Moonwatcher

OS X 10.5.3 Google Contact Sync is for iPhone Users Only. Um, What?

Today after Google announced that Mac OS X 10.5.3 supports syncing Address Book with Google Contact for iPhone users, I asked this question:

Is this functionality only available to iPhone users? What if I just have a Mac and want to sync my Mac Address Book with Google Contacts?

There's been no response yet from Google, but the community hasn't reacted well:

If this is an iPhone-only feature I think that's ridiculous.

I was so happy when I read the title of this announcement! ...and so disappointed when I saw it was for iPhone users only :( But why? Yahoo mail users can do this for a while without having an iPhone!

I am not happy at all. Unless you have an iPhone or iPod touch, the Google Sync setting does not appear. That ticks me off. What the heck is so different between syncing with Yahoo and syncing with Google?

I agree completely. It stinks of a marketing/sales maneuver to sell more iPhones.

Yes. Why on earth is this limited to iPhone users? Just to infuriate everyone else? Or to protect sales of Apple's lousy .Mac service by offsetting them with iPod purchases?

A post on Lifehacker (immediately followed by instructions for a hack that enables contact sync without an iPhone) puts it in perspective:

Several commenters rightly point out that this capability only exists for iPhone and iPod touch owners by default, which is quite possibly a crappier move than forcing Safari onto Windows users on Apple's part.

A commenter to the Lifehacker post suggests a new headline:

Gina, perhaps revise the headline to read "Mac OS X's Address Book Can Now Sync Google's Contacts in Exchange for a Small $800 Additional Purchase (plus 2-year AT&T Plan)"

Surely this is just a goof-up of some kind. If not, it will be interesting to see how Google and Apple handle it.

As a reminder, Spanning Sync v2.0 (currently in beta) syncs Address Book with Google contacts, and doesn't require an iPhone or even Leopard, and is free to paid subscribers.

Update: A day and a half later, no one from Google has answered the original question. It's becoming clear though that yes, you either need an iPhone or iPod Touch or you need to perform the hack described on the Lifehacker comments to use the Google Contact Sync function in Address Book 4.1.1. I guess it doesn't come with customer service. Bummer.

Why SAP Can't Afford to Fail, and Google Can't Afford Not To

When I was at SAPPHIRE a few weeks ago, I got to have a really great conversation with Jeff Stiles and Rainer Zinow, and it got me thinking about why SAP can't afford to fail.

Jeff is the (take a breath, SAP titles are like German sentences, of which Mark Twin famously quipped, "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth") the Senior Vice President of Global Small and Medium Enterprise Solution Marketing. I need a drink. Anyway, Jeff is one of the smartest marketing guys I've met, and he specializes in Business ByDesign.

Rainer (whose title, extensive though I'm sure it is, I didn't write down) has been working on various aspects of ByDesign since 2003. He was the more technical half of the duo, which was awesome because he was able to answer questions about details like whether you can apply transformations to environment variables before using them to compose URLs for simple Google Mapsish mashups (you can), and how referential integrity is maintained when low-level objects are exposed via services (a whole set of higher-level services was built).

I could have spent my entire three days speaking with just those two guys and wouldn't have run out of things to talk about. Unfortunately we only got an hour or so together, but in that time I learned a great deal. The most important thing I heard though wasn't about ByDesign itself, or anything related to any specific product. It was something Rainer (I think) said (and I'm paraphrasing here): We're SAP. People expect it to be correct.

Contrast this with Google. Six weeks ago when they launched Google App Engine, they came right out and said, "A couple of the restrictions mean we’re not suitable for the business market," but that it would evolve fast. Similarly, when they launched Google Calendar Sync for Microsoft Outlook, hundreds of users immediately reported problems ranging from destroyed calendars to repeated crashes to privacy violations. The response? "It's not feasible for us to respond to individual problems."

In fact, Google is famous for its products being in perpetual beta. It's almost as if their attitude is We're Google. People don't expect it to be correct.

to be continued...

It may be the 'new normal', but it sure is a pain

I've said before that "downtime happens", "outages are a fact of networked life", and "we should all have a Plan B". I think it's clear that having sporadic problems with hosted apps is The New Normal.

But it's hard to be sanguine when PayPal stops telling me about purchases my customers have made and email sent to my Google Apps accounts starts bouncing. Both of these things happened last week.

In addition to the widely-reported problems with international subscriptions, PayPal has been having a hard time keeping its traditional Instant Payment Notification system working reliably. In the past, IPN outages were simply delays, and notifications of payments would eventually be sent. Starting two weeks ago, IPN's have simply been dropped, meaning that PayPal never sent any automated notifications (either via API calls or email) of some payments.

We were able to manually update affected customers' accounts to reflect their payments, but not without doing a lot of manual searching through our records on the (insanely slow) PayPal site. The whole process was time-consuming and frustrating and frankly made us look bad. Google Checkout is looking more attractive every day. But Google's not immune to outages either.

Last week, following reports that a vulnerability had been discovered in Gmail allowing hackers to use it as an open spam relay, emails to our Google Apps account started bouncing. The problem was soon fixed, or so I thought, but then recurred daily for several days after the end of the business day in the US. Hey Google, my business runs 24/7. There is no "good time" to screw around with my email service.

Around the same time, a new option appeared in our Google Apps admin console:

I suspect the email outages are related to Google's fix for the routing problem. I'm glad they're working to address the open relay issue, but bouncing emails sent to my domain isn't acceptable.

So two of my mission-critical services—PayPal and Google Apps Email—both went flakey in the same week. Bummer. I think it's time to take my own advice and have a Plan B.

Update: Five hours after I posted this, PayPal reported yet another problem with IPN's. This is getting ridiculous.

Attending WWDC, Just Not the Conference Part

Every time I go to a conference I regret it. They're expensive in both time and money, and the best part is always the parties anyway. So I've decided to head out to San Francisco for Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, but save the $1,295 registration fee, skip the conference proper, get some actual work done during the days, and just hit the parties, meetups, and other peripheral events.

Monday night I'm meeting a friend for dinner. Tuesday I'm planning on going to the Ars Technica/Gizmodo party. What's going on Wednesday night? Any suggestions?

Update: My dinner plans for Monday fell through so I'll be able to make it to Buzz Andersen's 5th Annual WWDC Party, where I hope to bankrupt my former employer (and party sponsor) NewsGator with my bar tab. ;-)

Total Borrowings of Depository Institutions from the Federal Reserve

Wow. Here's the page (from the St. Louis Fed) with a full-sized graphic, and the original data.

Found by my friend Dylan Tynan.

In Mobile, It's Shaping Up to be Rainbows vs. Pinstripes

MacWorld reports that Google is developing native iPhone applications. Google's Vic Gundotra calls iPhone "the pre-eminent phone in the world" and Mobile Safari "a better mobile browser than anyone had ever delivered before". Android notwithstanding, BusinessWeek's two Most Innovative Companies are clearly aligned with each other in mobile, at least for the moment.

But other tech giants are lining up on the other side of the ball. BlackBerry-maker RIM recently announced its plans to develop native applications for SAP, IBM, and Microsoft.

On the surface, this looks like a simple partitioning into consumer and business segments. But RIM is touting the music-playing, photo-viewing, movie-watching, Face-booking abilities of its otherwise buttoned-down handsets in TV spots like this one:

While at the same time Google's enterprise group has signed up 10 million active users for Google Apps and Apple is set to launch iPhone 2.0 with a laundry list of enterprise-friendly features. Here's the announcement (with the relevant part starting at around 2:30):

Things getting a lot more interesting in the mobile world. Should be fun to watch.

Why Doesn't Apple Face The Innovator's Dilemma?

Clayton Christensen's seminal work The Innovator's Dilemma¹ describes how incumbent vendors typically compete by continually adding performance (typically in the form of new features) eventually overshooting the requirements of their target market and providing an opportunity for upstart competitors to provide a lower-cost "good enough" solution.

But John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes:

No one’s going to beat Apple by being "good enough". The only way to beat the iPhone is by creating something better.

Intuitively I agree with John that Apple doesn't face this problem with the iPhone. But why don't they? I think the answer lies in the reason people buy Apple products in the first place.

Apple doesn't sell products based on laundry lists of features. In fact, their products often lack features considered standard by competitors. For instance, the iPhone has a substandard 2 megapixel camera with no flash, no video recording capabilities, no voice dial, etc. Many of the features of the iPhone are in fact only "good enough".

Instead, Apple differentiates itself on design. Their products feel right. And to their customers, "good enough" design will never be compelling, regardless of how high Apple sets the bar.

By choosing to compete on design instead of technology alone, Apple seems to have found a loophole in the Innovator's Dilemma.

Update: Thanks for the many excellent comments to this post.

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¹ If you haven't used Google Book Search, click the link to be freaked out.

TimeTube: Awesome YouTube/Timeline Mashup

TimeTube, from the increasingly badass guys at Dipity.

Two Quick SAPPHIRE Endnotes: ByDesign and Ecosystems

Tuesday I got to meet with SAP Business ByDesign chief Peter Zenke and ecosystem czar Zia Yusuf. And while I don't have time today to compose the full blog post that each meeting merits, I do want to describe my impressions in broad strokes.

Mr. Zenke was quick to address reports (including mine) that ByDesign has been delayed. As our meeting began he said, "The product is out. The product is not delayed. We are [only] rolling back the accelerated deployment." So it's the big marketing push and worldwide rollout that has been delayed, not the product itself.

Zenke went on to discuss the rationale behind the no-longer-accelerated launch, saying that SAP wants to bring more automation to the in-flight product upgrade process, which should eventually only require a few hours of downtime for the customer and one or two days of work behind the scenes by SAP. He said, "There were some surprises. We thought it was a little easier."

He reiterated Léo Apotheker's comment on Monday that, "What you can never fix is the wrong impression on day one," and said clearly that, "There is no pressure on SAP. We want to do what's right. We want happy customers."

It's fascinating to watch such a mature company with such deep competence in so many areas enter a space that is totally new for them, in this case SaaS. Some companies might gloss over the complexities and subtleties of the new space, and ignore the gaps in their competence. SAP seems to be carefully identifying the gaps, learning from them, and proceeding only once they're filled, even if it means scaling back global launch plans.

The delay, er, rolled back acceleration, makes for juicy headlines. But the resulting increased product quality should make for happy customers. It's pretty clear which is more important to SAP.

I also got to sit down with Zia Yusuf, who runs SAP's far-reaching ecosystem efforts. We didn't get to dive as deeply as I would have liked into the nuts and bolts of how SAP manages its relationships with its ecosystem partners, but I did get a glimpse into SAP's sophisticated portfolio management process and how it helps address the platform problem.

SAP looks to partners for "innovation at the edge", and goes so far as to publish a product roadmap on SDN and explicitly call out the "white space" opportunities around its platform—areas where SAP has no plans to develop competing solutions that are therefore ideal for partners. Zia also briefly described the governance structure within SAP that addresses potential partner conflicts on a weekly basis.

The wild and wooly "Web 2.0" world could learn some things from buttoned-down SAP. I specifically asked Zia if he would be willing to give a talk about managing ecosystems (he's in Palo Alto), and he said he'd be happy to. Google, Facebook, are you listening?

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SAP's iPhone Amnesia

This morning RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie took the stage at SAPPHIRE to expand on last week's announcement that his company is partnering with SAP to natively integrate SAP applications with BlackBerry devices. When asked whether SAP would also integrate with Treos and iPhones, Henning Kagermann said that the RIM deal wasn't exclusive, but that he didn't have any plans to integrate with BlackBerry competitors.

Which is indeed strange, given SAP's announcement of an iPhone version of its software six months ago:

SAP is breaking with precedent by introducing versions of the new software that are compatible with the iPhone ahead of programs for mobile devices businesses traditionally use, such as Research in Motion's Blackberry, Palm's Treo and devices that run on software from Microsoft Corp.

"The iPhone has become such a popular thing," said Bob Stutz, a SAP senior vice president who is responsible for developing customer relationship management software. "Everybody wants the ease of use of the iPhone."

The first generation of the iPhone software will load business contacts, information on sales prospects and account data onto the device, Stutz said.

Stutz said SAP decided to introduce the iPhone software ahead of programs for other devices at the request of its sales people, saying they prefer using iPhones to the other devices.

Mr. Stutz, who runs CRM and industry verticals for SAP, just walked past me in the press room. His iPhone was ringing. Once he gets off the phone, I'll ask him to clarify.

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