Coop's Corner

Mayors representing the Bay Area's three largest cities pledged Thursday they would work together to transform the region into the country's "electric vehicle capital."

At the same time,the global electric transportation company headed by Shai Agassi, Better Place, Announced plans to enter the U.S. market, beginning here.

The news warms this die-hard greenie's ecologically correct cockles. But can we dispense already with the pipe dream that the electric revolution will be brought to a filling station near you, courtesy of the far-sighted policies of local leadership?

That's not to say that government intervention can't help kick start industries in need with the right dose of economic stimulus. But for better or for worse, it's up to the auto industry--or what soon may be left of it--to bring the idea to life. (I'm assuming that Uncle Sam is not going to nationalize Detroit's car makers. Then again, there are any number of things I never expected this government to do. So who knows?)

If you want to see the glass as half full, there is encouraging news to report. At the LA Auto Show this week in Los Angeles, BMW, Mitsubishi, and Chrysler all demoed electric cars. Meanwhile, General Motors says that its Chevy Volt is still on track for 2011, assuming GM doesn't run out of money first. Elsewhere, Nissan-Renault, working with the state and the utilities company, Portland General Electric, hopes to have an electric car in the Oregon market within the next couple of years. The company's CEO predicts Nissan will have a mass market version ready by 2012. Cool.

But in the absence of a big hand from the federal government, all these vehicles will depend upon a patchwork system built by cities and towns. Can it get built that way? Maybe over decades, though fits and starts.

VentureBeat's Chris Morrison noted that Thursday's press conference suggested a new level of seriousness about electric cars.

"That might seem to have been the case before, but it's worth remembering that California was the backdrop for previous failures to commercialize electric cars, providing inspiration for the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? And the California Air Resources Board has repeatedly relaxed requirements for automakers throughout its lifetime, providing loopholes to escape switching off the combustion engine."

All true. The announcement shows good intentions, but knowing human nature it's only reasonable to believe people will continue to behave as they always have. Seems to me that the magnitude of the challenge is beyond the capacity of any municipality, alone or in coordination with its neighbors--assuming we want to do it right.

In 1956, President Dwight Eisenhower signed into law the federal act that authorized the construction of the Interstate Highway System, which proved so crucial in the development of the country in the decades since. Any reason why that same sort of leadership today couldn't pave the way for a nationwide grid of electric-based transport?

After January 20, when the new administration takes power, maybe we'll find out.

Some marketing genius decided it would be a splendid idea to plaster the subway station I arrive at in the morning with posters promoting Microsoft's "I'm a PC" campaign. So twice a day, five days a week, I'm face to face with one of the worst advertising spots in Madison Avenue's history.

Then when I get home and turn on the television, the same ads--this time in full motion color with sound--are all over the airwaves.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Get me an ice pick so I can drive it between my eyeballs and get it over with already.

I'm obviously late wading in here, but I wasn't swept up in the first round of harrumphing when the ads first hit in September. Even though I never thought the spots were very interesting, I figured Microsoft would improve upon them. Eventually. After all, this was part of a $300 million ad campaign that Microsoft planned, in part, to counter Apple's successful Mac versus PC series.

Silly me. I think Rory Carlyle's tongue-in-cheek summary says it all: "I'm a PC and my commercials are terrible."

No doubt there's someone high up in the Redmond bureaucracy who believes it's possible to corporately manufacture cool. But it just won't wash. When I was a kid, an advertisement for Bic pens ripped off a popular counterculture phrase of the era with the corny television refrain, "Write on." (Get it? Write on, not "right on." Ugh.)

As contrived as that was, it paled compared with this stinker from IBM for its now-defunct line of PS/2 computers...(How you gonna do it?...You're gonna PS/2 it") Vanilla Ice couldn't have done worse. A friend who worked in Big Blue's marketing department at the time candidly allowed that the jingle would have had better success as a WASP rap ditty.

The production quality of Microsoft's "I'm a PC" spots is higher, but technical excellence alone can't compensate for the core problem: conceptually, the ads fall flat. Maybe it's me but parading a bunch of goofs all declaring that they're "a PC" and I'm thinking it's "Stepford Wives" time. If the idea was to counter the impression fostered by Apple's series of lacerating Mac ads, Microsoft should rethink its original assumption. Now that Steve Ballmer says he's no longer thinking about Yahoo, he should devote a few brain cells to cleaning up this mess.

The ads simply grate. As John Gruber put it in a post a while ago:

"And so what makes Microsoft's new "I'm a PC" commercials so jaw-droppingly bad is that they're not countering Apple's message, but instead they're reinforcing it. That the spots themselves jump between dozens of different people who "are" PCs, that the spots make a point of emphasizing that there are a billion Windows-running PCs worldwide, this only emphasizes that "PC" is not a brand name but a generic."

"Microsoft's new ads emphasize the same message as Apple's: that the Mac is the one and only brand-name computer in the world."

Write on. Err, right on.

Dell plans to preload computers with more subscription-based functions. The idea: give IT another, presumably less expensive way to access a myriad of systems management functions through the "cloud."

The details are still being worked over but the idea would involve a range of high-end services delivered through the cloud, like remote infrastructure management, or the ability to monitor and proactively deal with malfunctioning assets on a computer network.

(Credit: Dell)

"We think that we've sorted through most of those issues. It will work in some customer segments and not in others," said Stephen Schuckenbrock, Dell's chief information officer and head of of its Global Services business. He added that Dell will roll out its announcements over the next three to four months.

Some of this is old wine in new bottles as cloud computing has become a buzzword, covering everything from the delivery of computer services to the hosting of applications off premises. Dell already includes remote data protection services for its new E-series of notebooks. So it is that whenever a lost or stolen laptop gets attached to a network, the system will identify the unit and automatically delete any data on the hard drive.

What's new is that Dell is expanding the scope of its systems management software ambitions. Without oversimplifying, the idea resembles the approach Dell took in the 1980s and 1990s, when it focused on squeezing costs out of its supply line. The upshot was to accelerate the commoditization of PC hardware by helping to drive down prices.

Dell CIO: Stephen Schuckenbrock

(Credit: Dell)

Dell's timing in reaching into that same playbook is propitious. With the economy on all fours, the magic words IT wants to hear aren't so much "cloud computing" as "this will save you money."

Schuckenbrock, who formerly worked at EDS as a co-CIO, noted that customers increasingly are frustrated with cost and that when you look at how CIO's and IT organizations spend their money, "a disproportionate amount gets spent on keeping the doors open and running their applications." Of the annual $1.2 trillion that gets sunk into new computing infrastructure in this country--or used to get spent before the current recession-cum-depression--about $800 billion goes just to make sure the hardware runs properly.

In theory, remote infrastructure management and software as a service for systems management should allow Dell (as well as its rivals) to squeeze the associated labor costs. To the degree Dell can help reduce that sort of expense, its push into cloud computing may resonate.

"We're keeping our eye on how the industry evolving," he said. "I've seen estimates that say 25 (percent) to 35 percent of computer consumption could come through the cloud in next 3 or 4 years...You have to look at what it costs to deliver a service in the same way that you looked at what it cost to deliver a PC in terms of configurability, flexibility, or access to industry standard components."

In the last year, Dell has been on a buying spree, acquiring software companies like Message One, Silverback Technologies, and Everdream to build out the technical chops it will need for any future push into cloud computing. In the future, Schuckenbrock indicated that Dell would offer modular components that customers can pick and choose what they want in their computing environments

But as Dell builds out the software stack to compete against the likes of IBM and HP, can it help customers optimize for cloud computing in ways the competition can't?

Schuckenbrock's argument is that traditional outsourcers will have a difficult time taking large revenue streams with long-term contracts and converting to modular services that you can turn on when you want, and turn off when you want. That's because the incentive structures are very different. Thus Dell's idea is to build in the functionality as part of the hardware itself.

"If it came preloaded with all the services inside and all you had to do is go online and click, then you're automatically enabled," he said.

An interesting approach in theory. Let's see whether Dell can make it happen-again-in practice.

Internet Explorer dominates the Web browser market, but are that many people so in love with it? Meanwhile, the Flash player dominates its segment because lots of people find it to be a terrific. So might Adobe one day decide that the next logical step is to try its hand at building its own Web browser?

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch speaks at the company's Max conference Monday.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland, CNET News)

Turns out that's not such a crazy idea. Following the completion of Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia in 2005, the company's brass actually toyed with the idea.

"We looked at making our own browser," said Adobe's chief technology officer, Kevin Lynch, in an interview leading up to this week's Adobe Max conference. "We thought about how to advance the capabilities of the Web."

At first blush, that sounds like a fit with the message Adobe attaches to Flash as a technology to foster delivery of "applications, content, and video to the widest possible audience." But the idea ultimately failed to persuade management that it was wise to commit the resources (and in the process pick another fight with Microsoft.) "Our primary interest is to build a great platform upon which others can build great applications," Lynch said. "There are enough browsers in the world."

Too bad. As a user, I'd like even more choice. Even though they don't have more than minor shares of the market, I'm thrilled that Mozilla, Opera, and Google decided to design their own PC Web browsers. Anything to turn up the heat on Microsoft and force it to think more creatively about the Internet browsing metaphor.

For Adobe, the temptation was to create a product that would do a better job of enabling its technologies on client systems. But Lynch said the green light hinged on whether an Adobe browser would win wide enough distribution. As even Google is discovering, that's not an easy goal to achieve.

"It's brave of (Google) to come out with a browser," he said. "I love to see innovation. But will Chrome get 80 or 90 percent reach? I don't see how that's possible."

Credit John Thompson for having impeccable timing. Of course, the timing of his resignation announcement as chief executive officer from Symantec was purely coincidental, falling just one day before Microsoft dropped an A-bomb on the antivirus security market. But better lucky than good.

Microsoft's move to kill its Windows Live OneCare PC care and security suite and replace it with free consumer anti-malware software is a big deal for the likes of Symantec, McAfee, and the other antivirus suppliers (though nobody's going to say that on the record). Competing against free is always a tough sell, and this is no exception.

The only real surprise is that it took Microsoft this long to reach this point. But it's in line with the company's practice of offering for free the features that other application makers charge for. Let's remember that back in the Stone Age, companies used to sell things like word processors and spell checkers. Know anybody in their right mind still paying for that functionality today? Those companies--if they still exist--have long moved on because those businesses dried up. You can get that stuff (and a lot more) as part of Windows.

Forget antitrust claims. There's a world of difference between today's announcement and Microsoft's takedown of Netscape in the late 1990s. Microsoft is not the dominant vendor in the antivirus market. It won't be bundling the product with the Windows operating system. Neither will it force anyone to use the application. There's just no case to be made.

If past is prologue, I'm sure some commercial antivirus makers will argue that their products remain qualitatively head and shoulders above anything Microsoft could make in the security realm. Even if that were true, it doesn't matter. The economy's on all fours and times are getting worse. Some bozos may still be ordering $200 bottles of wine for dinner, but most folks are into saving their dimes.

In that budget environment, "free" is going to ring a special bell.

Unfortunately for Yahoo, Barack Obama's otherwise engaged.

As headhunters from Heidrick & Struggles scroll through the available A-listers for Yahoo's next CEO, they might be excused for secretly wishing John McCain had won the election.

That's because after all this company has gone through, it is going to take some sort of superstar to rally the troops now that Jerry Yang is returning to his former role of "chief Yahoo."

Truth be told, you should be happy for Yang. He no longer has to suffer the indignity of playing the role of human pinata. I never thought Yang was the right guy for the job, but give him credit for taking on a tough job. After Terry Semel's ouster, Yang did his best to revive a company he helped found and obviously still loves. Can't fault him for giving it a shot. Unfortunately, Yahoo's brain-dead board of directors took way too long to realize that it was a bad match almost from the get-go. But that's another story.

After the on-again, off-again Microsoft novella, the final straw was Google's decision to bow out of a pending ad pact. That agreement was supposed to bring in hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Before barreling ahead, however, the board might have considered whether the Justice Department would try and block that combination.

Yang's subsequent uninspiring public performance at the Web 2.0 conference only reinforced the impression that he was in over his head. Rightly or not, Yang was then variously described as "a train wreck, self-delusional, and as making a mockery of the vaunted company he helped create."

That's now all in the past. Yahoo's pressing challenge now is to find somebody who can rally employees to make one last, best effort to get it right. Talk all you want about Yahoo being a basket case, but that ignores the reality on the ground. Yahoo remains a company with some 500 million users and that's quite a coveted franchise. And if the economy would give everyone a break, several of Yahoo's announced initiatives might actually bear fruit. (And who knows? Public bluster notwithstanding, Steve Ballmer may yet take another run at Yahoo.)

Sure, a real superstar would make a big difference, but Yahoo does not need a miracle worker. It does need someone with passion, vision and managerial chops. Lots of names have been bruited about as possible successors-thankfully, Mark Cuban is otherwise engaged-and I can't say who has the inside track.

This much I do know. After a lost decade in which Yang, Semel and Tim Koogle marched the company around in circles, CEO competence has to be more than a throw-away line on a potential resume.

The board doesn't have the luxury of blowing it again.

No pressure. (Right.)

See also:
• Yahoo CEO Yang to step down
• Yahoo's ultimate search: A new CEO
• Yang's travails: A Yahoo timeline
• Jerry Yang memo to staff about stepping down
• Microhoo revisited: Would it be a search-only deal?

Look on the bright side: If you work in Silicon Valley, you may not have that tough a time finding time to meet up with friends and acquaintances during the holiday season.

In another sign of the slowdown in the technology industry, employees at Hewlett-Packard Co. and Micron have been instructed to take more time off during the holidays.

In HP's case, the company is ordering employees to take an extra three days off around the annual Christmas holiday week.

"Shutting down during a period when many employees traditionally take vacation helps HP achieve operational savings and allows employees to enjoy more time with their families," the company said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the Idaho Statesman is reporting that Micron is asking employees to take up to 12 days of time off in December and January as a cost-cutting measure to help the company. A spokesman for the company was not immediately available for comment.

Earlier this month, Dell asked employees to take off up to five days over the next three months without pay.

With newspapers cutting back, and predictions of even worse times ahead, Rupert Murdoch said the profession may still have a bright future, if it can shake free of reporters and editors who he said have forfeited the trust and loyalty of their readers.

"My summary of the way some of the established media has responded to the Internet is this: It's not newspapers that might become obsolete. It's some of the editors, reporters, and proprietors who are forgetting a newspaper's most precious asset: the bond with its readers," said Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corp. He made his remarks as part of a lecture series sponsored by the Australian Broadcast Corporation.

Murdoch to journalists: Shape up or risk extinction

(Credit: Dan Farber/CNET Networks)

Murdoch, whose company's holdings also include MySpace and The Wall Street Journal, criticized what he described as a culture of "complacency and condescension" in some newsrooms.

"The complacency stems from having enjoyed a monopoly--and now finding they have to compete for an audience they once took for granted. The condescension that many show their readers is an even bigger problem. It takes no special genius to point out that if you are contemptuous of your customers, you are going to have a hard time getting them to buy your product. Newspapers are no exception."

The 77-year-old Murdoch, recalling a long career in newspapers that began when his father's death forced him to take over the Adelaide News in 1952, said the profession has failed to creatively respond to changes wrought by technology.

"It used to be that a handful of editors could decide what was news--and what was not. They acted as sort of demigods. If they ran a story, it became news. If they ignored an event, it never happened," Murdoch said. "Today, editors are losing this power. The Internet, for example, provides access to thousands of new sources that cover things an editor might ignore. And if you aren't satisfied with that, you can start up your own blog, and cover and comment on the news yourself. Journalists like to think of themselves as watchdogs, but they haven't always responded well when the public calls them to account."

To make his point, Murdoch criticized the media reaction after bloggers debunked a 60 Minutes report by former CBS anchor Dan Rather that President Bush had evaded service during his days in the National Guard.

"Far from celebrating this citizen journalism, the establishment media reacted defensively," Murdoch said. "During an appearance on Fox News, a CBS executive attacked the bloggers in a statement that will go down in the annals of arrogance. 60 Minutes, he said, was a professional organization with 'multiple layers of checks and balances.' By contrast, he dismissed the blogger as 'a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.' Eventually, it was the guys sitting in their pajamas who forced Rather and his producer to resign."

Murdoch continued: "Mr. Rather and his defenders are not alone. A recent American study reported that many editors and reporters simply do not trust their readers to make good decisions. Let's be clear about what this means. This is a polite way of saying that these editors and reporters think their readers are too stupid to think for themselves."

Murdoch's comments come at a time when the media landscape looks increasingly bleak both for print-based and online news organizations. A recent report by Goldman Sachs predicted that advertising pressure will continue because of the declines in the auto and financial industries. Online outlets are also feeling the impact. On Friday, TheStreet.com shut its San Francisco office.

Despite the blemishes, however, Murdoch said newspapers can still count on circulation gains "if papers provide readers with news they can trust." He added that they will also need to embrace technology advances like RSS feeds and targeted e-mails. The challenge, according to Murdoch, will be to "use a newspaper's brand while allowing readers to personalize the news for themselves-and then deliver it in the ways that they want."

Murdoch concludes that "the newspaper, or a very close electronic cousin, will always be around. It may not be thrown on your front doorstep the way it is today. But the thud it makes as it lands will continue to echo around society and the world."

When I covered WordPerfect back in the day, the go-to guy for the press was a fellow named Pete Petersen. He was the one who would return your phone calls and answer questions about the company and its products. But Petersen owned only 1 percent of WordPerfect. The two majority shareholders were its co-founders, Bruce Bastian and Alan Ashton.

From time to time, you could corral Ashton for a quote, but that was the exception to the rule as he much preferred to stay out of the limelight. So it was with more than passing interest that I came across news of Ashton's decision to help bankroll proponents of a ban on gay marriage in California:

The campaign issued an urgent appeal, and in a matter of days, it raised more than $5 million, including a $1 million donation from Alan C. Ashton, the grandson of a former president of the Mormon Church. The money allowed the drive to intensify a sharp-elbowed advertising campaign, and support for the measure was catapulted ahead; it ultimately won with 52 percent of the vote.

I haven't seen breakouts of how people working in California's technology business voted on the question of banning gay marriage. Still, I'd be flabbergasted if it paralleled opinion in the rest of the state--let alone Utah. Silicon Valley isn't Orem.

But while one man, one vote sounds fair on paper, it counts a lot more when you're voting as a member of the super-rich. So it is that Ashton, who hasn't been active in a significant way in California's technology industry for years, may now wind up having more impact here than for anything he did in his previous career as an entrepreneur.

Update

Moore's Law may get a new lease on life thanks to a discovery jointly announced Friday by researchers at IBM and Purdue University.

Named after Gordon Moore, former Intel co-founder and chairman, the well-known predict posits that the number of transistors on a chip doubles roughly every two years. But while Moore's Law has held true for the last 43 years, scientists say the computer industry is bound to bump up against limits to the shrinkage of conventional silicon transistor dimensions sometime in the next decade.

But that may no longer be true. IBM and Purdue researchers say they have found that the growth pattern of silicon nanowires is sufficiently predictable so as to become part of a manufacturer's design processes.

One nanometer equals one-millionth of a millimeter.

Nanowires are grown out of silicon "nucleate," and then undergo a process to a solid phase forming into wires. They range in size from 10 to 40 nanometers.

Eric Stach, an assistant professor of materials engineering at Purdue, said this was the first time that scientists have been able to measure the nucleation process with any precision.

Let's get small: Silicon "nanowires"

(Credit: Purdue University)

The findings are reported in a paper appearing Friday in the journal Science. The paper was written by Stach, along with Purdue doctoral student Bong Joong Kim, and IBM materials scientists Frances Ross, Jerry Tersoff, Suneel Kodambaka, and Mark Reuter from the physical sciences department at the Watson Research Center.

Here's a brief description of the process they describe in a summary:

The silicon nanowires begin forming from tiny gold nanoparticles ranging in size from 10 to 40 nanometers, or billionths of a meter. By comparison, a human red blood cell is more than 100 times larger than the gold particles. The gold particles are placed in the microscope's vacuum chamber and then exposed to a gas containing silicon, and the particles act as a catalyst to liberate silicon from the gas to form into solid wires. The particles are heated to about 600 degrees Celsius, or more than 1,100 degrees Fahrenheit, causing them to melt as they fill with silicon from the gas. With increasing exposure, the liquid gold eventually contains too much silicon and is said to become "supersaturated," and the silicon precipitates as a solid, causing the nanowire to begin forming.

In real world terms, the fact that the nucleation process being repeatable on this small a scale means that scientists can measure and predict when the process is going to occur. Stach said that would help companies more confidently design systems to make nanowires for electronics products.

Eric Stach, assistant professor of materials engineering

(Credit: Purdue University)

"The key result we report is a very basic and fundamental one, namely that when forming these structures, they start their formation in a very controllable fashion," Stach said. "In short, if one were to place equal sized catalysts over a large silicon wafer (as one would need to in order to integrate into chip architectures) and exposed them to the source gas, silane, they would all start their growth at pretty much the same time.

"In prior work, the IBM group has shown that their rate of growth thereafter is also very uniform," he continued. "This means one can make the same structures over a large scale, just as needed for real devices. If this were not to be the case, there would be substantial hurdles in making these structures part of real device design, from a manufacturing viewpoint."

The hoped for result: transistors consisting of nanowires. But even with this discovery, Stach said that there remain questions related to the optimization of device creation, and device optimization. Another challenge to using nanowires in electronics, he said, will be the replacement of gold as a catalyst with other metals that are better suited for the electronics industry.

"It represents a challenge: there are issues with gold migrating into the silicon wires, which can affect properties, depending on the way that they are used," he said. "There is work by multiple groups worldwide on catalysts, with copper, nickel, and aluminum among the most prominent. Copper and nickel are interesting, as they have been--and are--used routinely in modern devices as metals, and thus are more 'comfortable' for incorporation in a manufacturing environment."

IBM echoed that caution, saying it was too early to predict when manufacturers would be able to port the science to the production lines.

"Gold is not the best metal from an electronics perspective so the next step would be to integrate other metals such as copper, nickel, or aluminum. So until that happens it would be premature to predict what technology node would be ideal for mainstream manufacturing," said a spokesman for the company.