If you’ve ever wondered why healthcare institutions can’t easily share data between computer systems, just take a look at Calendaring in iOS, OS X, Outlook 2010 and Google Android/Chrome.

Google went down the road of calendar overlays. You can have as many calendars as you like and you can share them across a Google Apps domain or between Google users. Public calendars are available for subscription. My current Google Calendar calendar list holds twenty distinct calendars of which 8 belong to my family. (One for each family member, one for entire family, a couple of parent-only calendars that the kids don’t see.) In Google’s world, which is consistent across Chrome and Android, shared calendars can be read-only or read-write. Google supports invitations by messaging.

I love how Google does this, but I’m a geek.

I’ve not used any modern versions of Outlook, but Outlook 2010 also supported Calendar subscription. They didn’t do overlays though, every Calendar stood alone. I never found this very useful.

Apple did things differently. Not only differently from everyone else, but also differently between iOS, OS X, and iCloud.  OS X supports calendar overlays and subscriptions, but the support of Google Calendar subscriptions is  weird (there are two ways to view them and both are poorly documented). iOS has a very obscure calendar subscription feature that I suspect nobody has ever used, but it does support “family sharing” for up to 6 people/calendars (also barely documented). There’s an even more obscure way to see multiple overlay Google calendars on iOS, but really you should just buy Calendars 5.app.

iCloud’s web calendar view doesn’t have any UI support for Calendar sharing, I’ve not tested what it actually does. Apple is proof that a dysfunctional corporation can be insanely profitable.

All three corporations (four if you treat Apple as a split personality) more-or-less implement the (inevitably) quirky CalDAV standard and can share invitations. Of course Microsoft’s definition of “all-day” doesn’t match Apple or Google’s definition, and each implements unique calendar “fields” (attributes) that can’t be shared.

Google comes out of this looking pretty good — until you try to find documentation for your Android phone and its apps. Some kind of reference, like Google’s Android and Nexus user guides. As of Dec 2015 that link eventually leads to a lonely PDF published almost five years ago. That’s about it.

I don’t think modern IT’s productivity failure is a great mystery. 

I used Pacifist to install Airport Utility 5.6 when I upgraded to Mountain Lion. So I didn't really notice how many features Apple removed with the Mountain Lion/Airport Utility 6 upgrade. 

Recently though, I wearied of having to restart my (only) 3 yo Time Capsule every 4-6 days to reenable Time Machine backups. I ordered a new TC from Amazon to do a hardware swap test (30 day return) and, for no good reason, I tried using Airport Utility 6.2 to configure things.

It was an abysmal failure. To start with, it failed with a meaningless error message when it tried to join my existing network. For another I couldn't archive my Time Capsule backup -- and I couldn't disconnect guests and backups prior to power down. A Jan 2012 CNET article has the long list of lost features -- not to mention support for older devices.

In retrospect, Airport Utility 6 was a big initial step in a trek that included the iOS podcast.app and iTunes regressions (though some functionality was restored to iTunes). January 2012 was the start of what has been a long and disappointing 15 months for customers like me.

WWDC 2013 will tell us if Apple is going to change direction.

I hope the rumored Microsoft shakeup is a very big one. I have a bad feeling I'm going to need them.

Over the two years Google has knifed a number of open net protocols, including CalDAV, RSS, XMPP, Atom and CardDAV and they split Chrome from WebKit.  They effectively abandoned their wiki and web authoring platform. Most recently they killed Google Reader; the competition-crushing champion for standards-based change notification and information consumption. Feedburner is next, and Blogger will likely be subsumed into Google+ (and perhaps lose its RSS feeds).

It's almost as if Google wants to end the document-centric open web as we have known it.

But why would they do that? Doesn't Google make must of its money from searching that web?

Well, yes, they do. But, as many have noted, most recently Jason Smith, Google's search monopoly is shakier than it seems. Apple has been bowed by dual attacks from Google and Samsung, but they are likely to strike back over the next year -- probably allied with Microsoft and perhaps Yahoo (but not Amazon). Apple will use its massive cash reserves to survive dropping Samsung manufacturing, and Apple will switch its default search engine to Bing.

Google knows this. 

Thousands of years of human warfare told Google how to respond. If an army cannot hold rich agricultural ground, it must burn it. Let the enemy eat ashes.

The web is a forest, and Google is burning it.

I grew up in a bipolar world.

Yes, the USSR vs. USA, but also the bipolar world of Microsoft and Apple. One was ruthless and ruled by corporate power, the other was a stylish tyranny.

Times changed. The USSR fell apart leaving a Russian mafia state ruled by a mobster, and the USA fell into a spiral of fear, wealth concentration, political corruption, and institutional failure. China grew wealthy, but turned into a fascist state run by oligarchs and mobsters. The EU has Greece and Italy and the second Great Depression. India, Brazil, everyone has problems, nobody is a secure Power. Now we live in a multipolar world.

Weirdly, the same thing has happened to the world of computing (now including phones). Microsoft's slow collapse is this week's Vanity Fair special. Google joined the Sith and all it got was dorkware, a human-free social network, and a profit-free phone. Post-IPO Facebook is rich and frail looking. Dell, HP, Motorola, RIM and Nokia are history.

Ahh, but what about Apple? Isn't Apple going from power to power -- even in the old Mac/Windows wars?

That's how it looks - to the press. Today. But I'm just coming off an epic 1 week fiasco involving OS X Lion and iCloud. It ended with me deciding to keep my primary machine on Snow Leopard and reverting my iPhone to iTunes sync after years of MobileMe sync. I'll try again when Mountain Lion is out.

Yes, few people will run into the problems I have had (arising at least in part from an obscure geeky bug with OS X/Unix vs Windows "line termination"). Many people, however, will run into some problems. My experience shows that many months after Apple's grandiose iCloud launch and insane MobileMe/iCloud migration, they still don't have troubleshooting tools and procedures or, amazingly, any way to delete your iCloud.com data. It's as though they thought they'd get everything right the first time -- perhaps because everyone associated with MobileMe was purged.

That's a hell of a miss for a corporation with billions in the bank and a fifteen year history of bungling online services.

Then there's the Apple ID/FairPlay/iCloud problems. My friends are struggling with these. Other friends can't figure out how to manage Ringtones on iTunes.

Perhaps most worrisome of all, Apple is providing mega-compensation packages to its corporate executives because, apparently, they must be retained. An unavoidable step with inevitable consequences. Bad consequences.

Apple doesn't look strong to me. It looks vulnerable.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook. None of them are serving me well. None of them are looking all that strong.

All the Empires are falling. My personal balancing act is becoming more complex all the time.

Via Daring Fireball Linked List ...

Google Atmosphere or “Admosphere”? - Why Microsoft

.. More importantly, with advertising revenue (and therefore mining customer data) remaining central to Google’s business model, and leadership that until recently took pride in declaring comfort with getting “right up to the creepy line” around privacy. Every CIO needs to ask if that value system is consistent with your privacy needs.  Are you comfortable with every click in your business, every document, and every communication being in Google’s hands?  Are your customers and business partners?...

... Organizations need to plan for the future without having to question a cloud provider's long term commitment to their business.  Despite the need for customers to understand their roadmap, Google and others often surprise their customers by unexpectedly removing important features - or adding new ones - which increases both headaches and cost. These unexpected changes often lead to more work....

I don't trust Google 2.0. Microsoft has a fat target now.

Top end of the scale is 15. It's a linear scale.

My personal scale rates large for-profit corporations. CARE International is provided as a baseline measure and Philip Morris shall forever define the upper limits of corporate evil.

1. Philip Morris: 15
2. Exxon: 13
3. Goldman Sachs: 12
4. United Healthcare: 11
5. AT&T and Verizon (tied): 11
6. Facebook: 10
7. Google: 8
8. Average publicly traded company: 8
9. Microsoft: 7
10. Apple: 5
11. CARE International: 1 (They're not a PTC, so this is merely a non-evil reference point)What's your ranking?

There's been a lot of action since the 2009 1st edition. Google was once tied with Apple, but the manner and actions of the Reader affair moved them, for the first time, above Microsoft. They're heading into Facebook territory, even as Facebook itself is improving. AT&T and Verizon are slowly rising up the scale , breaking into the top five for the first time.

Conversely Microsoft has been relatively angelic over the past two years. They are incompetent, yes, but this is a scale of corporate evilness. Similarly Netflix is not so much evil as incompetent.

Apple, for all its sins, has stayed relatively low on the chart. They take our money, they mostly give us what we expect. They did nuke several customer services, but with a 1 year warning (vs. Google's 1 week warning before eliminating my shared reader items).

Some past editions for comparison:

• Gordon's Notes: Gordon's scale of corporate evil - 2nd edition(12/2010)
• Gordon's Notes: Gordon's scale of corporate evil - 1st edition (12/2009)

The Google-Apple war officially ended in September. I've not seen any convincing explanation of why the war ended; my best guess is that both companies realized that Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are the greater enemy. The three big carriers want to bring the cable TV business model to the net through the IP Multimedia Subsystem ... (emphases mine)

Mobile Carriers Dream of Charging per Page | Epicenter | Wired.com:

... The companies, Allot Communications and Openet — suppliers to large wireless companies including AT&T and Verizon — showed off a new product in a web seminar Tuesday, which included a PowerPoint presentation (1.5-MB .pdf) that was sent to Wired by a trusted source.

The idea? Make it possible for your wireless provider to monitor everything you do online and charge you extra for using Facebook, Skype or Netflix. For instance, in the seventh slide of the above PowerPoint, a Vodafone user would be charged two cents per MB for using Facebook, three euros a month to use Skype and $0.50 monthly for a speed-limited version of YouTube. But traffic to Vodafone’s services would be free, allowing the mobile carrier to create video services that could undercut NetFlix on price....

... “It certainly is exactly the thing we have been warning the companies will do if they have the opportunity and explains why AT&T and Verizon are so insistent that the wireless rules be solely about blocking and not anything else,” said Public Knowledge legal director Harold Feld....

... The ideas don’t look too different from the way cable companies price their video offerings, with different packages of programming at different levels.

... “I have been saying that this is where they want to go for a while,” van Schewick wrote to Wired. “The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), a technology that is being deployed in many wireline and wireless networks throughout the country, explicitly envisages this sort of pricing as one of the pricing schemes supported by IMS.”...

... And as van Schewick points out, this model is already showing up in European mobile networks, where some networks charge users an extra fee to use internet telephony or to use an e-mail client on their phone....

... For instance, Comcast runs an online video service called FanCast that competes with NetFlix and YouTube, and is trying to buy NBC, which owns more than 30 percent of Hulu.com. And every cable and satellite company offers pay-movie services for an extra monthly fee and a la carte video on demand that compete with third-party streaming video services, like Blockbuster and Amazon....

I love the Orwellian twist of calling a cable-company business model venture "Openet".

Google and Apple will never be best buds again, but the vision of a net run like cable TV has concentrated their minds. At the moment then, though betrayals are certain, we have Google, Apple, Netflix, Amazon and even Facebook on one side. On the other side we have Verizon, AT&T and Comcast. Microsoft, the wounded Titan, lurks in the background, perhaps contemplating an acquisition.

As a consumer and citizen, there's no doubt which side I support. On a scale of corporate evil, AT&T & Verizon are far above Google and Apple (Facebook is another matter). Politically Google and Apple are pretty much on the Dem side, and Verizon, AT&T and Comcast are very much GOP.

Should be interesting, and scary.

We are way past the tipping point if the no contract $149 Android phone is real [1]. The replacement for the $150 ChromeOS Netbook has come before the netbook, and Google’s $80 ultra-portable (with a cell phone too!) is a year ahead of schedule – though Microsoft’s lawsuits will slow things down.

After the lawsuits settle down the contract free low end iPhone will go for $250 in 2012 and Android will hit a billion users by 2013 (including China’s forked Android phone). By then RIM, Windows Mobile and so on will be history. Nokia and Motorola will make Android phones. Microsoft will be an IP parasite, a shadow of its former self.

So what about Dell?

Here’s where it gets funny. I’m used to thinking Dell will go away. After all, even today’s phones can have external monitors and keyboards. Who needs a Dell after 2012?

Well, verticals will. Software development. Servers.

Thing is, vertical gear doesn’t sell for $800 a pop. Remember what Sun workstations cost when Sun was profitable? Desktop prices are going to start going up, and up. By 2013 I expect Dell will sell far fewer machines – but they’ll be much more expensive. One day we will see the $4000 desktop, even as much of Africa carries a supercompter in their pocket.

[1] But what will it cost after the patent suits?

Jean-Louis Gassée blogs on Monday Note. He’s been doing it since Feb 4, 2008.

Gassée has done many things, but he’s best known for having been Apple’s CEO for a time. These days he’s a VC “general partner”. It’s safe to assume he’s rich beyond my paltry dreams of avarice. Why does he bother writing a not-terribly-famous blog? I don’t think it’s for the adword revenue.

My best guess is that he’s helping out the blog’s co-author, and that he writes for love. Alas for those who write to live, his free stuff is better than the best of the WSJ. Such is the curse of early 21st century journalism.

Today he takes on the Google-Microsoft cloud apps war. It’s fantastic stuff (emphases mine) …

Cloud 2.0 - Monday Note

… Last year, Microsoft’s total sales were $58B, down 3% from 2008 … Note the Operating Profit, 35%. The company spends 15% of its revenue in R&D and 28% in Sales, Marketing and General Administration….

… Compare this to Apple’s 29.5% Operating Profit, 3% R&D, and 9% SG&A [selling, general and administrative expense] with a comparable revenue level, in the $50B to $60B range annually…

… Microsoft’s Net Income is 25% of revenue, Apple’s is 22%….

… Microsoft Office represented 90% of the $19B Business Division sales, with a nice 64% Operating Profit … Roughly 60% of all Microsoft’s profits come from Office and a little more than 53% from Windows OS licenses (or what MS calls its “Client” business):

So… Office + Windows, 60% + 50% = 110% of Microsoft’s Operating Profit? The math is complicated by the losses in something called “Corporate-Level Activity”… …and, more importantly, by the hefty 73% operating loss in the company’s Online Services Business:

If I’m interpreting Gassée’s writing correctly, Apple’s numbers are only comparable to Microsoft’s because Microsoft “wastes” a huge percentage of revenue. Microsoft’s R&D percent spend is 5 times Apple’s and Microsoft spends 3 times as much on selling, general and administrative expense – not to mention “corporate-level activity”. If Microsoft were as stingy as Apple, their profits would be mind-blowing. Microsoft Office is a money-factory.

I’m reminded of an old Cringely column, in which he opined that Microsoft could have any profit number it wanted to have.

Gassée continues from numbers to user experience, saying the same things I’ve whined about but that, honestly, I never see mentioned anywhere else

.. Google Apps aren’t Office killers. I’ve been using Gmail in both the free and paid-for accounts. The basic email functions work well, but managing contacts is awful. (Months ago, I heard Google had an internal project called Contacts Don’t Suck. I’m still waiting.)…

… I’ve tried to use Google Docs to write, share, and edit these Monday Notes. Failure. Compared to any word processor, Google Docs feels clunky and constrained, and hyperlinks die when you download the document…

… Google Apps aren’t “there” yet. They’re still clunky, to say nothing of managing the “stuff behind the desk”. They’ve been quickly upgraded–perhaps too quickly– at the expense of the user experience. If managing Google Apps is as complicated as running an Office DVD install program, an important part of the Google theory falls apart. We see the trumpeted announcements of large organizations and governments that have turned to Google Apps, but what we don’t see is a courageous journalist going back to the proud early adopters a year later to tell us what actually transpired.

So why is it that only cranks like me and outliers like Gassée ever point out where Google fails? It’s a bit hallucinatory. Gmail’s contacts function has been terrible for years (starting with the weirdly isolated link to “contacts” in Gmail). Google Docs are still very weak (though about to move up a notch), and things are worse when you look at the channel confusion around Blogger, Google Doc, Buzz and Google Sites.

Really, I do love a lot about Google, but they have to give up on the idea that good design is emergent.

Go and read his Cloud 2.0 post and the “related columns” he references at the end. Don’t forget to marvel at the strange age we live in, where some of the best journalism is done for love*.

* P.S. As a bone to the pros, Gassée drops a broad hint on how they could write something interesting – go to the early adopters of Google Apps and tell us what happened.

2/28/10 10:32:19 AM [0x0-0x294294].com.microsoft.Excel[6407] Sun Feb 28 10:32:19 Stanford-MacBook-2.local Microsoft Excel[6407]

1. Philip Morris: 15
2. Exxon: 13 (see link to #1)
3. Goldman Sachs: 12
4. Facebook: 12
5. For profit health insurance companies: 11
6. AT&T and Verizon (tied): 10
   
7. Microsoft: 10
   
8. Average publicly traded company: 8
9. Google: 6 (revised up after the Google Buzz fiasco, then down when they showed some wisdom)
10. Apple: 5
11. CARE International: 1 (They're not a PTC, so this is merely a non-evil reference point)

Apple's problem is that Steve Jobs decides what we need. Microsoft's problem is that it should have been split into several competing companies ten years ago. Google's problem is that they combine Attention Deficit Disorder with a mystical belief in the power of the metamind.

The best we poor geeks can do is mix and match and try to keep our data liberated.

With Apple bitching on Discussion Groups can sometimes help -- the secret is to get a long thread going.

With Google you can look for one of their periodic attempts to survey their customer base, such as this suggest a feature for Google Apps poll. Give it a try! Note, however, you can't vote to "Burn Google Sites to the Ground and Start Over".

And Microsoft? Despair is recommended.

Update: Some related posts

• I, Cringely - The People’s Republic of Google
• Blodget on GmailLand: The Threading model alone condemns Google
• Stross on Microsoft and Apple

How can it be that the vast majority of my fellow bloviators are ignoring what Google is saying here …

Google CEO Schmidt Thought Building OS Was A Lousy Idea (GOOG, AAPL, MSFT)

Schmidt now believes Google can withstand whatever counter punches Microsoft might throw as the company sets out to make computers cheaper to buy and more enjoyable to use with an operating system tied to Google's 9-month-old browser, Chrome.

Let me put this more clearly.

Cheaper.

Cheaper.

Cheaper.

Netbooks edged down the $350 range last year (Linux), but have now moved up-market to about $500 (XP for free).

Google wants them to be … cheaper. Cheaper to buy, cheaper to own.

I think they’re aiming for under $150 without a battery and without a wireless contract, and free with a Kindle-like Sprint/4G network plan.

I think the long delay from announcement is all about regs for the Sprint/4G plan and I wouldn’t rule out Google buying Sprint to enable that for the US market.

The Google Netbook will be very cheap, it will be Google certified if not Google branded, and it will be cheap but reasonably reliable.

It will be extremely disruptive.

Oh … and “enjoyable to use”? He means vastly fewer hassles.

Really, it’s not that complicated.

Sure is disruptive though.

I do like Google.