Category: Technology
Here’s a perplexing thing to ponder.
After trying virtually every email configuration on iPhone and Android devices, the best experience that I have had so far is using Microsoft Outlook on my Apple iPhone to access Google Gmail.
I’ve been using Outlook on my iPhone for the past few months. I’ve tried several times to go back to Apple Mail, but it is impossibly bad when compared to Outlook. I’ve also tried using the Google iOS Gmail client, which – while better than Apple Mail – is still very klutzy at certain things.
I know that Microsoft Outlook is really Acompli rebranded at Outlook, but in the eight months since the acquisition the product has continued to get better and better.
Go figure.
Five years ago, in August 2010, I asked the question Have We Reached The Software Patent Tipping Point?
Oracle sued Google over a series of Java-related patents they got when they acquired Sun.
My favorite line from the whole thing was James Gosling’s (who was one of the authors of one of the original patents and a key creator of Java) when he wrote The shit finally hits the fan.
“The shit finally hits the fan…. Thursday August 12, 2010
Oracle finally filed a patent lawsuit against Google. Not a big surprise. During the integration meetings between Sun and Oracle where we were being grilled about the patent situation between Sun and Google, we could see the Oracle lawyer’s eyes sparkle. Filing patent suits was never in Sun’s genetic code. Alas….I hope to avoid getting dragged into the fray: they only picked one of my patents (RE38,104) to sue over.”
Oracle also got copyrights to the Java APIs. Remember, Java was theoretically Open Source, but like so many things in our world when lawyers get involved “it’s complicated.” Stack Exchange regularly has commentary about this. See Is Java free/open source or not? and Is java an open source programming language?
It’s not as messy as the Greek debt crisis but directionally similar. And it’s far from over. I was hoping the Supreme Court would take this on and help put an important issue around copyright to bed. But the Supremes passed, deferring to the need for a lower court to rule on the appeal.
“The justices, without comment, declined to disturb a May 2014 appeals court ruling in Oracle’s favor that reinvigorated the company’s case against Google. The appeals court, overruling a trial judge, said 37 packages of prewritten Java programs, known as application programming interfaces, were entitled to copyright protection.
Oracle has sought more than $1 billion in damages. A jury originally held that Google infringed the Oracle copyrights, but it deadlocked on Google’s defense that its copying amounted to fair use. That issue will have to be retried in a lower court.”
Patents and copyrights are different. And the courts know that. Unfortunately, it’s getting even more tangled up, especially around the critical concept of fair use. This continues to be a very important case, especially as interoperability between software has become a fundamental tenant of how software systems function, and I’m glad Google is fighting it.
At least we got the right to marry anyone we want from the Supremes.
An increasing number of companies that I work with are using PGP to encrypt certain email. While they are comfortable sending a lot of email unencrypted, there are periodic threads that different people want to have encrypted for a variety of reasons, some rational and some not.
Each company is dealing with this a different way. Suddenly I find myself managing a bunch of public keys in different PGP tools on different computers. I started by going with the recommendation of each company and predictably found myself managing multiple solutions that sort of worked some of the time.
Last night I was on a hangout with one of the CEOs trying to troubleshoot the problem we were having with the implementation his company was using. After 15 minutes of fighting with a Chrome plugin, we gave up. Of course, when I went to a different computer, it worked just fine.
This seems like such a simple thing for Google (and Yahoo and Microsoft) to build into their email clients, especially the browser based ones. Keep the keys locally (or even in Dropbox or iCloud). Encrypt and decrypt from within the browser. Only transmit encrypted email. Only display the decrypted email.
Why hasn’t this been done yet? Am I missing something obvious?
I’m a huge fan of William Hertling. His newest book, The Turing Exception, is dynamite. It’s the fourth book in the Singularity Series, so you really need to read them from the beginning to totally get it, but they are worth every minute you’ll spend on them.
William occasionally sends me some thoughts for a guest post. I always find what he’s chewing on to be interesting and in this case he’s playing around with doing a Drake’s Equation equivalent for social networks. Enjoy!
Drake’s Equation is used to estimate the number of planets with currently communicating life, which helps us predict the odds of finding intelligent life in the universe. You can read the Wikipedia article for more information, but the basic idea is to multiply together a number of functions: the number of stars in our galaxy, the fraction of those that have planets, the average percent of planets that could support life, etc.
I’m currently writing a novel about social networks, and one of the areas that’s interesting to me is what I think of as the empty network problem: a new social network has little benefit unless my friend are there. If I’m an early adopter, I might give it a few days, and then leave. If my friends show up later, and I’ve already given up on it, then they don’t get any benefit either.
Robert Metcalfe, inventor of ethernet, coined Metcalfe’s Law, which says “the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n^2).”
Social networks actually have a more rigorous form of that law: “the value of a social network is proportional to the square of the number of connected friends.” That is, I don’t care about the number of strangers using a network, I care about the number of friends. (Friends being used loosely here to include friends, family, coworkers, business associates, etc.)
Drake’s Equation helps predict the success of finding life in the universe because it takes into account the rise and fall of civilizations: two civilizations must exist at the same time and within observable distance of each other in other to “find intelligent life”.
So there must be a similar type of equation that can help predict a person’s adoption of a new social network and takes into account that we’re only willing to try a network for so long before giving up.
Here’s my first shot at this equation:
P = (nN * fEA * fAv * fBE * tT) / (tB * nF) * B
P = probability of long-term adoption
nN = Size of my network (number of friends)
fEA = Fraction of my friends who are Early Adopters
fAv = fraction of those who have available time to try a new network
fBE = fraction that overcome the Barrier to Entry
tT = Average length of time people Try the network
nB = Average length of time it takes to see Benefit of the new network
nF = Number of Friends needed to see benefit
B = The unique benefit or desirability of the network
In plain English: The probability of a given person becoming a long term user of a new social network is a function of the number of their friends who also adopt and how long they remain there divided by the length of time and number of friends it takes to see the benefit multiplied by the size of the unique benefit offered by the social network.
Some ideas that fall out from the equation:
- A network that targets teens, who may tend to have more time and may be more likely to be early adopters, will have an easier time gaining adoption than a network that targets busy executives, all other things being equal.
- A network that has a benefit when even two friends connect will see easier initial adoption than one that requires a dozen friends to connect.
- A network whose benefit applies to distant connections is at an advantage compared to one that only offers a benefit to close friends (because N is larger)
- A sufficiently large unique benefit can overcome nearly any disadvantage.
- Social gaming is interesting, because it provides benefit even when connected to no one, the benefit increases when connected to strangers, and then increases even more when connected to friends.
What do you think?
I’m at Startup Iceland today. I like Iceland – this is the second time I’ve been here. It’s the closest place on earth I’ve been to Alaska, which I love dearly. And it’s fun to see and hang out with my friend Bala Kamallakharan. As a super bonus, Om Malik – who I adore – is also here.
Om and I did a fireside chat with Bala. At the end, Bala asked about the future and what we were uncomfortable with. Neither of us is uncomfortable. Instead, we are both optimistic and intrigued with what is going on. Om talked about his view is that this is the most exciting time to be alive and went on a riff about what is in front of us.
I started with my premise – that the machines have already taken over and are just waiting very patiently for us to catch up. They are happy to let us do a lot of work for them, including feeding them with data, building homes for them, and connecting them together. In the mean time, they are biding their time, doing their thing, along side us.
If you wind the clock forward 50 years, our current state will be incomprehensible to that future human. The pace of technological change at all levels is accelerating at a pace we can’t fathom. Some people are pessimistic and now concerned about the notion of a real advanced intelligence. I’m optimistic and accepting of it, not fighting the inevitability of the path we are on or being in denial about our ability as a society to control things.
This is the rant I ended up on. Human structures change slowly. It’s unevenly distributed based on geography, culture, and political philosophy. Our legal system lags far behind what is actually happening, and as a result we are in the middle of a bunch of debates around technology, including things around privacy, net neutrality, data storage, and surveillance. Our existing approach as a species to dealing with the challenges are painful to watch from the future.
It’s fun to ponder how quickly things are changing along with how badly certain parts of society wants to keep them from changing, hanging on to the “way things are” or even the “way things were.” Don’t ever forget the sound of inevitability.
Amy and I had a wonderful week off the grid in Paris. No phone, no email from Friday night 5/8 when I boarded the British Airlines flight in DIA until Friday morning 5/15 when we decided to turn stuff on and just lay around the hotel all day getting reading to go home.
I’m always fascinated by the email patterns I have when I’m off the grid for a week. I almost always go off the grid late Friday or Saturday morning so there’s the weekend lull followed by an intense flurry on Monday. By Tuesday my regular emailers have seen that I’m off the grid and their pattern of copying me slows down, but doesn’t stop completely. The emails then become more random.
By Wednesday, I’m getting three kinds of email.
- #Important: Important stuff from people I know that I’m being copied on.
- #New-Known: Stuff from people I know who didn’t email me earlier in the week.
- #Random: Stuff from people I don’t know.
#Important and #New-Known tend to have similar tones. They are things for me to respond to, send to someone, make a decision around, or acknowledge receipt of information. Occasionally they require me to do something, but the action requested rarely takes more than five minutes.
#Random is completely different. Almost 100% of the #Random email has a specific request for me. These requests are often for meetings, phone calls, interviews, or speaking engagements. Some of them are specific sets of questions about a topic while others are long essays that never really get to the punch line, but clearly are begging to get to a question of some sort. Some are requests for introductions. And others are direct asks for financing.
This trip, when I went through my email upon my return, I left all the #Random ones for last to process. I had over 200 of these. This time I responded to all of them, but it wasn’t very satisfying. It took about four hours on Sunday and when I was done, I felt relief to be done, but when I reflected on it, I didn’t feel like I ended up with any new knowledge. That was disappointing as processing four hours of email to result in zero learning mostly just sucks, at least for me.
In this case, I packetized appropriately. Rather than getting bogged down in the stuff I needed to do while getting worn out by stuff that wasn’t that important to do, I only responded to stuff in #Important and #New-Known, ignoring the rest until I was completely finished with these categories. I think took a break and dealt with the rest later when my headspace was clearer.
As I sit here, I wonder why I responded to the other 200 #Random emails. I have a long-standing self-identity of responding to all emails that I get. For some reason, that’s important to me, but I’m no longer really sure why. It’s not satisfying in any way and the signal to noise ratio, or at least the value to non-value ratio, is way out of control at this point.
I guess I have something new to ponder in therapy. At least something good came out of responding to the 200 emails.
A year ago if you had suggested that I’d be using Microsoft Outlook on my iPhone instead of the Apple Mail app, I would have said, simply, “No Fucking Way.” And I would have been wrong.
It’s kind of like chocolate in my peanut butter.
When I try something new, I use it for two weeks to see if it sticks. A month ago, my partner Jason told me he was loving Outlook on the iPhone. I figured it wouldn’t last but I was wrong. So two weeks ago I moved my Apple Mail icon to the last page on the iPhone and moved the Outlook app down into the special reserved place for email.
Outlook on the iPhone is better than Apple Mail on the iPhone. It’s one of those perplexing things – I’ve tried many of the other iOS email clients and none of them were ever more than incrementally better. I go back and forth with the Google Gmail iOS client but it never sticks for some reason, probably the UX. I tried Google Inbox for a few days and my brain simply doesn’t process email the way it presents it. So I kept ending up back at the Apple Mail iOS app.
While the Apple Mail iOS app is fine, it doesn’t delight, especially when using Gmail. Mail is often slow to download. Push has gotten better in a recent release, but I still find myself waiting for emails to download. Search is lousy. Calendar integration is non-existent.
Outlook is better at all of these things. It’s not that it adds any dramatic new features, but it does the stuff I’ve expected Apple Mail to do for many years. And, when I actually think about what is going on, I’m using Microsoft Outlook on my Apple iPhone to read my Google Gmail.
What iOS email client do you use and why?
Desperately Seeking a Solution to Google Hangouts Errors 212, 213, 214, 215, 216
I’m a huge Google Hangouts user. It’s typically a multi-day occurrence that I’m on a hangout and one of the devices connected to the mega-video-conferencing setup in my office is a Chromebox.
A few months ago I got Google Hangouts errors intermittently for a few weeks but it magically cleared up. I noticed it again on Sunday and it has been constant on all my computers in multiple locations on different networks.
I’ve tried clearing the cache, logging out, and resetting the browser / computer, which seems to be the only constructive solutions I can find on the web. The other solutions, that are not so constructive, are “wait for a while for it to clear up” and “use something different.”
Strangely, this problem only exists in Chrome. My iOS Hangouts works fine as does my Chromebox.
Does anyone have a clue how to solve this nagging problem? The screen shot I’m getting in Chrome when Gmail is open is on the left.
Since I’ve had dealing with email on my mind recently, I thought I’d write about how to deal with email after a long vacation. Over the years, I’ve heard over and over again from people who never going on vacation or getting off the grid explaining that they can’t imagine doing this because they would be more stressed out when they return to all the email they have to respond to. I don’t think it has to be that way.
For context, I’m a huge believer on completely going off the grid for vacation. Amy and I have been taking a weekly vacation off the grid for 15 years. No phone, no email. Just the two of us. Given the pace of our lives and the amount of time we spend apart, it’s an awesome way to reconnect. There’s nothing quite like spending a week with your beloved on a periodic basis to remember why you love each other.
Whenever I’m off the grid for a week, I always come back to loads of email. I used to organize my trips from Saturday to Saturday so I’d have Sunday to go through all my email and catch up. That works, but ruins the last Sunday of the vacation. Then I shifted to Monday, so I basically scheduled nothing on Monday and just went through all my email during the day while getting back in the flow of things. That made for a shitty Monday and usually damaged my calm that had resulted from my week off the grid.
When Amy and I took a one month sabbatical in November, I tried something different. Here is my vacation reminder from that trip.
I’m on sabbatical and completely off the grid until 12/8/14.
I will not be reading this email. When I return, I’m archiving everything and starting with an empty inbox.
If this is urgent and needs to be dealt with by someone before 12/8, please send it to my assistant Mary (mary@foundrygroup.com). She’ll make sure it gets to the right person.
If you want me to see it, please send it again after 12/8.
My partners covered for me when I was gone and dealt with anything that was important. The three of them had each taken a month off before my sabbatical so we had a nice rhythm around this.
At the last minute I chickened out on archiving everything without looking at it. Instead, I just scanned through my inbox, archiving messages without responding to them. I didn’t save anything, even if it asked me to do something. I archived it just like I said I was going to. But I had some context around what was going on. It took me about three hours to get through the 3,200 emails I had waiting for me. Not surprisingly, when you don’t send any emails, you get a lot less.
On Monday morning (12/8) when I came back to the office, I had an empty inbox except for the emails that had come in since I did the scan (which I did on 12/6 – we traveled home on 12/7). It was unbelievably liberating. I sat down with each of my partners and went through things that had happened when I was away in companies I was on the board of. That took less than 15 minutes per partner. At lunch, I got caught up on the overall portfolio.
By Tuesday I was back in the flow of things and felt very calm and relaxed. My vacation mellow wasn’t harshed at all.
This approach works for any length of time. Amy and I took a five day off-the-grid vacation for Valentines Day week. Same drill, although this time I responded to a few emails that came in when I reappeared and did my scan. But I set the expectation that I wasn’t going to look at anything, so plenty of “resends” happened on Monday and Tuesday, which meant that folks who really wanted to interact with me took responsibility for it.
There’s something about taking control of how email interacts with you that is very satisfying. I’ve heard the complaint, over and over again, that email allows other people to interrupt your world. That’s part of the beauty of a low barrier to communication (e.g. just send something to brad@feld.com and it gets to me.) But it’s also a huge burden, especially if you want to engage back.
I’m always looking for other approaches to try on this, so totally game to hear if you have special magic ones.