Author: Stagger Lee

Another dozen dead – possibly more – because letting nuts have guns and slaughter people every six months is the price we pay for freedom.

This stopped being funny a long time ago.

Also, it’s on days like this that I really miss DC.  I guess being part of the DMV will never leave me, which makes sense given that I was rebuilt from nothing there.  It’s an affinity that wholly trumps “the South” in any meaningful sense.

In Mountain View, the platform for the VTA light rail is on the northbound side of the Caltrain tracks, between Castro Street and the Caltrain platform.  And in the last couple of years, the afternoon commute hours have seen it turn into a straight-up bike boulevard.  Anytime between 5 and 6 PM on a weekday, one can watch bicycle after bicycle whizzing down the platform, directly beneath the multiple signs saying “No biking, skateboarding or rollerblading on the platform.”

Here’s the thing: the light rail platform doesn’t turn into a bike boulevard in the morning, as far as I’ve observed.  Only in the afternoon – when the bike traffic is headed for the northbound train, back to San Francisco. And of necessity, that bike traffic must be coming from the other side of Central Expressway, or the VTA platform would be out of the way. Where reposes a certain Internet search giant.  In short, it’s almost a lock that the majority of these malfeasant cyclists are tech employees headed back to San Francisco after work.

So why do I point this out? Partly to shame VTA for their utter indifference – an agency that runs their light rail system with performance and efficiency more suited to Thomas the Tank Engine – but more to illustrate the same kind of thinking that led to one Pax Dickinson being catapulted into a swamp by Business Insider the morning after the technology Internet press absolutely went in on his outrageously unprofessional and dicktastic Twitter account.

There is a problem in Silicon Valley.  In a way it’s always been here – for decades, this has been an industry largely populated by the socially inept, the Asperger’s-diagnosed, the kind of people who retreat into technology because they’re not well-suited for the real world.  Not coincidentally, it was overwhelmingly male, and developed the sort of “no girls allowed” thinking one might associate with, say, Dungeons and Dragons night in 5th grade.

That’s changed this time out.  In the current bubble, the “brogrammer” phenomenon is reaching critical mass.  The kinds of big swinging dicks that would inevitably have gone into big finance in the 1980s are all switching their Stanford major from business to computer science, and along the way, the usual sort of paste-eater who populates the industry is starting to decide that if he gels up his hair, throws on some aviators, dresses like a Jersey Shore understudy and talks like a Tucker Max message board, he too (it’s always he) can be cool and awesome and live the big life.

Time was, being somebody who was incapable of taking other people into consideration was a flaw.  It was something to be frowned upon, something you had to work to correct, a source of embarrassment if not outright shame.  And yet, sometime since the last bubble, it was apparently decided that being a complete and utter douchebag was not a bad thing, but was in fact something to aspire to.  Something that showed how “edgy” and “disruptive” you were, how you were free from the chains of “political correctness” (which, in my experience, usually means “manners”) and how you were so great and powerful that you didn’t have to play by the normal rules of society.  Somewhere along the way, being an utter asshole ceased to be a socially and career-limiting move.

Thing is, Larry Ellison built Oracle into a world-class database company despite being regarded as the biggest swine in the Valley.  Steve Jobs made an incredible comeback at Apple only after being humbled by ten years in the wilderness and despite the temperament of a French film director. Tony Stark is a fictional character. Successful people who are jerks tend to accomplish this success despite being jerks.  If all it took to be wildly successful was to just be an asshole, Wall Street wouldn’t have had to beg Uncle Sam to pick up the tab in 2008 and Pax Dickinson’s boss wouldn’t be permanently banned from the securities industry for insider trading and deceptive practices.

So, dear millennial bros of Silicon Valley, take it to heart before you’re too old to check yourself: nothing you bring to the table justifies what you take off it. It’s not okay to be racist. It’s not okay to be sexist. It’s not okay to be an utter asshole. You live in a society, and taking a big shit on the basic rules of decent human interaction doesn’t make you clever, or revolutionary, or special – it makes you a dick.

And try walking your fucking bike on the goddamn train platform.

I can’t stop thinking about the similarities between the Moto X and the iPhone 5C.  Brightly-colored polycarbonate cases around last year’s top-of-the-line internals.  And the iPhone still undercuts the Moto X by half price on contract.

As predicted, Wall Street is savaging Apple’s stock – but then, nobody goes to a stockbroker for anything more complicated than rape jokes and tacky accessories (of which more later).  Certainly not for actual insight on technology.  The fact of the matter is this: the modern smartphone is good enough already.  Thus Motorola’s willingness to ship the Moto X as equipped.  An 8-megapixel camera is plenty good.  300dpi on the display is plenty good.  16 GB of onboard storage is enough for most anyone in a world where people are migrating to Spotify and Rdio and Netflix.

In the past, Apple would always use last year’s model as the $99 phone, and the two-year-old model as the free-on-contract phone.  This time, there’s a new device in the $99 spot – and it’s basically an iPhone 5 that costs Apple less to make.  The $99 option has a much higher profit margin for Apple than previous iterations of the one-down phone.  So it sort of boggles the mind that the stock would slump…but then, it’s all about Wall Street’s expectations, not those of customers or tech specialists, isn’t it?

Everyone keeps crowing about how Apple needs to produce a dirt-cheap phone for developing markets – conveniently forgetting the fundamental truth of almost forty years of Apple Computer – they don’t do dirt-cheap. Period, paragraph.  So are they just abandoning that space?  No.  Why do you think they’ve launched a trade-in program? Why do you think the iPhone 4 (not the 4S) is still on sale in China? Why do you think iOS 7 still supports the iPhone 4 with every feature that doesn’t require specialized hardware (i.e. Siri and AirDrop and parallax view)?  Because the refurb iPhone 4 is the dirt-cheap phone for developing markets.  Save the bits, replace the battery and the cracked front glass, and boom, ready to go and for far less than building a new phone.

Don’t let the Auburn degree fool you, folks: Tim Cook is smart.  And like God, or the Cylons (but unlike Ronald D Moore as it turns out), he’s got a plan.  Look back at what a “disappointment” the iPhone 5 was last year and decide who you’d rather bet with.

We’re still in the shadow of where those towers ought to be.

If you want proof, consider what President Obama was pushing for until last night.  A Middle Eastern country with chemical weapons, using them against a civilian population, with documented proof, and an extremely limited response involving virtually no risk of American life.  Hell, even the French were on-side.  And yet, overwhelmingly, the country says no.  Part of that is down to Obama Derangement on the right, which even now is pivoting back toward “ATTACK NOW” ever since the vote was put on hold in favor of the Russian initiative.  But part of it is just war fatigue – we’ve been down this precise road ten years ago.  With more boots on the ground and less proof of the weapons.  And it came an absolute cropper.

I don’t think we could have gone into Iraq without September 11.  Afghanistan was necessary – we were attacked, the leadership of our attackers was in Afghanistan, the Afghan government wouldn’t give them up, and quite frankly we should have been arming the Northern Alliance long before the Taliban took control of the entire country in the mid-90s.  I remember hearing about their final push on NPR and thinking “this cannot possibly end well,” and I was right.

But once we broke the seal, there was no stopping Team Bush from trying again.  I don’t know how much of it was some sort of Freudian fixation to out-do Daddy, but we dropped everything in Afghanistan to hit Iraq, which is why we’re still in Afghanistan and why it took until 2011 to kill Osama bin Laden.  And by the time it was over, the public didn’t want to go to war ever again.  It’s not the best reason to be anti-war – because you’re tired of doing it – but it’ll do, by and large.

Because that’s the other legacy of September 11: because of Iraq, we’re sick and tired of intervening in the world.  Guilt over inaction in Rwanda spurred action in the Balkans, but very few people were behind our air support of the revolution in Libya, and nobody has said a mumbling word about involving ourselves in Egypt, and it’s been two years of looking anxiously at Syria but Ed Earl Brown sure as hell doesn’t want to send troops.  Pundits talk about “neo-isolationist” Americans, when in fact they probably just want to shut the window, pull the blinds, and stay out of other people’s business for a while, for better or worse.

The one reason this would change is if we got hit again, on our own soil.  And Obama knows this, and this is probably why the NSA chugged right along uninterrupted, doing the same thing they’d done ever since Rob Watson was interviewing me on a Georgetown street corner for BBC’s coverage of the Total Information Awareness initiative.  And Obama let it go on, because he knew that some people will piss and moan about privacy (in some cases, even rightly so) but that another September 11 would be catastrophic, so best not to take the chance.

Twelve years on, that might just be the legacy of September 11 and its aftermath: “best not to take the chance.”

Very little in the NFL is new.  The much-vaunted Wildcat was basically a re-engineering of the single wing, the oldest “offense” in pro football, and you can see some of its concepts in the zone-read as well. The concept of a fast offense in the NFL is not new either. Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Sam Wyche in Cincinnati and Marv Levy in Buffalo and Jerry Glanville in Houston and Atlants were all experimenting with no-huddle offenses predicated on the quick pass.  And when the Buffalo Bills were going to four straight Super Bowls and winning game after game, it was routine that they would lose the battle for time of possession.  The offense would only have the ball 29, 28 minutes – but they would still win, because their possessions were quick and ended with touchdowns rather than punting the ball away.

Last night, in the first quarter, the Philadephia Eagles held the ball for eleven and a half minutes.

Think about that. Even a bad Redskins team playing a sloppy first quarter would still be expected to have the ball for 5 or 6 minutes.  Instead, the offense got the ball for three and a half minutes out of fifteen, largely because they turned it over three times in the first seven offensive plays. Ironically, the first Washington score of the game didn’t do them any favors – a peculiar pick-six that gave the Skins a TD…and sent the defense right back out on the field.  The offense didn’t even get a crack at the ball until halfway through the quarter, whereupon they shat the bed as described.

That’s why I’m having a bit of a tough time buying all the way into the Eagles’ exciting new offense.  They were handed a gift: a team with an offense that couldn’t shoot straight and a defense that started the second quarter pre-gassed for convenience.  A more able defense, especially one not starting two rookies in the secondary, might not struggle the same way.  It’s going to be interesting to see how it looks going into the teeth of a motivated and aggressive Chicago defense, for instance, or taking on the Niners or Seahawks (who may be playing their own game of keep away).

But even correcting for the ineptitude of the opponent, it’s pretty obvious that Chip Kelly’s Oregon blur is going to be just fine in the NFL, at least at the beginning.  As tape accumulates and teams get accustomed to the offense, professional defenses will almost certainly start to catch up – walk the safeties up a little, play a hard nickel, everybody stays in their lanes and exploits the fact that every NFL defense has lateral speed that many if not most college teams don’t.  Offenses like this will ultimately live or die on the quality of personnel – Lesean McCoy and Desean Jackson are the real deal and no fooling, but whether Michael Vick is prepared to take a regular beating over the course of seventy offensive snaps a game – at this point in his career especially – will ultimately dictate how far it goes.  I’m sure Chip Kelly is looking back toward the Pacific Northwest and wondering whether Marcus Mariota might be prepared to go pro after this season.

But for connoisseurs of Washington pro football, last night was yet another ridiculous disintegration under the lights of Monday Night Football. The closest thing to a positive you can take away is that Chris Cooley sounds fresh, polished and professional on the radio broadcast team.  He’ll be fine – and I know that Sam Huff basically can’t go anymore, and it’s for the best, but it was like knowing you’d lost your grandpa. The absence in the booth was palpable, and it’s lost on no one that Sonny Jurgensen is the last man standing from the WJFK glory days of “Sonnysamanfrank”. And another piece of the past recedes in the distance…

Pretty much every single rumor spot-on. The only real eye-opener was the move to a 64-bit processor in the A7 and the addition of the M7 “motion co-processor” – other than that, the rumor blogosphere pretty much hit it out of the park. The days of surprise and “one more thing” have gone by the boards, not least because of a supply chain to China that leaks like an incontinent Fox News viewer.

Thoughts:

* Apple will get slaughtered in the press, because the things I mentioned above are the only things nobody knew.  Hell, we could extrapolate price points and ship dates from the moment the announcement was made.  People want amazing new magical surprises and are taxing Apple for not pulling a rabbit out of a hat (or more likely, a big-screen TV or smart watch or Google Glass competitor).

* The fingerprint thing could easily be dismissed as a gimmick, but if it actually works, it will be very attractive to businesses who want to enforce handset security on users who would rather die than put a passcode on their phones.  I’m willing to give Apple the benefit of the doubt on being able to take a gimmick and make it non-gimmicky.

* The iPhone 5C is plainly meant to shore up some of that lower-end market where Android has gotten fat and sassy, whether abroad or in the prepaid space.  It’s an attractive enough phone, but the story will be whether the unsubsidized price is $400 or below.  If it’s not, it’s the same sort of pricing decision as the Moto X, which I have my doubts about.

* Speaking of, Apple now joins the Moto X and Microkia/Nokiasoft on the “colorful polycarbonate” bandwagon. Nokia had a snarky tweet about this, which might have a little more cut to it if there were ever going to be another Nokia-branded smartphone, but garish plastic is apparently the new brushed metal.  The premium space is shrinking, as Android turns the consumer smartphone into a commodity product, and it’ll be interesting to see whether Apple can carve a midrange niche instead of relying on the “affordable luxury” market.

* Also speaking of the Moto X, Apple’s A7 processor includes the M7 “motion coprocessor” – in short, a Fitbit in your phone.  Two makes a trend: the next big thing in phones is apparently highly-specialized hardware to do one specific thing while consuming as little power as possible.  In a world where phone battery technology hasn’t progressed beyond “cram a bigger battery in there” for about eight years, this may be the only way to significantly stretch battery life while still allowing always-on sensors to function.

As always, if you have last year’s new iPhone, there’s probably not enough here to justify upgrading.  If you have a phone more than one version behind, you need to run right out and place your order.  The jump from the 4S to the 5S is phenomenal, and I’m positive ‘er indoors will be placing an upgrade order on September 13.

This is everything we more or less expect:

 

1) New iPhone 5S (or similar) – basically the 5 but with a dual-LED flash, a fingerprint scanner, probably a bump in RAM and processing/graphics power and possibly a gold/”champagne” option.

2) New iPhone 5C – basically the guts of a 5 or maybe even a 4S, but with the 1136×640 4-inch display and Lightning connector in any event, and with polycarbonate cases rather than metal/glass, probably in multiple colors.

3) Maybe iPads, maybe Apple TV, but not tremendously likely.

4) At least one of the phones, probably the 5S, to be released in the US on Sept 20 – and iOS 7 to be publicly available Sept 18 or so.

 

Let’s ride.

Maybe.

Today Yahoo released Yahoo Screens for iOS, a streaming video app that puts all Yahoo’s video in one place for easy access and playback through the phone.  Right now it looks like mostly clips, but between SNL and Comedy Central, they have plenty of attractive stuff right off the jump.  Which makes for a nice app on top of the completely-reengineered Flickr app, and the excellent rebranded Yahoo Sports app (formerly Sportacular), and a best-of-breed Fantasy Football app, and a Yahoo Weather app so good that Apple basically lifted 85% of its UI wholesale for iOS 7, and…

Hm…

Don’t look now, but Yahoo is quietly salting a mine over there in Sunnyvale.  They’re turning out some very good mobile apps, they’ve apparently administered Tumblr with a light touch (and are dogfooding it for their own product blogs, apparently), and they just poached a deputy editor of the New York Times to run Yahoo News.  And for all the hype and opprobrium about the new logo, people are talking about it – and the very clean modern white-and-purple suggests a grown-up company with serious ambitions.

See, Yahoo was Google before Google.  Not just in terms of search, where Yahoo was the search engine from the days of being hosted at akebono.stanford.edu – Yahoo had a meaningful presence in chat, in portals, in all-in-one Internet content like scores and stock quotes and weather.  And in mail, where they were an original part of the iPhone launch and the only provider of actual push-style email. There are plenty of people who are still using a Yahoo email address to this very day.

In short, Yahoo is ideally positioned to be an alternative to Google, because they already have millions of potential users who already have accounts, because they were Yahoo users ten years ago.  All people need is a reason to take a second look, and a lot of people are finding one – whether over Google paranoia, or from intrigue over interesting new phone apps, or just because it looks new and fresh and still has everything you need for fantasy football except a way to keep Victor Cruz from only making catches in the end zone.  They’re still a built-in option for mail and search on every iOS device, and unlike Microsoft or Google, they’ve never competed directly with Apple in anything Apple sells for money…which makes them an ideal partner going forward.

And let’s not forget who’s in charge at Yahoo – the former Google employee number 20, the one who probably wouldn’t mind laundering the title of Queen of Silicon Valley that Carly Fiorina and Meg Whitman managed to drag through the mud and taking it for herself.  On present form, you have to think that resurrecting one of the grand old names of the dot-com boom era would get that done – and it looks like she could very well pull that off.  I’d love to see it happen.  We need another superpower.

This month is my career anniversary. On September 15, 1997, I left behind the world of political science and embarked on a new job adventure in the lucrative and exciting field of high-tech.  That my salary has doubled in the ensuing sixteen years is more a tribute to inflation and how little I was raking in at the beginning.  And the enthusiasm of those early days (in which I commented to some unwitting Iowa undergrads in email that my job was “as simple, easy and rewarding as picking up free money in the street”) has long, long, long since gone by the boards.

Sixteen years, man and boy, as the Cockneys say.  In theory and on paper, I should be halfway to retirement.  But the notion that I’ll get to retire before 60 is risible in the extreme, things being how they are.  That’s another post. This is more about what happened in those sixteen years.  When I started, my company had Ethernet, Token Ring and LocalTalk all in use, and whether you could get onto the Internet or whether your Mac could print was a function of what floor of the building you were on.  There was actually a modem pool so you could connect over the network to a 56K modem and dial into Erols or Heller or whoever was your ISP.* (And I had to do this, because at the time, the firewall blocked IMAP.)  We had Windows for Workgroups, Windows NT 4, Novell-based file and print services (at a time when FAPS wasn’t as giggle-inducing as now), and the phone in my pocket was a Motorola Piper that I couldn’t afford to turn on.

Things have changed a lot.  Apple stopped dying and took over the world in some non-PC markets that didn’t exist back then. Nowadays it’s all Ethernet connection, except when it’s all Wi-Fi.  I literally cannot remember the last time I had to use a model to dial in, but it must’ve been a while, because I don’t remember when I last had a computer with a modem built in.  The vast array of Zip disks, Jaz disks, and even CD-RW went by the boards in favor of USB thumb drives – when physical media was used at all, that is. I can’t remember the last time I had to use a DVD to install software, but extrapolating back I can only assume it was to install OS X 10.6.  Setting up printers remains as annoying and ignominious as task as ever, but the vast majority of my support tasks can be handled remotely.  The landscape of IT support, in short, should be completely transformed.

And yet.

I was having a conversation with my boss, who independently gave voice to something I’d been thinking for quite some time.  Generation X has by and large spent its entire office career working on computers.  Millenials don’t know anything else.  The baby boomers – the last generation to know routine office life without a PC on every desk – are starting to retire.  In theory and on paper, then, IT support should be trending away from “how do I do that” and more exclusively focused on “this doesn’t work,” because the user base as a while should have become more computer-literate and adept at handling the machine.

And yet.  The boss concurred completely: this hasn’t happened.  The new crop of users produces no fewer ridiculous questions, no less fodder for the Twitters and blogs and websites detailing the follies of help desk callers.  So if it hasn’t gotten any better – why the hell not?

My theory was this: as with most things in the tech world, the blame belongs to Microsoft. Windows was a mess until the release of Windows 95 – and then it was a slightly fancier-looking mess.  But all the old DOS problems remained and new and exciting ones were developed; Win98 was a kludge and WinME a disaster area.  Not until Windows 7 were the more robust NT underpinnings available at the consumer level – and by that time, the forced integration of Internet Explorer (as part of Microsoft’s effort to fend off the Netscape challenge) had opened the way to a whole new world of viruses and malware, made worse by the proliferation of peer-to-peer file sharing and high-speed home networks.

In short, Windows kinda sucked.  And it continued to kinda suck. People rebooted every day whether they needed it or not, and some folks prescribed a full OS reinstall every six months just to try to speed things back up.  Entire businesses grew up around consumer IT support – the Dell technician on the other end of a phone line in Hyderabad, the stereotype-bedecked Geek Squad at Best Buy – and people just accepted that the computer did weird things, bad things, performed poorly or oddly, and it was beyond their control.

It’s pre-Enlightenment religion, is what it is. You don’t know why your child is coughing and can’t stand up, you don’t know why the crop is withering brown in the middle of the season, you don’t understand why the sun is suddenly being covered in the middle of the day – and so you run to the village shaman or medicine man or whatever, and he sacrifices a chicken or something, and suddenly the sun comes back out or the kid gets healthy or, more likely, it goes on being shitty…and that’s just the way of the world.

Windows gave the computing public learned helplessness. People just accepted that the computer was beyond their comprehension, and gave up trying to understand or solve it.  Better to let the computer wizard do it, or the computer guru, or the computer magician – even the terminology suggests a primitive tribe throwing itself on the mercy of the supernatural.  And IT departments gladly indulged the peasants.  Maybe out of a need to get more budget, maybe out of a need to feed their own egos, whatever.  Personally, I think they did it because they wanted to guarantee that when sacrifice time came around, the peasants would look upon them as the priests…and not the chickens.

 

 

* I had the good fortune to have used two small business for my Internet access for a continuous stretch of about 13 years: Heller for dialup and Speakeasy for DSL.  Both are outstanding, and dearly missed.

Samsung did what they wanted to do: they got a watch out the door faster than Apple or Google.  Unfortunately, it seems a very Samsung sort of watch: all kinds of features,  a slightly clumsy UI, and a battery that may not make it through the day – and right now, it only works with the two new Samsung devices just announced.  Ultimately I suspect this was launched more for the sake of “FIRSTIES” and not for the sake of an optimal product.  Say what you like, but when Apple ships, the thing will be ready…for what it does.

See, that’s the thing: a watch is going to have to start at the bottom and scale up.  The tablet market wasn’t cracked until Apple chose to scale up the phone OS rather than cram down the desktop OS.  Similarly, someone like Pebble has a much better grip on the smart watch: what do you NEED it to do?  Shoot pictures? Probably not. Hell, you probably don’t even need a color display at this point.  What you DO need is not to charge it every night.  We’re more or less accustomed to that with phones at this point – the days of plugging my SonyEricsson Z520 in twice a week are long past – but to have to do it with a watch, to take it off every night and plug it in?  Pebble sorted that by focusing on battery life – still the most important trick in mobility computing – and for their trouble got a watch that could go for a week, can be worn in the shower (assuming it’s not too hot) and can be charged with a MagSafe-type cable.

Then there’s the other thing: the fitness monitor. Many of my friends have latched onto these, and the wife has started using the FitBit One – pedometer, activity tracker, can even tell whether you were going up stairs.  Easy to quantify and easier to monitor from a phone app.  No reason it couldn’t all be rolled into a watch; after all, the Fitbit Flex or Jawbone Up or Nike FUELBand are all on the wrist.  So there’s that – take your time-and-date and pop your Fitbit on there as well, and there’s your smart watch.  What else do we need?

Well, notifications. Apparently notifications are a big deal, as evinced by the attention given to the power-sipping active notification mechanism of the Moto X.  Presumably any notification you can get on your wrist is one less time you have to pull out the phone, unlock it, open an app or pull down a windowshade panel, all while burning through battery with that big bright screen.  So notification triage, and maybe even the ability to read text messages in full, possibly with some canned replies.  Throw that in there.

Now…each of the Big Two mobile operating systems has its specific party piece.  For Apple, it’s Siri; for Android, it’s Google Now.  Each represents a potentially useful way of interacting with the phone via watch.  With Siri, you do it all via voice.  Talk to the watch, hear the phone speak back via the watch or show you what would be on the phone screen on the watch (which probably mandates a color display or else some rejiggering of the UI).  With Google Now, it’s the constant push of cards to the watch (ditto re: the UI) and the ability to flip through traffic conditions on the way home or weather or flight tracking or what have you.  Each is potentially useful but would require some extra work from the OS side to make it function easily.

That’s the trick: it’s going to be difficult to come up with more than a bare-bones device that isn’t inherently tied to iOS.  Or to Samsung. Or to Motorola, or HTC, or just Android.  Pebble is way ahead of the curve on a genericised interface, but to really get use out of it may entail a bigger commitment to one manufacturer or another.  Which brings us to the Google Now problem generally.

See, I’ve done everything I can to try to make Google Now useful for me, but it doesn’t do much.  Weather report (of varying quality), commute directions (kinda sorta), transit info (when close to a stop), and to be honest not very much more.  Why?  Because I don’t use Gmail for anything. If it doesn’t have your email to mine, Google Now can’t offer you very much in the way of scheduling or prediction or “hey, leave now if you want to make your flight.” And even the notional alternatives (thinking of the slightly-stale Osito here) need to have Gmail access to do much more.

The problem, then, is that if you want the benefits of something like Google Now, you have to commit to Google for your services.  Which is asking a lot (which I’m sure is what Google wants). The “Today” view in iOS 7 will give you a little of this, supposedly, and apps like Donna are already trying to replicate some of the functionality with your calendar by rolling travel and weather and even car service via Uber into the package.  But it’s not all the way there.

Ultimately, the thing is this: at some point the Google Now-like service has to be something that does all its data mining and processing locally on the phone itself. Independent or at least agnostic of service provider, able to get useful info out of your work email without compromising your security in doing so and able to leverage whatever personal email provider you use without relying on Google’s technology.  In a way, that’s already present in iOS – for instance, if you get email with a tracking number from UPS or FedEx and tap on that tracking number, you’ll see “Track Shipment” as an option, irrespective of whence came the email.  Apple Data Detectors – a technology that Apple first rolled out in 1997 then largely ignored until two or three years ago  – can do that right now, already parsing out addresses to be sent to the address book (or soon to Maps) or dates to be sent to the calendar.  So the technology is there and it doesn’t take much to suggest that it could be extended to include things like flight confirmation numbers or  the like.

All of this is a very roundabout way of saying that I fully expect an Apple watch before long, and I expect it to rely on the functionality of iOS 7 to deliver a thin but satisfying slice of data to a glorified wrist-bound FitBit.  And in doing so, obviate the need for the phone itself to do a lot of the heavy lifting that currently makes it difficult if not impossible to use the iPhone itself as your fitness/presence tracker (see: the battery-slaughter of Saga or Human or Moves).  Anything that can be staffed out to something with its own separate battery is good for your phone.

So now we wait.  Every man his own Big Data.  It’s coming.