SFist Tech Roundup: Three Companies
Big things are happening at SFist Tech, as part of our ongoing bitter rivalry against the cow-molesters at SFist A&M and those stupid frat jocks at University of SFist. This week, your researchers in the labs are in the middle of a zany mix-up involving three Bay Area companies and their wacky misunderstanding of how to market themselves, take advantage of wireless, and handle media rights issues.
Our hapless neighbor who thinks he's sexy but just fails to appeal to anyone, is Palm, formerly PalmOne, originally Palm. While they didn't invent the PDA (what happened, Apple?), they made them ubiquitous and became the 900-pound (408.23 kilo) gorilla of a brand new market. But that was then. This week, they announced falling profits, despite their success with the Treo 650. They've also had issues with quality control, as Palm is being sued by some Treo owners who complain that the Treo fails as both a phone and a PDA.
While we here in SFist labs would describe the plaintiffs using scientific terms such as "overly litigious" and "whiny" for suing over software crashes and dropped calls, we can corroborate the reports of poor quality. Our ugly-but-lovable Treo 600 recently went to live on a farm where it could play with other cellphones, forcing us to get a new Motorola V3 RAZR. While we can't deny that the RAZR makes us a big hit with the ladies, we miss the simpler interface of the Treo and the ability to get a quick, simple, but full-featured internet connection over the phone.
Motorola's got the right idea with the Motorola Q, which aims for the business and "lifestyle" markets, meaning that we'll be able to use mapquest and get lots of tail. Palm's rise to the challenge is the just-revealed Treo 700, which is not a bright, sexy vision of the future, but just a thinner version of the 650 that runs Windows Mobile.
The towels continue to be hers and hers and his, after the jump!
SFist Chuck, contributing
Playing the part of our landlord who only lets us live here because he thinks we're, you know, fruity, is TiVo. Like Don Knotts, TiVo is loved by people even though it's awkward and clumsy and nobody can really explain what it does that's all that appealing. It's got a friendly mascot and season passes and has a such a high level of brand name recognition that it's the Kleenex of DVRs.
But they had that whole falling out with DirecTV, and more long-term, they never failed to distinguish how a DVR is different from the TiVo service. And now newsfromme.com is reporting that that service is getting worse, because a recent software "upgrade" has introduced draconian copy protection. Basically, they've created an unholy hybrid of the hated and justly-dead DivX device and our beloved TiVo.
Digital rights management issues are nothing new, of course — just look at all the Black Eyed Peas and Beyonce Knowles songs in our iTunes library. (But just look! For the love of God, don't try to play them!) The difference here is that iTunes' DRM policy still lets us listen to these songs furtively and shamefully on our iPods or Mac minis whenever we want; the only limitations are on how much we can illegally copy back up our music.
Having programming that can't be recorded, or that self-destructs after a week, goes against the entire gestalt of TiVo and DVRs in general — the viewer no longer owns the programming but is back to watching it on the media companies' schedules. That sound you hear is the little TiVo guy shooting himself in the foot, creating customer frustration, alienating users from the service, encouraging them to circumvent the copy protection, which will then scare off the corporate clients who advocated the DRM schemes in the first place.
Our unassuming star is Google, the company beloved by so many that the previous link was completely unnecessary. We were just down at the Regal Beagle, and we heard the bartender tell Chrissy that she read in the SF Gate that Google is planning a free wireless internet network. But then Janet heard from news.com that they're building an entire internet technology empire.
The idea of using the computer as a portal to web apps is certainly nothing new — it was the original promise of Java, and Microsoft announced it as part of their long-term goals years ago. The difference is that Google is more focused than either Sun or Microsoft, and Google Maps has shown that they can actually make web apps work well and fit in with their corporate mission to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." A wireless network would make good on the "universally accessible" part, but it'd also be a pretty significant leap for a search engine company. We're sure that it's all just a crazy misunderstanding, and there's some simple, logical explanation.
And as long as we're talking about lawsuits, rights management issues, and Google, there's the report that some authors are suing them for copyright infringement. Apparently their Google Library Project is threatening to make some of the world's information a little too universally accessible. SFist Tech feels that Google's "snippet view" adequately handles copyright concerns and remains in the realm of "fair use." But then, we're scientists, not lawyers.