view — Cisco and Motorola. As the two largest manufacturers of cable boxes either could use a kosher DVR implementation to its strategic advantage.  I think Motorola is the more likely buyer because it is about to be flush with $12 billion GoogleBucks from the sale of its Motorola Mobility division and because Cisco has been pointedly concentrating lately on its enterprise businesses and might see buying TiVO as sending the wrong signal to Wall Street.

But none of this means a hill of beans to me.  I’m not a TiVO subscriber, just an observer.