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Christopher Saunders (bio)

May 1, 2008, 2:36 PM

Vint Cerf Waxes Nostalgic on the Early Days of TCP/IP and His Suit
It's Vint Cerf!
Source: Google

Esquire magazine, not really known as a bastion of IT and Internet news, has a brief, intriguing interview with Vint Cerf, one of the pioneering luminaries in our industry and a hero of mine.

Cerf (full name: Dr. Vinton G. Cerf) is, of course, the co-originator of the TCP/IP protocols and by extension, a great deal of what makes the Internet work.

Along with Robert Kahn, Cerf developed two technologies at the heart of the Internet protocol suite, creating an internetworking (a real word) design so robust that proponents say it be supported between any sorts of network, including the venerable (and oft-cited) tin-cans-and-string model (and the less-often-cited pigeon-based model).

Cerf, who currently holds the position of Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, is also known to history as the man who, at the height of an early IETF technical discussion, stepped to the podium and stripped off his trademark three-piece suit to reveal his famous "IP on Everything" T-shirt -- pacifying for the moment a heated debate over fundamental Internet design.

In retrospect, Cerf's T-shirt also hinted at possibilities we're only beginning to realize today, in the form of VoIP, IP-enabled automobiles, Internet-linked home entertainment systems and the long-discussed IP-enabled refrigerator (and thank heavens for that one, eh?)

When not pictured ripping open his dress shirt, Superman-style, to show off his famous T-shirt (it appears on his private Facebook profile, for the interested), Cerf is almost always seen wearing a three-piece suit; in the Esquire piece, he expounds a bit on its merits (which, if I had my druthers, would be required reading for today's predominantly shorts-and-T-shirt set... although I suppose anyone wearing a three-piece suit would be hard-pressed to look anything but sweat-drenched and disheveled while slaving away in a hot datacenter. Hmm.)

More to the point, the Esquire interview also includes a couple of telling moments of reminiscence and insight from the "Father of the Internet":

There was no one "Ah-ha!" moment. Not in the sense that many people want to hear. They see the Internet now and think, Well, thirty-six years ago someone imagined what it would look like in 2008, and that is what drove the process. It wasn't like that at all.
There was a first "Oh, no!" moment. That was the first time I saw spam pop up. It could have been as early as '79. A digital-equipment corporation sent a note around announcing a job opening, and we all blew up, saying, This is not for advertising! This is for serious work!

Link: Esquire: "What I've Learned: Vint Cerf"

More info about TCP/IP and its component TCP and IP protocols.)

Posted by Christopher Saunders at 2:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

April 7, 2008, 8:38 PM

Presence and Working Smarter (OR: Enterprises Still Haven't Figured Out How to Use IM)

A story from our West Coast bureau chief, David Needle, got me taking a brief stroll down memory lane. Dave had written last week about distractions -- the bane of getting things done (in both the traditional and the David Allen, initial-caps sense -- and how they plague the modern information worker.

There's discussion of new software solutions, of course. But what concerns me most is how much we've disregarded a great deal of the progress we've already made in developing technology to help minimize distractions. The sad thing is that much of the problem was addressed by software years ago -- but the solutions haven't yet implemented by businesses.

I'm thinking specifically about presence, which most folks think about in terms of IM status and "Away" message. In a larger sense, however, presence involves a user's availability to collaborate.

Is a coworker busy? In a meeting? On the phone? At lunch? In a videoconference? On the road? A fully integrated IM system could let any colleague know at a moment's glance -- and this capability has been around for ages.

For years, major IM systems and unified collaboration systems had been linkable to corporate VoIP or PBX systems, enabling a user's IM status to change to "Busy" or "Unavailable" when the user is on the phone. Additional software from major enterprise vendors can tie IM availability with screen-sharing and videoconferencing services.

By linking IM status to these other services, a user's IM presence immediately becomes a broader indicator of availability, with even more work-changing scenarios possible:
Imagine phone calls being sent automatically to voicemail when you're in a videoconference. Now imagine the same thing happening to IMs, too. On the flip side, imagine knowing at a glance when a coworker is free to chat or to take a phone call.

Imaging being able to tell that when a colleague is away, they're gone to an all-day, high-level meeting. (Not to be disturbed -- dig?) Just as long as IM tools have been capable of integrating with phone and conferencing systems, they've also been able to be tied into appointment calendars in Outlook, Lotus and so on, enabling colleagues (with the appropriate permissions) to get more granular data on their whereabouts. (Here's one of the latest implementations of this in Microsoft Office Communicator 2007)

Add mobile presence to the mix -- another feature whose underlying technology has been long available in major enterprise services and software -- and Buddy Lists can show when another user is accessible only via their mobile phone or BlackBerry (including BlackBerry Communicator). As a result, a colleague knows the best ways to communicate with them at any given moment.

It's also not just about finding when a user is available to collaborate, and then bugging them using the appropriate method. Instead, a number of enterprise IM and UC systems and add-ons allow for a degree of intelligent message routing: Enabling a user to be alerted or contacted based on their preferences and their availability, as determined by their presence.

And isn't being able to choose to avoid distractions while busy what this is really all about?

None of this is wishful thinking: wireless carriers, major players in enterprise e-mail and unified collaboration and VoIP/PBX vendors have offered all of this technology for years now. And for as long as they've been doing so, companies have looked the other way while their employees are victimized by overwhelming distractions.

Posted by Christopher Saunders at 8:38 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

March 25, 2008, 12:51 PM

Time to Play Catch-Up for Mozilla

My colleague Sean Michael Kerner touches on one heck of a shortcoming at Mozilla:

Why doesn't it do more to cross-promote its own projects?

Mozilla's rivals certainly don't share the same reluctance to aggressively cross-promote their products. Look at Microsoft, which hasn't been shy about the practice. And now, Apple is being widely chastised by Mozilla execs and much of the blogosphere -- that portion that cares, anyway -- for doing the same.

(The blogosphere, of course, largely overlooks the fact that Apple's been doing this sort of thing for ages, perhaps most recently with iTunes and QuickTime -- not to mention pushing Mac OS along with its hardware, in a larger sense.)

As many have rightly mentioned, Apple is far from the only company pursuing this kind of tactic. The use of an updating app to push out new wares, specifically, isn't new, either.

Which means it's Mozilla's responsibility to rethink its strategy, if it indeed finds recent moves like Apple's so threatening, as it seems to.

Why doesn't the group go to greater lengths to promote (as Sean suggested) Thunderbird alongside Mozilla? Both offer boatloads of related plugins and skins. And if you've already taken the plunge into an alternative browser, it seems likely that you're at least willing to consider a new e-mail client.

While we're at it -- why isn't Lightning or Sunbird seriously promoted with Thunderbird? One might think that at least some users moving to Thunderbird are seeking alternatives to Microsoft Outlook or other combined e-mail-and-calendaring apps. Why isn't Mozilla making it easier for its users to get the same functionality by pushing a calendar app or plugin with its e-mail application?

As rivals like Microsoft work to counter the progress it's made with Firefox, Mozilla may do well to consider that if it doesn't get its act into gear, it's going to have much more to worry about than merely Apple poaching its market share.

Posted by Christopher Saunders at 12:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

March 19, 2008, 6:31 PM

Datacenter Costs: Who's to Blame?

Wanted to say a bit more about datacenter energy costs and how little businesses understand about getting them in line.

Yes, we all know datacenter costs are growing out of control -- but businesses themselves are often to blame.

How did this sad state of affairs come to pass?

IBM's Steve Sams (who runs Big Blue's service to assist customers in revamping their datacenters) shared some of his ideas earlier today.

Reason #1: Poor IT management in the wake of aggressive growth by acquisition. Fast-consolidating industries often suffer from a fragmented or redundant datacenter strategies -- a case IBM's Sams said he often sees in financial services firms.

Reason #2: Running regional and business units independently -- which may make sense from a business standpoint, granted. But all too often, this also means a company fails to coordinate IT needs, again leading to a fragmented or redundant strategy. Finance and media companies often fall into this trap, Sams said.

Reason #3: Lack of CEO focus on IT needs -- despite a CIO's best efforts, datacenters continue to age (87 percent of datacenters were built before 2001, Sams said) and mission-critical components, frankly, break down. At the same time, needs grow and costs balloon.

Reason #4: Genuine ignorance by CFOs about datacenter energy costs. Sams described IBM clients who weren't breaking out datacenter energy expenses from overall facilities energy expenses. Consequently, CFOs had no idea that datacenters were sucking up a large portion (10 to 30 times the energy needed by general office space!) of their energy bills. Thus, they couldn't prioritize the datacenter for an energy- and cost-saving makeover.

(Sams said IBM five years ago undertook efforts to address this shortcoming in its own organization -- contributing to the company's ultimate savings of $1.5 billion in datacenter costs annually.)

In every case, a lack of a cohesive, business-wide datacenter strategy the culprits, aided and abetted by a dearth of actionable data on datacenter costs.

With most large companies utterly dependent on the datacenter, their very businesses are on the line. That's why it's perplexing why more haven't taken the obvious steps necessary to ensure a sensible datacenter strategy.

"CEOs really have not come to grips," Sams said.

Has yours?

Posted by Christopher Saunders at 6:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

March 19, 2008, 2:11 PM

Datacenter Costs: Horror Stories

My colleague Pedro Hernandez, who blogs about Green IT over at Enterprise IT Planet, and I sat down today with IBM's Steve Sams. Sams is VP of IBM's Global Site and Facilities Services, and the go-to guy when it comes to IBM customers seeking to cut datacenter costs.

And man, do businesses need to cut datacenter costs.

Recently, Commercial and Industrial Bank of China tapped Sams' group to refashion its datacenter strategy. The end result: The bank consolidated 38 datacenters (!) down to two, saving around $180 million annually.

Despite the widespread talk of "going green" -- IBM has its own massive "Big Green" initiative, for instance -- the need is not just about becoming more eco-conscious, Sams said: It's about implementing greater operational efficiency.

That's because companies are throwing money out the window due to poor space, server and environmental management.

This can lead to some truly bizarre situations.

For instance, businesses routinely allocate too much datacenter space to too many underutilized servers. (We're talking average Intel-based server utilization rates of around 5 percent.)

At the same time, Sams said enterprises are holding off on a third of all server-related decisions -- because they don't think they have enough space in the datacenter!

Other businesses are allocating unnecessarily huge portions of their datacenter expenses to power and environmental costs. One datacenter observed by Sams' team spent a piddling 28 cents of every dollar on running its servers: the rest went to keeping the lights on and the air cool.

Efficient? Hardly. There's plenty of room for improvement, which is one of the reasons why Sams' group is ranking in millions annually in helping companies rationalize their datacenters.

And some enterprises do get it: One of the best datacenters Sams' team saw had almost the inverse spending ratio as the example above. These guys should be an example to others.

Yet Sams said his group routinely encounters datacenter air conditioners that are cooling nothing; overly chilled server rooms; jury-rigged or dauntingly overbuilt and overcomplicated (and in both cases, accident-prone) datacenter designs -- and IT and company management largely ignorant of how far out of whack their cost structure has become.

More notes to come from our talk.

Posted by Christopher Saunders at 2:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

March 12, 2008, 1:02 AM

One Problem Google Can't Solve: Spam

I get a fair amount of email -- on average between 1,000 to 2,500 emails a day. Most, as you might expect, are spam. (Not fan mail, alas.) As a result of this figure, and of years following the spam industry both as a journalist and as a vexed end user, I've become well-versed with a number of the popular spam-fighting tools out there.

I'm particularly fond of tools that leverage the so-called "wisdom of crowds" to help combat spam: services that judge a message's likelihood of being spam based on the number of recipients who have marked it as such. These approaches have been commercially available for perhaps a decade, and have often been integrated with other antispam approaches (checksum, Baysian -- still my favorite, and so on) at either the client or server level. Many ISPs integrate some form of these kinds of solutions at the server level without end users even knowing.

Not that it makes much difference: Most of us who have been on the Internet for some time knows that inevitably, the spam will find its way into your inbox.

(more) |

Posted by Christopher Saunders at 1:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

February 28, 2008, 11:16 AM

Time Warner Cable Dabbles in Paid Search, Redirection, Usability Annoyance

Time Warner Cable, my ISP at home, has elected to pursue a somewhat controversial route to better monetizing its users: Insinuating itself into their Web surfing behavior.

I'm probably making this sound more nefarious than it really is. The ISP has begun redirecting what it terms "web address errors" to a "helpful search page" -- chiefly, a set of Yahoo-powered sponsored search links.

In other words, you mistype a URL, and instead of getting an error, you get a list of paid search links, courtesy of your ISP.

From the company's FAQ on the practice:

    Why should I use Road Runner's name redirect service?

    Road Runner's redirect service makes finding website easier and more convenient. The service uses the entered non-existing website name to determine useful search results. Often, you will see a desired website or page that meets your needs.

Some users, I know, are up in arms over what they see as cybersquatting -- taking advantage of typos to make a buck. (Some also have, rightly, pointed out the irony that large companies like Time Warner routinely take a dim view of others buying mistyped versions of their domains names and monetizing accidentally misdirected traffic.)

Still others have pointed out the lax security and verification measures Time Warner has taken with its service.

I'm not getting into the ethical nor security implications of Time Warner inserting its own results page in lieu of a 404. Instead, I want to talk about the usability gaffe they've made here.

It might be a different matter altogether if the this "helpful search page" didn't actually override functionality that some users have actually built into their workflow.

For instance, my girlfriend was looking online for airfares the other evening, and decided to visit Orbitz. She -- like I can only assume plenty of others do routinely -- typed in "Orbitz" into her browser's location bar, omitting the rest of the URL as a timesaving measure.

Instead of Safari attempting to parse this into "http://www.orbitz.com" -- as many modern browsers are capable of doing -- it did something unexpected, sending her instead to Time Warner Cable's paid results page.

(Guess what the top result was? You're right -- Orbitz.) So, Time Warner actually added another step in getting to her destination, and undermined a user's accustomed Web-surfing behavior.

To Time Warner's credit, the ISP does allow users to opt-out of the service, and provides a useful "Why am I here?" link on its search results, to explain the change to confused users.

Posted by Christopher Saunders at 11:16 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

February 6, 2008, 1:33 PM

Mobile Content in Post-Carrier Era

I suppose I'm not done ranting about mobile content and the Nokia news. I've deliberately not mentioned the obvious: Nokia is not a carrier.

With Ovi, Nokia is competing with the likes of Google, Apple and Microsoft -- technology players making inroads into an arena long dominated by carriers, with their mobile portals. (I use "dominated" loosely here -- the space is still nascent and subject to dramatic change.)

The burgeoning success of these tech companies shows that we may be approaching some sort of post-carrier period, where content and services are delivered primarily through handset makers (like Nokia) and traditionally Web-based content players (Google, for instance, which has gone to great efforts to make its content accessible to a wide variety of mobile users.)

Nokia, I should also mention, may yet get creamed in the U.S. by the usual gang of Internet giants. Even if this is the case, it's Google, Apple, Microsoft and the like that will still lead mobile content; not carriers.

So where are carriers in all this? They're still (as ever) obsessively focused on subscriber churn, but they've also yet to connect all the dots in earnest: Compelling mobile content can serve as a major driver for subscribers while driving additional revenue through ads and fees. That should be all the more critical in today's era of (largely) commoditized wireless service.

Perhaps carriers have some grandiose plan for the coveted 700MHz FCC spectrum that involves rolling out rich mobile content and services. But somehow, I doubt it -- considering that they've done so little with the spectrum that they already have.

Posted by Christopher Saunders at 1:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0) | Share

February 6, 2008, 12:24 PM

Nokia, Mobile Content and the End of Civilization as U.S. Carriers Know It

Nokia. We here typically think of the Finnish mobile phone giant as just that -- a handset maker.

But it's aiming to be far more. The company began rolling out its "N-Gage" and "Share on Ovi" offerings earlier this week, as Reuters noted. Both are designed to enhance its mobile portal and e-commerce service, Ovi.

N-Gage, of course, is the company's gaming platform, which debuted in connection with Nokia's ill-fated handheld game devices. It's since been retooled to support the company's mobile phones. The service makes its debut after some product testing difficulties that delayed its introduction several months.

Share on Ovi, meanwhile, is a file-sharing and social networking component for Ovi.

Together, the two additions signal Nokia's continued commitment to mobile content and commerce through Ovi, which is ostensibly designed to compete with MySpace, Facebook, and a host of their rivals.

With the new additions, it's poised to become even more of a challenge to mobile content offerings out there. As a result, the continued effort behind Ovi also serves to throw Nokia's rivals into sharp relief, highlighting the generally sorry state of mobile content.

Here in the U.S., carriers have dominated mobile content -- what little there is. To date, consumer content available through our mobile phones has been chiefly confined to news feeds and lukewarm efforts at selling downloadable games, music and video. (Though, location-based services may see some traction shortly, some believe. Nokia's poised for big things here, as well.)

The mobile portals offered by U.S. carriers, in comparison to their Asian and European counterparts, come across as decidedly lackluster. There's no compelling reason for the average consumer to spend time there -- despite the proven interest consumers have in mobile gaming and portable music (as if it needs to be said, think the Sony PSP, Nintendo DS and the Apple iPod/iPhone). Not surprisingly, uptake has been generally light.

We've long lacked the mobile services available to subscribers in other countries, which makes Nokia's plans seem still more exotic.

Mobile content is the carriers' market to lose, and they're doing a good job of just that. I've watched Verizon Wireless, for instance, fail to deliver a truly innovative killer app in the mobile content space, much less content that can even approach what we see on the PC-based Web -- despite countless alliances with vendors like Microsoft's MSN.

Is it any wonder that companies like Nokia and Google feel they can move