Gaining the most leverage

The campaign-ability of net neutrality was most effectively realized in 2008 by a ranking member of then-candidate Barack Obama's transition team named Julius Genachowski, now the chairman of the FCC. In the FCC's notice of proposed rulemaking for net neutrality last October, Chairman Genachowski essentially absorbed Google's definition of the Internet as something designed from the beginning to enable free and open communication over the Web. Credited with the invention of the whole thing were: the US government for TCP/IP, Tim Berners-Lee for HTTP, and Marc Andreessen for Mosaic.

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Apple is ending 2009 with a seemingly big bang. The stock is soaring higher than ever, lifted by scathes of rumors about an impeding tablet announcement. But tablets are oh-so 2001, when Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates showed off the Tablet PC. Apple tablet rumors show how much hype -- and not might -- is lifting Apple's share price. Hype has a way of turning on companies. Just ask Microsoft, which hype meter measured off the scale in 1995, but barely registers a decibel today.

Few companies reach Apple's success level in a day, a week, a year or even five years. Successful companies make strategic investments over time and many still fail to reach the stratosphere, or, for that matter, escape velocity. Apple made some wise strategic investments after the turn of the century, benefitted from good luck and rebuilt the brand image through its retail stores and smart marketing efforts.

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Though Palm has not yet officially confirmed it, Sprint has posted a support article that says today is the day when WebOS will be updated to version 1.3.5.

Sprint's description of the 1.3.5 update is brief, and lists only four "enhancements" to Palm's flagship operating system:

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Like the other over-50% of smartphone-owning people in North America, I'm quite the fan of my BlackBerry. Even in an era when newer kids on the block -- namely Apple's iPhone and Google's Android -- garner more accolades and headlines for having slicker interfaces and cooler (and more) apps, the BlackBerry platform remains the safe, reliable choice that's good enough for most consumers and businesses. Despite analyst predictions that the BlackBerry will someday be reeled in by the upstarts, Research In Motion continues to grow and dominate the market it practically defined a decade ago.

We may want to revisit the "reliable" bit, though. After a week from hell marked by two highly publicized continent-wide outages, BlackBerry users are asking themselves whether this is the new normal, and why BlackBerry devices seem especially vulnerable to this kind of mass outage when competing platforms like iPhone and Android are not.

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There is so much buzz about Apple's rumored tablet, Santa Claus landed back in Cupertino (the Mac maker's Calif. headquarters) instead of the North Pole. Not that he found anything more than a lump of rumors packaged like a real present. Poor Santa. He's not the only person being fooled. The Apple tablet buzz stinks of blog and news media manipulation and quite possibly stock manipulation -- not that the latter is new for the goings on around Apple. Sadly, bloggers and journalists are too willing to be manipulated by people leaking information.

The state of the news media, fueled in part by SEO -- search engine obsession, ah, optimization --- where the story or post first and flawed is better than second and straight-up, favors gossip and rumors to drive pageviews. Nothing has to be true, as long as the post makes the top of Google News. Unnamed sourced stories and ancient domain registrations are the new news. So it is with Apple's iSlab -- surely not its name but good enough for this bitchy commentary.

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The year 2009 will go on record as one of Apple's best years ever, as I explained in the "10 things Apple did right in 2009" list. This second, did-wrong list looks at the mistakes, and there were plenty. But one did-wrong is pervasive throughout nearly all of them. Apple failed to innovate the way it did during the last recession. Apple CEO Steve Jobs and his senior executives took many of the actions affecting 2009 during 2001 and early 2002. With that introduction, I present the list of 10 things Apple did wrong in 2009 -- in no order of importance. They're all important. Apple:

1. Made no CES commitment. Apple has given up Macworld, so why not make a big splash at Consumer Electronics Show, which is January 7-10 next year? During the summer, there were rumors (and they may not have been true) that Jobs had been asked to keynote in 2010. Apple is a Consumer Electronics Association member but not currently listed as a CES 2010 exhibitor.

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Apple's 2009 execution was nothing short of spectacular, given the sour economy and CEO Steve Jobs' medical leave. Apple executives handled both circumstances, which might have sunk another company, with finesse and subtle but direct aggressiveness. I had a difficult time narrowing the did-good list to just 10 items. I'll post a did-wrong list later today or just after midnight tomorrow. For now, I present the list of 10 things Apple did right in 2009 -- in no order of importance. They're all important. Apple:

1. Kept Mac prices high. While Windows PC competitors slashed computer prices -- and so their margins and profits -- Apple held above-$1,000 pricing firm for iMac, Macbook Pro and Mac Pro. The higher pricing surely didn't seem to hurt Mac sales, which were strong all year. Meanwhile, low-cost netbooks sapped Windows PC margins and profits. Apple did right by lowering prices at the high end, which simply opened up more sales over $1,000, where Apple has more than 90-percent revenue share for computers sold at U.S. retail, according to NPD.

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Earlier this month, the Federal Communications Commission launched an inquiry into Verizon Wireless' early termination fee for "advanced devices," which was increased to $350 in November.

Verizon responded to the inquiry last Friday, with a letter that cited various ways that "advanced devices" --essentially anything that we'd call a "smartphone" today-- are more costly for the network to offer. According to the company, any time a customer cancels his contract, Verizon Wireless still collects less than it's losing.

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Like the Walkman was to the 80's, and the Discman was to the 90's, the dedicated, disconnected portable media player will no doubt be looked upon as a relic of the 00's.

Today, the ability to play media files is stock functionality in tech devices. All computers have media players, four out of the five video game consoles have them, and most smartphones have them. You can pick up a low-quality Portable Media Player for $20 at the local all-night drug store, or you could even fish them out of a 50¢ Skill Crane machine.

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Just about everyone who is anyone has asked "Is Google evil?" some time during 2009. I did, in an early November post. Google's growing dominance is reason enough to wonder. That dominance helped put me out of a job nearly eight months ago and many other journalists since. Google's free business model, supported by advertising, has hugely disrupted news and other information services. More disruption is coming to more business categories in the early 2010s.

Is this disruption evil? The answer may depend upon worldview. In a compelling blog entry posted late yesterday, Jonathan Rosenberg, Google's senior vice president of Product Management, described the company's "meaning of open." But the meaning is broader than open standards or open source. What he lays out, whether intended or not, is a different business worldview -- and it's one that can't help but be disruptive.

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The US Circuit Court of Appeals in DC has today denied Microsoft's appeal to overturn a court injunction preventing it from selling copies of Microsoft Word (or Office with Word). Those copies contain a feature that a jury last May found infringed upon patents held by i4i, a former Microsoft partner that built Word add-ons for editing XML.

Now, Microsoft says it will be ready to sell revised versions of Word 2007 and Office 2007, beginning next January 11 -- the date the court injunction takes effect.

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Download Opera 10.5 "Pre-alpha" for Windows from Fileforum now.

In initial Betanews tests involving our Comprehensive Relative Performance Index suite on the Windows 7 platform today, this incomplete rendering of a browser -- the latest version of a model that was in danger of becoming only half as fast as Mozilla Firefox -- blew right past not only Firefox but Apple Safari as well. And yes, it beat Google's fastest Chrome development build browser, by a score that's something more like a touchdown than a field goal.
On our physical test machine running Windows 7, the Opera 10.5 pre-alpha scored a 24.52, meaning it delivered about 24-and-one-half times the overall JavaScript, rendering, and computational performance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 running in Windows Vista (the slowest browser on the slowest platform we test, which we index at 1.00).

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Social networking site Facebook has more than 350 million active users, and more than 35 million users update their "status" every day. They could be updated with personal information, music, videos, links, or anything that users feel the need to share with their social group.

During 2009, nearly 13 billion of these status updates were posted, and Facebook has released its "Top Status trends of 2009," indicating just what was on people's minds.

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Betanews readers are an opinionated lot, so it's no surprise they've got a few things to tell Microsoft about how to run the business. On December 7, I asked readers to offer their advice for Microsoft in 2010 -- and, whoa, have they done it.

By the way, I'll offer advice, too, sometime next week. I've been doing it for the last couple years in lieu of making predictions. Meanwhile, here are readers' recommendations:

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I like my toys behind the wheel as much as everyone else. Between my GPS, iPod, BlackBerry, and DVD player, I've got enough technology to avoid getting lost, stay entertained, stay connected, and keep my seat-belted kids from beating each other silly. I have no idea how my Luddite parents survived the Dark Ages before in-car electronics, and I'm not sure I ever really want to know.

Before setting off on a drive, it takes me about five minutes to get all my doo-dads connected and working. My wife, bless her, usually gives me a small grace period for fiddling before her patience wears thin.

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