Good news for air-guitarists

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From Technology Review…

It’s every guitar player’s nightmare: you step onstage, strike your rock-god pose, triumphantly strum the first chord of a song–and discover that your guitar is out of tune.

A new line of instruments from Gibson Guitar now promises to banish this scenario to the dark ages with high-tech self-tuning technology built into the company’s flagship electric-guitar models.

The idea is drawing both kudos and criticism from guitar professionals and purists. On blogs and forums around the Web, some players call it an inexcusable crutch for sloppy players. Others, particularly those who use different tunings for different songs, say it could be a godsend.

Either way, the system is a sign that the music world’s digital transformation is reaching ever deeper, even into the rarefied circles of high-end analog instruments…

eBay: we goofed

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From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

Today, in what will undoubtedly be a blow to the Skype founders’ seller rating, eBay finally acknowledged that its bid for the VoIP firm may have been a tad overenthusiastic and that whatever expectations it had were not being met. EBay announced that in the quarter just ended, it will take $1.4 billion in write-offs and charges related to the Skype acquisition. About $530 million will go to former Skype shareholders to help them forget about those additional performance-based payouts. And eBay will write off about $900 million in Skype-related “goodwill” to more accurately reflect the acquisition’s value. And just in case the message wasn’t clear, Skype co-founder Niklas Zennstrom was eased out of the CEO’s office and given the non-executive chairman’s seat at the Skype board table.

Wow!

That still leaves open the question of what eBay ought to do with its tarnished toy, and Henry Blodget has an answer: sell it to someone who could put it to use, like Yahoo, Microsoft or Google.

This year’s Xmas book

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Every Christmas there’s a book which takes the UK market by storm. It’s the book that everyone thinks someone else would like to read — the perfect literary stocking-filler. In earlier years it was Lynne Truss’s Eats Shoots and Leaves and Schott’s Miscellany.

I’ve just finished what I predict will be this year’s Christmas Book. It’s Alan Bennett’s delicious fantasy about what would happen if HM the Queen became a serious reader. Here she is explaining Proust to the (baffled) Foreign Secretary:

“Terrible life, poor man. A martyr to asthma, apparently, and really someone to whom one would have wanted to say, ‘Oh do pull your socks up.’ But literature’s full of those. The curious thing about his was that when he dipped his cake into his tea (disgusting habit) the whole of his past life came back to him. Well, I tried it and it had no effect on me at all. The real treat when I was a child was Fuller’s cakes. I suppose it might work with me if I were to taste one of them, but of course they’ve long since gone out of business, so no memories there. Are we finished?”. She reached for her book.

124 pages of pure, unadulterated bliss. If I were a screenwriter I’d be working on the adaptation now.

The Brooning of Labour

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If, like me, you were repelled by the unctuous vapouring of Gordon Brown’s Conference Speech, then you’ll enjoy Ross McKibbin’s acerbic commentary in the current LRB. Sample:

How problematic Brown’s policies were and are has been demonstrated by the Northern Rock affair. In the short term, of course, its difficulties were not the doing of the government. Northern Rock was the victim of a crisis in the international banking system caused by unwise mortgage lending in the United States. In the longer term, however, Brown, New Labour and much of the country’s political and financial elite have acquiesced, with more or less enthusiasm, in a financial regime which began in this country with the abolition of credit restrictions by the Thatcher government. Although there were arguments in favour of abolition it was always very risky – just as the present colossal levels of personal indebtedness (essential to Labour’s electoral success) are very risky. That it came to a run on a bank – something that has not happened in Britain for 150 years, not even in the international financial crisis of 1931 when the stability of the British banking system was the wonder of the world – shows how instinctively (and understandably) nervous people are of this regime. Furthermore, Brown’s system of regulation worked badly. It was he who divided regulatory responsibility between the Financial Services Authority and the Bank of England – which was asking for trouble – and it was he who extended the autonomy of the Bank, with predictable results.

The truth is that — as McKibbin points out — much of what is most detestable about New Labour — its authoritarianism, contempt for civil liberties, adulation of ‘wealth creation’, micromanagerial obsessiveness over ‘targets’, PFI, etc. — are actually more Brown’s creations than Blair’s. The only difference is that Brown is now varnishing them with a new layer of patriotic tosh about “Britishness”, “British values”, etc. If the Tories weren’t so pathetic there might be some hope of unhorsing the pompous ass.

Google’s secret sauce

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Pascal Zachary get it right, IMHO:

Consider the question of Google’s greatest business secret. Is it the algorithms behind its search tools? Or is it the way it organizes vast clusters of computers around the globe to answer queries so quickly? Perhaps predictably, Google won’t disclose the number of computers deployed in its vast information network (though outsiders speculate that the network has at least 450,000 computers).

I believe that the physical network is Google’s “secret sauce,” its premier competitive advantage. While a brilliant lone wolf can conceive of a dazzling algorithm, only a superwealthy and well-managed organization can run what is arguably the most valuable computer network on the planet. Without the computer network, Google is nothing.

Eric E. Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, appears to agree. Last year he declared, “We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures.”

So, … XP stands for ‘extended presence’, right?

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Well, well. Microsoft bows to pressure on XP…

Customer demand has forced Microsoft to extend the shelf life of Windows XP by five months.

Microsoft was scheduled to stop selling the six-year-old operating system on 30 January 2008 to leave the field clear for Vista.

Now the date on which many sellers of XP will no longer be able to offer it has been lengthened to 30 June 2008.

Microsoft said the change was to help those customers that needed more time to make the switch to Vista.

Ho, ho!

Taking people at their Facebook value

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This morning’s Observer column…

To the old question: what are friends for? we must now add: how much are they worth? This is topical because rumours abound that Microsoft is contemplating buying a stake in Facebook, the social networking site. The really interesting bit is the arithmetic. Microsoft is supposedly contemplating paying between $300m (£147m) and $500m for a 5 per cent share. If true, this suggests that its advisers put a value of between $6bn and $10bn on Facebook. Google is also reported to be sniffing around, raising the prospect of a bidding war for a website which essentially enables people to post embarrassing photographs and impress acquaintances with accounts of their busy lives…

Tony’s txtng skills

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Simon Hoggart writing about an audience he had last week in Bournemouth with Alastair Campbell…

His most interesting point to me was that as prime minister, Tony Blair was shielded from the bewildering speed of technological change. Everything was done for him. So in 10 years he never learned how to send a text message. Finally he did. Campbell reported: “I have had two from him. The first was the single word ‘are’. The second read: ‘this is amazing you can do words and everything’.”

All of which reminds me of another Blair-technology story I once heard from Campbell.

iPhone Hackers 1: Apple 1

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New York Times report today says that:

the Web was filled Friday with complaints from people who had installed the latest iPhone software update, only to see all the fun little programs they had been adding to their iPhones disappear — or, still worse, see their phones freeze up entirely.

It was bound to happen. The moral is that if you hack your iPhone you should forget about syncing it to your computer from then on.

Control freaks like Apple don’t give up easily.

But wait! — GMSV has more:

From the warranty right on through Steve Jobs explicit reminder (see “Jobs to iPhone hackers: Bring it on”), Apple has consistently warned iPhone buyers that if they choose to go off the reservation and modify their units to use third-party software or run on networks other than AT&T, they run the risk of their beautiful toy turning into a handsome skipping stone. Still, thousands took their chances, and sure enough, when Apple pushed through an iPhone update Thursday, there was soon wailing and lamentation throughout the land.

Unfortunately for Apple, at least some of that wailing was coming from owners who had not hacked or modified their iPhone, yet found it hobbled or bricked after the update. And the overall picture of which phones were hit, the damage and the chances of recovery is veiled in the fog of war. Depending on which unlocking hack was used, or not, the iPhone update may or may not brick your unit or cause data loss, and that damage may or may not be repairable by new hacks or perhaps by a sympathetic Apple Genius. What is clear is that even while acting within its rights, Apple has a messy little problem that is not going to go away any time soon.

Still more: Erick Schonfeld has advice for Apple — “Stop behaving like a phone company”…

As we all know by now, the latest software update to the iPhone may in some cases turn it into a useless brick—if you happen to have put hacked software on it or unlocked it (ahem, John) in order to make it work on a non-AT&T carrier (such as T-Mobile, in the U.S.). Apple, of course, is free to try to lock in customers to its partner AT&T and to control what software will work on the phone. That’s just the way the cell phone business works. Right? It’s all about customer lock-in and reducing churn.

But Steve Jobs might be better served here to take his own advice and think different. Because, as he has so elegantly demonstrated with the iPhone, these devices are finally becoming little computers. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that consumers will expect them to act like computers. They will want to modify them to their exact, quirky predilections. They will want to use them any way they want, as a general-purpose device.

That is why PCs took over the world. They could be tuned a million different ways to the needs of a million different customers. You don’t ask Apple permission to download software off the Web for your Mac. And you would never agree to buy a laptop that only worked with only one broadband provider. Why should the iPhone be any different?

The uproar today may be limited to hackers and the digerati. But soon everyone will want the same thing. And if they don’t get it from Apple. They may look somewhere else. Google Phone anyone?

How to do it

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Halo 3 arrived from Amazon today, and so I guess no homework will get done today in the Naughton household. Sigh. But behind the delivery is an interesting story about customer service.

We pre-ordered Halo 3 ages ago, along with another game. Then the launch date for the second game slipped — to November. I assumed that Amazon would then split the order and deliver Halo 3 on launch day. Came the day and the postman was anxiously awaited by the Naughtons. No Halo 3. None the next day either. And so it went on. Eventually — yesterday — I went onto ‘Track My Order’ on Amazon.co.uk and found that Halo 3 hadn’t been dispatched. Wading through the site to find a way of communicating with Amazon, I came on a button labelled (I think) ‘Phone Call’. I clicked on it, entered my mobile number and 30 seconds later the phone rang. It was a real human being wondering what the problem was. He looked up the order, found that the Halo 3 shipping date was bound to that of the other game, asked me if I’d like to cancel the second order, and scheduled Halo 3 for immediate dispatch.

After hanging up, I looked in my inbox — to find two emails from Amazon one confirming cancellation of the second order. The other asking me for feedback on whether the phone call had been helpful.

A long time ago, I wrote in the Observer that Amazon was really just a world-class customer-service outfit that happened to be on the Web. I was right. I wonder how many other firms can match that kind of performance.