We will miss you, Steve

Once, giants roamed the earth. They dreamed the future, and then made it come to pass. Steve Jobs was one such giant.

My brother reminded me today that while Steve was roaming in the wilderness known as Next Computer, he visited Wolfram. He was so impressed that he decided to ship a free copy of Mathmatica with every NeXT machine sold in the academic program (which already was selling machines for half the list price). That program changed how my brother viewed math forever. He went back to school (to Harvard) and got an advanced degree in Math, and has been a teacher of Math ever since – touching the lives of untold students through the years.

That was Steve Jobs – changing the world directly and indirectly in so many ways.

The change engine that is Apple will continue operating on momentum for a while. The team that Steve build is strong and they have been taught well. We will see if they can have the impact on another industry like those that Steve has created or recreated.

Personal Computing – the Apple ][ and the Mac

Music – the iPod, iTunes, digital music sales

Telephony – the iPhone

Animated films – Pixar

Personal Computing – the iPad

We had considered Steve to be an immortal. Now we know that he was merely a giant. Those of us that follow him now must dedicate ourselves to apply what we have learned by watching him work and live.

Today we lost a giant.

Steve Jobs  1955 – 2011

Motorola Mobility: Google’s $12.5 Billion Escape Hatch

We have had a few days now to digest the acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google.  It is clear that the stock market does not like the deal – the price of a share of GOOG has dropped by $30 since the deal was announced.  A respected analyst, Horace Dediu, has written a long article in the Harvard Business Review and talked more about it in the “critical path podcast” –  both of which are summarized very well in Fortune’s Apple 2.0 blog by Philip Elmer-DeWitt.

I encourage all to read the pieces linked above and to listen to the podcast, but I’ll also cut to the chase.  Dediu’s conclusion is that Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility makes no sense.  Not as an expansion of Google’s business, not as a strategic decision to begin making telephone handsets and tablets, not even as an expensive way to buy lots of patents that deal with various aspects of mobile computing and communications.

One thing that we do know is that Google does not employ dumb people.  They must have something in mind to support their decision to spend $12.5 billion – a lot of money even if you have Google’s bank account.

Celebrating Patent Trolls

The topic of the month in tech is “patent trolls are evil.” They typical statement is that patent lawsuits stifle innovation and divert resources from development into defending patent suits.

I disagree – what “patent trolls” actually do is accelerate the inventing process. They allow the true innovators – the ones that invented something new and got patents – to get immediate value for the patent rights because they pay cash to the innovators when they purchase the right to sue infringers of the patents. Innovators then can invest that cash to developing now inventions. This speeds the cycle for an inventor to get to the next invention.

The people or companies that have to allocate resources to defending against patent suits are the infringers – those that do not really innovate but rather copy the inventions of others. These are free riders – the do not invest in creating new technologies but rather quickly rush a copy of new technology to the market in hopes of grabbing sales from the actual inventor. They actually reduce the incentives to innovate because the inventor makes lower profits when she has to compete against these copiers. This is the whole reason why the field of patent law exists – to protect inventors from these copiers.

Apple’s Music iCloud has a Hole

Apple announced iCloud yesterday, and what Steve Jobs announced uncharacteristically failed to include the value and ease of use that Apple typically delivers.

First – what did Apple announce?  iCloud is a system of providing information anywhere – regardless of what device we are using or where we are physically located.  It is integrated into Mac OS X Lion (available in July) and into iOS 5 (available in the fall).  One small slice of iCloud is available immediately – a piece of the iCloud offering that extends our music collections.

Up until now, a computer (Mac or PC) controlled the music collection with Apple’s iTunes software.  Music could be copied onto iDevices by syncing them with the computer.  It worked pretty well as long as we were very careful to keep one computer as the master media server and if we both synced regularly and backed up the collection regularly.

With iCloud, the need to regularly back up the collection goes away.  At last, Apple will allow us to do something that we should have been able to do all along – download again songs that we purchased in the past.  That means that we can download our purchased collection of music onto a second computer, a third computer, etc (up to ten devices) directly from Apple’s servers.  That is a nice service, and I am sure that my daughters, especially, will be happy to be able to have a copy of the family music library (or a subset of it) on their computers.

Kudos to the SEC!

I sometimes see what appears to be obvious manipulation in the stock markets, and I get upset when the SEC seems to turn a blind eye towards it. I had an excellent interaction with the SEC Enforcement Division this morning, and I believe they deserve kudos. So I am posting this to share with the world their excellent work.

I am a General Partner in a venture capital investment fund. Yesterday morning, I received a telephone call from a man in Norway, saying that he had purchased stock from a law firm calling itself the name of my venture fund. He had send payment to them via wire transfer, but had not received any shares of stock. He was trying to track down the status of his purchase. He gave me the url for the web site of this supposed law firm, which included addresses in Hong Kong and in California – and the California address that they listed was the original address of my venture fund (an address that we moved out of over 8 years ago).

Since this organization impersonating my venture fund was claiming to be a law firm, I first called the California Bar Association. They said that they only had jurisdiction over real lawyers, not fake lawyers. They suggested that I contact the local district attorney. I called the local district attorney, who told me that stock fraud was under the jurisdiction of the SEC and referred me to SEC Enforcement.

RIP Paul Baran

Paul Baran, one of the brilliant men who created a technology without which our current world would not exist, died March 26, 2011. He was 84.

Dr. Baran invented the concept of packetizing digital information for transport through a network, with the packets being reassembled at their destination. This concept is one of the fundamental technologies of the Internet.

Dr. Baran was a giant.  All of us who use the Internet today stand on his shoulders.