Reality Check | Ephraim Schwartz » July 2007

July 31, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Rise up against ink waste

TAGS: Green IT

Printer manufacturers must be held accountable for ink replacement policies that are far from green, writes Ephraim Schwartz

When it comes to high tech, rarely is anything repaired. The same goes for consumer electronics, as both industries have been componentized at nearly every level of manufacturing. When something breaks, just throw it away and plug in another component.

A nice little revenue model for manufacturers -- one that, if you are not paying close enough attention, could end up costing you more.

For example, when my first VHS player broke down after the warranty period, I was told by the manufacturer that it didn't pay to fix the device. However, a friend who put a scope over the ICs found the dead chip, bought a new one in Radio Shack for under $1, and put my tape player back in business.

My guess, and my electronically inclined friend's guess, was that this chip didn't just accidentally burn out. It was manufactured for a certain number of hours of use and then, Good bye, Charlie.

We are now seeing variations on this theme, especially in the highly competitive printer industry. So componentized is this industry, that you can buy an ink-jet printer for less than $50 or a laser printer for less than $75. I paid $40 for my latest Samsung laser printer, an energy-efficient model to boot.

As for ink-jet printers, my latest model signals when ink is low and stops working altogether when out of ink. How does it know when this happens? A small sensor in the cartridge monitors the ink levels.

The question is, How much ink remains in the cartridge when the sensor decides it is empty? Is it like when a laser printer tells you your toner is low? Most people know that when you get this message all you have to do is remove the toner cartridge, shake it back and forth a bunch of times, and put it back in the laser printer. Lo and behold, you get another hundred pages out of that cartridge, if not more.

But it is even worse with ink-jets. My printer manufacturer does not allow me to buy ink refills; so I can't just open up the cartridge and refill the ink. Even if I could, the sensor indicator cannot be reset to indicate a full cartridge, so refilling it would be pointless. If I could refill the cartridge and reset the sensor, I could save a lot of money, meaning the manufacturer would make less, of course.

Instead I have to spend about $28 for a new color cartridge. Worse, the latest ink-jet models don't have separate cartridges. I suppose high tech, the industry that invented componentization, feels it has the right to take it back when it suits them. So now most of the latest ink cartridges are all-in-one affairs. If one color runs out, you need to replace the entire cartridge.

This is most "ungreen." Manufacturers might say they are producing energy-efficient products, but they are also quite wasteful. Instead of letting you use the same nonbiodegradable plastic container, most would rather have you toss it out and buy a new one. It is time for printer manufacturers to stop this practice -- even if we have to force their hand a bit.

In the spirit of revolution, I recommend that consumers of the world rise up and unite against printer cartridge waste.

Here's how. I am asking everyone with an ink-jet printer to conduct an experiment and report back. When your printer signals that your cartridge is out of ink, open up the cartridge and see what's left. Send me the manufacturer and printer model number, as well as the ink status, and I will post the printer models that are the worst offenders.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on July 31, 2007 03:00 AM

July 24, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Macs and motorcycles

TAGS: Apple

Apple's cult appeal has a somewhat unlikely predecessor: Harley-Davidson

In an attempt to explain the phenomenon that is Apple and why it has such a loyal following, I thought I would take a look at a company that achieved that haloed status first, by about 80 years. It's one of the few that can claim a similar kind of loyalty among its customers: Harley-Davidson Motorcycles.

Aside from the fact that hardly anyone gets the Apple logo tattooed onto their body, both companies have a lot in common.

One of the more curious similarities that Harley and Apple share is the fact that both have a charismatic leader whose roots go back to the company's founding and who, after losing the company, took it back from the philistines.

In Harley-Davidson's case, it was Willy Davidson, grandson of the founder, who became part of the group that bought the company back from bowling ball company AMF. In the case of Apple, of course, it was Steve Jobs, once ousted by his own board of directors but who returned in triumph as CEO.

The similarities don't end there.

When I bought my first Harley, the salesman rolled it out of the showroom and into the street and started it up for me. The first thing it did was backfire two or three times.

I was worried. Why did it do that, I asked?

"It's a Harley. If you want perfection, buy a Japanese bike," he told me.

Way back in the early '80s, while editing a car and motorcycle magazine, I became fascinated by the new world of high tech. I decided to leave publishing and got a job selling computers at one of the first computer retailers on the East Coast.

If memory serves, the Apple II -- not the Apple II Plus or the Apple IIe -- sold for about $2,495. Sometimes, only days after having bought one, a customer would come back into the store carrying the Apple in his arms like a baby and announce, "My Apple is sick. Can you fix it?"

Unlike the Harley salesman, I didn't say, "What do you expect? It's an Apple," but it did amaze me that someone could be so good-natured about forking over $2,495 for a brand-new, nonworking machine.

Love, even for an inanimate object, does not spring from perfection. Rather, I suspect it is the imperfections of the object of our desire that make it lovable.

As for Harley, its bikes were never the most comfortable machines to ride. In fact, a kidney belt was recommended before the company recently rubber-mounted its engines. And its V-twin engine is way out of date in terms of motorcycling engineering.

In the beginning, far fewer programs ran on Apple than the IBM standard. For the most part, Apple innovated more slowly, late to the table on the hard-disk drive and lagging in memory. Its first business machine, the Lisa, was a total flop.

And now, even the flaws in the iPhone are meaningless to the faithful.

Another attribute both Apple and Harley share is their status as an underdog. By the late 1960s, British motorcycle companies had all but died, and the Japanese had the fastest, most reliable bikes on the street. Harley was tired, unreliable, and doomed, it seemed, to memory. But it came back through a series of shrewd business decisions and the help of the U.S. government, which put a tariff on imported bikes to help make the local marque a bit more palatable.

For its part, Apple has been counted out too many times to mention. As soon as IBM introduced its first PCs, Apple became the underdog. I was there in that first computer store when the owners brought in Big Blue. It took over immediately, riding its trusted name in business to account for nearly 80 percent of the store's PC sales almost overnight.

What's interesting, however, is that whereas Harley keeps its image old-school, playing off tradition to keep its audience loyal, Apple appeals to modernity to keep its edge. Either way, though, Harley or Apple, both companies make products that are eye candy to their followers.

Yet to perpetuate their appeal, each company must win over new customers. And this is where the two companies may really diverge.

Next time you're on the street, take a good look at the Harley riders as they pass. I will wager you will see gray hair and a somewhat weather-worn face beneath the helmet. Harley owners are aging, and so, in search of a more youthful demographic, Harley took two bold steps. It revamped its line, adding the sporty Buell to its big-cruiser-only product line. And even worse, to attract more buyers, the company produced the first non-air-cooled engine, a move anathema to traditionalists.

Unfortunately, neither strategy has proved to be a roaring success for Harley.

On the other hand, Apple was able to transition its systems from the PowerPC processor to Intel, the very brains that power its archrival Windows PCs, with barely a complaint from the faithful.

The company also diverged from its core business when it introduced the iPod and now the iPhone. Not only have both products sold extremely well -- the iPod becoming a huge success and the iPhone likely heading in a similar direction -- but they are driving new customers to consider other parts of the Apple product line.

In fact, longtime Apple watcher Tim Bajarin, principal at Creative Strategies, estimates that 50 percent of the people coming into Apple's stores are new to Apple.

For both Harley and Apple, customer loyalty has provided a tremendous competitive advantage. Nevertheless, there is no guarantee that the next generation will be as loyal as the previous one.

So far it looks like Apple has come up with the right answers. I hope Harley does, too. In the meantime, it will be exciting to see how both companies evolve to keep their phenomenon factor going.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on July 24, 2007 03:00 AM

July 17, 2007 | Comments: (0)

SaaS gains enterprise cred

TAGS: SaaS

Google's Postini acquisition and Salesforce's development capabilities lend enterprise-level chops to the software-as-a-service model

With two important announcements, one this week and one last, we are finally starting to see a critical mass build around SaaS (software as a service).

And, as I've written before, it is time for enterprise IT to take the model seriously.

Last week we saw Google -- after a four-month partnership with Postini -- decide to buy the security and compliance SaaS vendor outright. This week Salesforce.com finally dropped the other shoe, officially calling its offering what it had already unofficially become, a PaaS (platform as a service).

In terms of gauging the likely success of Salesforce's strategy, the only thing I'm unsure of is whether the acronym PaaS will catch on as well as SaaS has.

By dubbing itself a platform company, Salesforce is now poised to lead the charge -- well, to be one of the leaders, anyway -- that will see hosted applications dominate the software industry. Traditional vendors will just have to jump on the bandwagon whole-heartedly, and ramp up their current half-hearted attempts at hybrid SaaS solutions, or be pushed aside.

Salesforce's Summer 07 launch includes the kinds of components any developer would expect from an enterprise-level environment. For example, the platform now offers multiple sandboxes. In addition to the usual production and development environments, there are now staging and training environments, lending support to all of IT's software development requirements.

On top of that, there is the Apex programming language, which, if you take Salesforce at its word, is the "world's" first multi-tenant programming language, according to Kendall Collins, senior vice president of product marketing at Salesforce. Collins also says the language is "Java-like in its syntax."

I use the phrase critical mass here to illustrate that the SaaS phenomenon started slowly with Salesforce.com, but, as the model gained credibility, SaaS solutions have reached into other application categories such as human resources, supply chain management, and business intelligence.

Salesforce has been the leader here, continually taking the SaaS model to the next level. It opened its APIs to third-party ISVs, in essence giving its customers a reason to stay with Salesforce by offering services it lacked.

Now, just when SaaS growth might have stalled, either because it wasn't offering the custom development capabilities enterprises require or had multiplied into too many proprietary systems, we see Salesforce's platform gaining depth and breadth with its own language and toolsets. If done well, Salesforce could become the standard-bearer for the SaaS industry.

Google's acquisition of Postini is equally important, as Postini -- which provides e-mail security and compliance capabilities, including archiving for e-discovery -- will give Google far more enterprise cred.

But when I asked Postini founder Scott Petry why he thinks Google took the extra step in buying his company rather than continuing the growing close partnership that started about four months ago, Petry said that, with the acquisition, "Google gets the people, the technology, the processes, the back-end infrastructure, the DNA we have in delivering enterprise applications."

Postini's enterprise-grade policy management allows companies to ensure adherence to company-level policies such as who can share what information with whom. Today, Postini does that for e-mail and IM over the Web.

Because of this, the theory goes, enterprise-level customers and their IT departments can now feel more comfortable using a hosted e-mail platform. But Petry's answer reveals that something more is afoot here than simply giving Google e-mail security and archiving capabilities for Gmail and IM.

And so I asked another Postini executive, Sundar Raghavan, vice president of solutions marketing, about the rest of Google's applications, such as Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

Raghavan didn't disappoint.

"Our policy management platform is flexible and extensible," Raghavan said. "I expect our product managers to work with Google's product managers to see how to apply this technology to documents and spreadsheets."

Built on an SOA and XML architecture, the benefits of SaaS have always been obvious. Until now, however, the model lacked certain technology attributes necessary for adoption in larger environments.

But now, with development, security, and compliance out of the way, there aren't many hurdles left for SaaS to clear before it becomes the dominant force in the software industry and the enterprise.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on July 17, 2007 03:00 AM

July 10, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Pandemic flu test: Planning for the next disaster

TAGS: None

Financial services will be the first industry to plan for a pandemic. Time for broader planning?

On Sept. 11, 2001, the business continuity and the financial services industries met head-on. Long-term disruption was avoided in part by a decision to let workers return to work on Wall Street six days later -- a choice that has since been questioned based on a revised analysis of air quality.

Given the vital role played by the financial sector, many feel that creating detailed response plans to counter worst-case scenarios is long overdue. That's why the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, in conjunction with the Financial Banking Information Infrastructure Committee (FBIIC) and the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council (FSSCC), will be conducting a three-week "Pandemic Flu Exercise" this year from Sept. 24 through Oct. 12.

The exercise assumes an outbreak of H5N1, a much-feared strain of the avian flu virus. Were H5N1 the source of a major pandemic, it could cause massive and protracted absenteeism. According to a bulletin issued by FBIIC and FSSCC, "all normal conditions and operating relationships potentially will be disrupted."

The primary purpose of the virtual exercise, which will take place over the Internet, will be to identify "systemic risks" to the financial services sector. It will provide an opportunity for companies to evaluate their current business continuity plans in relation to this particular type of disaster, and to understand the ripple effects within the financial markets and in other highly interdependent sectors.

Participating with the voluntary exercise will be an advisory group with representatives from the power and telecommunications industry as well as the Center for Disease Control (CDC).

At present, government regulations leave the details of preparedness to the enterprise. NASD Rule 3510 and NYSE Rule 446 simply state that financial services companies (including banks, securities firms, insurance companies, and credit unions) must have in place business continuity plans that include "contingencies for providing customers with access to their funds and securities during a disaster."

Of course, a large-scale pandemic would touch almost every industry. According to Dave Engaldo, a spokesman for FSSCC, the more automated IT is, the better off your company is. "You are going to be less dependent on people who are absent or at home, worried about coming into office or taking care of family," Engaldo says. But automated trading systems or clearinghouse systems still need to be piloted to some degree.

That's why I believe pandemic-proof communications is the key. To explore that aspect, I called to Steve Zirkel, general manager of business continuity at Varolii, a company that offers on-demand interactive communications services.

Unlike other catastrophic disruptions, says Zirkel, a pandemic is a people problem. Zirkel advises companies to build an automated communications platform that can be accessed if this kind of disaster becomes a reality.

According to Zirkel, we need a system that can give people a full range of communications capabilities in or out of the office -– to be able to create content, to reach other employees from anywhere, to ensure that a message was received, and to receive feedback from recipients.

Communications should cascade through the full range of channels with the push of a single key: e-mail, phone, fax, IM, SMS, or wiki if need be. Rules could define recipients by area code, employee number, or other custom designations.

The Pandemic Flu Exercise taking place this fall will be a good test for these kinds of systems. On Monday, Sept. 24, at 9 a.m. Eastern time, participants will receive their first scenario. Each company will try to determine what the impact will be to its firm and then respond by 1 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday. Then, during a three-week period, companies can watch the simulated flu make its way across the country, grow into a full-bore pandemic, and then fall into decline. The hope is that companies will learn how the entire pandemic cycle will affect facilities across the country.

Whether or not your company intends to participate in the exercise, the effects of a pandemic are unique, according to the experts I spoke with. It's a great idea to create a contingency plan -- no matter what industry sector you're in.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on July 10, 2007 03:00 AM

July 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

iPhone: Fool me once, fool me twice...

TAGS: Wireless

The drunken night with iPhone is over, and now as we wake up next to our new love, the sober reality is not as good looking as we thought.

As we learn more about the device and its battery shortcomings, as night follows day, bad press is following good.

I wonder if David Pogue of the New York Times and Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal knew now what they didn't know then, would they still have given the iPhone a thumbs-up?

The latest is the fact that replacement batteries must be installed by Apple, which will take three days for turnaround. But more importantly for a multimedia-savvy device, a warning from Apple that they are not responsible for maintaining any data, like contacts and phone numbers, on the phone. In fact, all the stored data may be wiped clean.

While the $500 to $600 price tag may be high, it appears obvious the only solution is to buy two -- probably Apple's real goal!

Seriously, as an enterprise solution the iPhone appears to be a non-starter. Certainly, other than a C-level executive, there are not many companies that will outfit a large sales force with such an expensive, and more importantly impractical device.

Years ago I spoke with a large financial services company that was putting at that time very pricey flat panel displays on the desk of each financial adviser in the company.

Yes, it was a very pricey move, the executive told me, but company image was also important and the flat panels made a statement about the company that outweighed the price.

So, is the iPhone equivalent to the flat panel display in terms of an upscale image? Yes, but, at least those flat panels were as good as the cathode ray tube monitors.

While a company may want to project a certain image by buying iPhones for its sales force -- and no doubt many on staff will buy the phones and demand support -- will IT be willing to put up with the necessary support required?

Who in sales can be without their cell phone for three days?

And Apple advises to back up contacts and data before sending in the phone for battery replacement. Obviously IT will have to do that for the non-technical staff. Perhaps IT will have to figure out a way to replace the battery in-house.

Will Apple train and designate someone at each Apple store to do the upgrade while you wait? Or at least, if not while you wait, avoid the hassle of having to mail it in? Have you ever seen what happens to a package marked "Fragile" in the Post Office?

It appears to me the iPhone is sitting on a very dangerous precipice. Either it can fall one way and become the status symbol it wants to be or, if a few more gotchas are uncovered the iPhone will become a laughing stock with buyers looked on as gullible consumers who weren't smart enough to spot a troubled device when it was right in the palm of their hand.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on July 3, 2007 10:45 AM

July 03, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Sun puts "Sparc" into Web 2.0

TAGS: Web 2.0

Company aims its Redshift initiative at expanding network loads

Moore's law and the commoditization of server boxes had most of us believing that the days of big iron were over. For a while at least, it looked as if Intel and Windows Server would take over the heart of the datacenter.

Perhaps even Sun Microsystems believed this would happen. How else to explain its adoption of x86 chips to the detriment of its high-performance Sparc product line?

The argument posited that it would be insane to spend $50K, for starters, on a Sun Solaris box when an Intel cluster at a third the price would do. Actually, in 1996, a high-end Sparc "mainframe" could cost more than $1 million.

Although many analysts -- and nearly all vendors with Windows hardware and software to sell -- endorsed the idea wholeheartedly, I don't think IT ever really bought into it.

If the poet William Blake said, "You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough," then IT departments never got there. You can never have enough performance, as IT knows. And now, with the advent of Web 2.0, SaaS, widgets, YouTube, and streaming video over your cell phone, that truth is self-evident.

Enter Redshift. Sun's answer to the newest demands on the network, one that could in fact indicate an actual shift taking place in the IT industry.

The name of Sun's initiative comes from an astronomical phenomenon -- the shifting of light toward the red end of the spectrum due to the expansion of the universe. Get it? Sun, universe, expanding -- as in scaling to meet the needs of an expanding network. You could say that with Redshift, Sun wants to be the Sparc behind the Web 2.0 network infrastructure as it evolves.

Of course, you can still deploy x86 rack-mount and blade servers, even with the Sun logo. But what Sun seems to be saying with Redshift is that fast, cheap, and easy no longer scale well enough. Wintel will just have to wait a bit longer before it becomes the heartbeat of the datacenter.

To meet these expanding network needs, Sun's latest products are built around Solaris ZFS, a 128-bit file system that yields almost unlimited data capacity, says Peder Ulander, vice president of marketing for Web 2.0 at Sun.

At the risk of becoming a commercial for Sun, here's how I see Sun reading the market as revealed by its Redshift initiative.

Project Blackbox is literally a virtual datacenter in a box. It houses eight server racks in a 160-square-foot shipping container. At 38 units per rack, it has the capacity for more than 700 CPUs, 2,000 cores, or 8,000 compute threads. And the entire network system architecture and management network are included inside.

Sounds to me as if Sun is trying to transform the datacenter into a commodity product. Yet commoditization usually occurs when a high-demand market is saturated with enough vendors that they end up competing almost entirely on price.

Obviously, datacenters in shipping containers aren't quite there yet, but what Sun seems to be saying with Blackbox is that, as everything moves onto the network, owning and running a datacenter will not remain in the hands of a few suppliers. It can't, simply because too many companies will find themselves in need of those levels of performance.

For example, SaaS solutions require a powerful infrastructure to deliver a user experience equivalent to that found on the desktop. And if more than 50 percent of all new software startups are delivering products via the Web, then the demand placed on datacenters will increase tenfold.

Code-named Thumper, aka Sun Fire x4500, is similar to Blackbox only it is a hybrid data server/storage solution in a box with 24TB in 4U of rack space. It combines the functions of 2 dual core AMD Operton processors, network fabric and switch, and SATA storage in a single integrated system.

Code-named Streamstar, aka Sun Streaming System, provides broadband in a box and is designed for the delivery of high-definition broadband TV, IPTV, and steaming video to the home.

Project Darkstar is a box optimized for the gaming industry.

Network.com is a Sun subscription-based service that delivers pay-per-use CPU cycles.

We have all seen companies selling products "in a box." Not many have succeeded. Some were too far ahead of their time; others failed because some technologies just change too rapidly to be put into a box.

Nevertheless, I think Sun is reading the market correctly, and while I'm not 100 percent convinced that Project Darkstar and Streamstar will be roaring successes, Project Blackbox has a lot going for it, as does Thumper.

Whatever the outcome, it will be interesting to watch the market and see how products and partnerships develop to meet the new demands on the network.

Perhaps IT will get what it has always wanted: performance to the max.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on July 3, 2007 03:00 AM

July 02, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Multinationals show true colors in China

TAGS: Work visas

"Abandon hope all ye who enter."

The lines above, from Dante's Divine Comedy, are the words that Dante said are engraved over the entrance to hell.

What conjures these words to mind for me is a story in The New York Times from Saturday, June 30, and how it applies to high tech CEOs who insist that their call for more H-1B visas has nothing to do with wanting to pay lower wages.

My point here is that human nature is pretty nasty and we should not expect much in the way of truth or fairness if money is at stake.

The Times story relates that unrest and fear of unrest among tens of millions workers who are being exploited by their employers has led the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress in China to pass legislation to strengthen protections for workers.

"In the past, workers have had to negotiate wages with their employers individually, and China's state-run union has had almost no involvement in setting wages and benefits," notes the article written by The Times' Joseph Kahn and David Barboza.

"Passage of the measure came shortly after officials and the state news media unearthed the widespread use of slave labor in as many as 8,000 brick kilns and small coal mines in Shanxi and Henan Provinces.

"The police have freed nearly 600 workers, many of them teenagers, held against their will in factories owned or operated by well-connected businesspeople and local officials."

So who in the world, you may ask, would object to any legislation to protect these workers?

"The law, enacted by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress over the objections of foreign investors..."

Foreign investors, that's who.

Who are these "foreign investors"? The article doesn't say, but it does quote one Andreas W. Lauffs, head of Baker & McKenzie's employment law group, "which represents many of America's biggest corporations in China."

"It will be more difficult to run a company here," said Lauffs.

It seems companies have even threatened that if labor costs were substantially increased due to this legislation "they would have little choice but to move their operations out of China if the provisions were enacted."

I don't think this is a political issue. Rather, it is an issue of human decency.

If you read the ancient history of Greece and Rome, and, I am afraid the more modern history of the United States, slaves have always been used to maintain the standard of living of slave owners and the economic growth of countries and empires.

On the more local level, my point is if this is the nature of business people, worldwide and in the States, then can we really believe them when they say they want to increase the availability of foreign labor simply because there is a technology shortage? I, for one, don't believe it.

If these foreign investors are willing to look the other way when it comes to inhuman treatment of workers how much easier is it for them to look the other way if it causes just a bit of unemployment?

It is about money, plain and simple. And it always will be.

Posted by Ephraim Schwartz on July 2, 2007 02:11 PM