When I was a kid, my mother and father handed me an Atari computer. When I opened the box, plugged it into the TV, and fired it up, well.. it didn’t do anything.  As I quickly realized, I had to make it do something.  The first thing I set out to do with this awful-to-use beast (yes, it had a membrane keyboard — horrifying) was compose music.  As I was a musician, treble clef was the first programming language I had ever learned, and so transposing music onto the computer was the perfect way to learn Atari BASIC.  Of course, it wasn’t long before I exhausted the capabilities of the Atari and moved on to a Vic 20, then to a Commodore 64C.

It was with the C64 that my understanding and exploration of technology bloomed in two directions: first, in messing around with video games; second, in messing around with this crazy modem thing that I purchased one day at Woolco.  I tried and failed to author a boat racing video game (physics eluded me as a tween), but found more traction in [ahem] ripping video games made by others.  I entered the BBS world and built/modified my own systems, then messed around with ASCII graphics.  While at high school I designed a billing system and almost an entire BBS using, of all things, dBase III+ and its onboard language — a project which I would be loath to advise anyone undertaking.

Still, this progression through various computers, idle when fresh out of the box, is what led me to my present career.  The fact that the technology was a tool, and not just a medium, was for me the key to this.  The fact that I needed to do a little extra work to get things done gave me a progressively more challenging learning curve, and a fairly unrestricted freedom of movement.  In the 1980s, but particularly in the 1970s, personal computers really didn’t do anything.

And that was the point.  PCs were modelling clay.

Thanks largely to the iPad, today Apple officially became the biggest PC maker in the world.  MG Siegler revived the debate about whether the iPad is a PC or not.

I wonder what kids think when they’re handed an iPad today?  It does amazing things, if you download the right app.  You can compose music, write a blog post, even edit a video.  These are truly creative tasks.  There are nearly a million apps in the App Store today which do all kinds of things, so it’s hard to argue that the app ecosystem limits the imagination.  Still, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Today an acquaintance jogged my memory of Neil Postman‘s “Amusing Ourselves to Death” in which he argues that ”form excludes the content,” — that is, a particular medium can only sustain a particular level of ideas.  In the book he holds both Orwellian and Huxleyan world views in some balance.  For instance, Orwell feared those who would deprive and manipulate information to the masses; on the other hand Huxley feared that we would be so deluged with information that we would become passive and self-centered.

While for some people a computer that does nothing can sustain zero ideas, for others it is a gatekeeper to infinity.  These days, every computer that ships still does next to nothing, but it is connected to the internet — by far the best conduit for ideas imaginable.  And computers still ship with programming languages today — only now they have APIs, SDKs, and much more to work with… not to mention github.  There are few delimiters on what we can make a personal computer do today.

With an iPad the Operating System, the means of production of new apps, and the means of distribution of apps are all off-limits.  Whereas I learned about code and hacking assembler by trying to circumnavigate copy protection, that is not possible in today’s iPad.  You cannot get under the hood of an iPad in any way (it doesn’t even have a filesystem), therefore you are highly unlikely to ever learn about computing from it.

When I look at Apple’s latest commercial for the iPad, I see many people making great use of works created by software engineers..

The iPad product line are incredible devices for consuming information or for creativity within the walled garden.  For his part Neil Postman (were he still alive) would likely fear two things about the device and the way in which it handles media:

1. Despite all of the hype, the iPad favours consumption over creation and negatively decreases the ratio
2. The iPad, coupled with the internet to which it absolutely must be connected, buries truth and beauty with irrelevance

I believe that this argument can be extended to the device’s pedagogy in helping kids, and therefore humanity, explore the possibilities of computing.  My concern is simply this:

When all of these wonderful apps and ideas we enjoy today were spawned from a generation of pimple-faced teens unboxing a gray, largely amorphic, hunk of silicon that would do whatever they told it to do… what happens when the next generation’s first experience with computing is with a hermetically-packaged inescapable walled garden that tells them what they can use it to do?

What happens when you replace modelling clay with a Mr. Potato Head?

Why is it that every time a politician feels themselves sagging in the polls, they invoke some improbable, obviously impossible, pipe dream about the space program?  This pantomime is almost invariably played out in front of a NASA audience in Cape Canaveral, involves some completely ludicrous timeframe, and involved rockets.  Americans, apparently, love them some rocket action.

Today, Newt Gingrich announced that if elected president, he would personally ensure that there would be a permanent US base on the moon, rather ambitiously, during his second term.  Given the US military’s tendency to proliferate permanent bases around the world, why not in the heavenly bodies?  Anyway, he also proclaimed that he believed there would be a “continuous propulsion system” that would allow travel to Mars in more practical time frames.  Sounds like he plans to be busy in the back yard of the White House with his slide rule and some bottle rockets, as well.

This stupid plan has been trotted out by every President since Clinton, including Dubya and even Obama.  Every time one of these obviously lame attempts to invoke memories of the famous “We choose to go to the moon..” speech by John F. Kennedy that launched the Space Race is tarted up for the press I am amazed that Americans buy any of this bullshit.

Americans need to come to grips with the fact they are staring down the barrel of a prolonged, likely irreversible economic decline.  Let me put this in perspective:  When you’re fucked, your credit cards are maxed, and your house is about to be foreclosed on, you don’t go out and buy a Bugatti Veyron. Well, I guess you do, actually.. so you can wreck it and collect the insurance money.  That’s America.

For the rest of us on the planet watching so many Neros, fiddling while Rome burns, is incredible.  I realize now that Americans will never elect a politician who is a realist.  They will cast their votes for sycophants who allow them to continue the fantasy of prosperity while their world crumbles around them, all the while fanning the flames of crisis.  They have cultivated educational, governmental, electoral, and media systems that literally weed out any form of realist or fixer, because fixing what’s broken requires a change of behaviour on a mass scale.  And reality is something that the vast majority of Americans would rather leave up to a later, less fortunate, generation to endure.

** This post originally appeared on TechVibes.  Go read it there.

I have a spotty track record for timing on predictions, but that doesn’t stop me from making them.  Having studied the influence of technology and media on societies, and having worked in the technology business now for almost 24 years, starting at 17 as a retail computer salesman, I have seen a lot come and go.

Amazingly that has not hampered my optimism, and I see 2012 as a pivotal year for a number of really key reasons — including what I think will be the tipping point for smartphones and apps in the mainstream; the prominence of IP in all media; the growing intersection between social media, mobile communications and politics globally; and the continued resistance of media companies to the Internet and the ethos and consumer behaviours that it brings along with it.

In an effort to handicap my wild speculation , I will qualify each prediction with a classification of either: SAFE BET, FIFTY-FIFTY, BOLD, or LONGSHOT.  So, purely for your amusement, away we go:

1. SOPA Will Pass to Become a Law   (FIFTY-FIFTY)
   Media companies are key players on the US political spectrum and they have no small influence on elections.  2012 being an election year,  SOPA is particularly well-timed to expose the vulnerability of US Politicians to their constant need for cash.  Media Cos and their executives will look hard at the positions of politicians on the issue of SOPA and Copyright in general when it comes time to write campaign cheques.  Silicon Valley has thus far been milquetoast in their response to SOPA, though consumers have not.  However, in US politics these days nothing matters less than the views of the plebes electorate.
2. RIM’s Co-Whatevers Will Step Aside    (SAFE BET)
   Reality has already beaten me to it on this one, with trial balloons floating up from the RIM Boardroom that it’ll be looking for a single outsider Chairman to replace the Co-Chairmen-in-question, of whom I have not been uncritical.  From there, it’s only a matter of time until we see  the outright departure of Messrs Lizardis and Balsillie from the executive ranks completely, which I suspect will slip just under the wire toward the end of 2012.  This will all come down to how well they have stacked the board in their favour, or how much inertia is building within the dissident shareholder ranks at RIM.  My guess is: THEY HAVE; and A LOT.. in that order.
3. A Country Will Indefinitely Block The Internet     (FIFTY-FIFTY)
   I actually think that the influence of social media on the Arab Spring was overstated.  That said, authoritarian regimes are not generally ones to quibble.  Somewhere, likely a country in northern Africa, one such regime will paralyze its own economy by cutting off the internet for a period of months as it attempts to quel a well-organized Awakening.  This will in the end accelerate the demise of the dictator and that of its people, and will never be tried again.  As a bonus, email solicitations to help the cousin of whatever General wire you $25 Million for safekeeping will decline by 15% for a time.
4. Online Dating Will Go Mobile   (SAFE BET)
   I have made a very specific bet in this category in creating Tingle (which we began working on in the summer of 2009).  With the astonishing growth of smartphones, consumers want to do more and more on their mobile devices.  Web-based dating sites are rapidly becoming the dinosaurs of social networking, and even those with mobile apps are being challenged by upstarts.  To be frank the pace of this shift has been astonishing even to me, though I predicted it: in April 2011, Match announced that growth of mobile use of its service was at 135% YoY, and a total of 30% of its users were now mobile.
5. The Canadian Venture Capital Business Will Revive   (BOLD)
   Almost two years ago, tax code changes (repealing the dreaded 116) signaled that it was going to be a whole lot easier for US Venture Capital to flow north to Canada.  And, in many instances, it has.  This left the Canadian VCs out in the cold, already queasy from some shaky investments in the 1999-2005 period and unable to close new funds in the face of US competition.  Suddenly, though, things have changed.  With iNovia and OMERS both announcing significant new funds and changes afoot throughout the VC industry in Canada, not to mention a few big exits, there’s suddenly a lot happening.  Let’s see if it sticks to the wall this time.
6. Canada’s Government Will Redesign SR&ED    (SAFE BET)
   Early last year, Canada’s government floated trial balloons that it was displeased with the $3.5Bn/year SR&ED innovation tax credit program.  Then in December, it sent stronger signals.  The program, which is of significant value to Canadian tech startups, also happens to be the object of considerable abuse and an increasingly engorged industry of SR&ED service providers — two things that the government does not like.  We in the startup community will need to be diligent to ensure that the Harper government does not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
7. Microsoft Will Replace Ballmer  (BOLD)
   Things have, obviously, not been going well in Redmond.  The company is in decline and morale is at an all-time low.  And in September, Fortune quoted the notion that “Steve Ballmer has done to Microsoft what George W. Bush did to the USA“.  Ouch.  The greater obstacle here is not likely acknowledgement that things are going poorly — the challenge is who you’d get to replace Steve Ballmer.  Not too many qualified people could look at Microsoft and faithfully declare that they have a strategy to turn things around quickly.  As a result, and this is a side bet, I’m taking options on Bill Gates’ triumphant return to revive his baby.
8. Apple Will Launch Another Set-Top Flop  (FIFTY-FIFTY)
   This is not exactly Nostradamus-esque.  Reception to the two successive launches of AppleTV has been lukewarm.  The AppleTV garden is very walled-in and the grunt of their A5 processor is insufficient to render 1080p HD video.  Now, new rumours are flying that Apple will indeed launch a fully-integrated OLED Television with networking built-in.  Better offerings that leverage open-ended media sharing platforms like Plex and XBMC are presently on offer from LG and Samsung.  If it happens in 2012 this will be a flop and will, incorrectly, be blamed on Tim Cook.
9. Apple Will Go To Work   (SAFE BET)
   Apple has successfully become a dominant consumer player, successfully seeding technologies deep into households.  But Tim Cook, for his part, actually used to bleed blue as an IBM guy.  I won’t name names, but a little LinkedIN surfing will reveal a rather radical exodus from RIM’s sales and channel teams to join Apple’s Enterprise Sales team beginning in 2010.  For those folks the writing has been on the wall: the iPhone shall inherit the Blackberry market share, and now they’re in the right place to benefit.  Apple will use the iPhone and iPad, which most senior execs already have one of, as a beachhead into the Enterprise.
10. Tech IPOs Will Be The Stars of the Public Markets   (LONGSHOT)
    I stopped short of saying that they will revive the public markets, because I still believe that the fundamentals of the global economy are troubling.  However investors looking for a quick pop will support and sustain the IPOS of worthy companies including Facebook, Dropbox, and maybe even my old alma-mater RingCentral.  While other IPOs simply bubble along, favourable light will shine on the market caps of tech IPOs in particular.  The real undercurrent of this story will be the fact that a tech company IPO is no longer a particularly exceptional occurrence — good news for the rest of us.

So there you have it, sports fans.. and remember this is only an exhibition.  Please, no wagering.  And have a Happy New Year.

I have been struggling (quite publicly) to condense why Steve Jobs is so unique and important to us all into a crisp, clear thought.  It’s difficult, of course, given the breadth and depth of his influence.  When talking to a CBC reporter by phone this evening I got very close to the thought I really want to express and after some hang-wringing and a great deal of editing, here it is.

From the perspective of any modern corporation, Steve Jobs was a misfit and never should have made it to the top of the world’s largest technology company.  Compared to his peers at AT&T, RIM, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Samsung, LG, Lucent, Nokia, and even Google, one of these things is not like the others.  These people, while they are for the most part talented managers and/or innovators, are not brave and unconventional visionaries questioning — and challenging — the status quo.  The template of a contemporary CEO simply does not apply to Jobs.. yet it is safe to say that he created more shareholder value during his split tenure at the helm of Apple than all of these combined.

Jobs doesn’t fit as CEO material because, as I wrote a few years ago, the design of corporations systemically weeds out and ultimately purges people like Steve Jobs, tending to favour evolution over revolution; hedgehogs over foxes.  Insodoing these institutions prefer making incremental steps toward that which can be known and quantified versus embracing risk and opportunity to make great leaps forward.  HP or Microsoft would never have brought us the iPod.  Certainly not the iPhone.  And the efforts of Apple’s competitors in the tablet space?  Hmph.

The lesson with the greatest gravitas from Steve Jobs’ famous 2005 Commencement Address is in my opinion the following:

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

So what made Steve special is that, having ascended to the top of the technology industry ecosystem, he was seemingly a fluke.  Those dots — The iPod led to the iTunes Music Store and to a flattening of media distribution and to the iPhone and iPad and beyond — all connected back to a single leap where a computer company decided to sell some portable music devices and see what happened.  Jobs made big bets all the way along and knew that the dots would somehow connect down the road, and staked his personal and corporate reputation on quality in every regard.  No focus group or market research could have supported the decision to place these bets, and so no other CEO did.

Many of us think that we have the courage to make big bets.  Far fewer among us are given the resources and leeway to execute these broadly.  Still fewer among those are actually successful in both ideation and execution.  Steve Jobs danced on that razor’s edge and always came away unscathed, teaching us all that it can be done and that the rewards for success await.

Steve Jobs created new markets and made us crave things we didn’t know we would need; he helped us consume information and ideas in ways we never knew we could; he literally tore apart the media business and set forth reshaping it to be more consumer-friendly.  All the while he dazzled us with things which are ‘insanely great’ like a magician entertaining a crowd of transfixed six-year-olds.

The saddest aspect of Steve Jobs’ passing is simply that without him it will be a long time before a similar revolutionary will ascend the treacherous climes of corporataucracy to lead another hugely successful company to create things which dazzle and inspire us.  If ever.

Here’s hoping there’s another Steve in the wings somewhere.  Until then, we’ll likely have to make do with a whole lot less magic in our world.

Every time I watch an Apple announcement such as this morning’s, I am reminded of a series of vision videos that Apple produced with Alan Kay in the late ’80s and early ’90s.  Apple seems to be steadily and unflinchingly chipping away at every aspect of these videos, guided by this 20+ year vision to change computing, to increase the depth into which technology is integrated with our lives, and to attack the form factors and user experience conventions previously associated with computing.

In the video above you see examples of fuzzy search, a touch-screen UI, a tablet form factor, social search, a recommendation engine, and of course speech-to-text as the main user input paradigm.  It isn’t so interesting that someone as brilliant as Alan Kay had this vision in the first place, but what is amazing is the degree to which Apple has been focused on delivering this vision — a vision telegraphed by a company nearly 25 years ago that was itself less than half that age at the time.

Just as NASA engineers and designers have accredited a great deal of their vision to the work of Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick (via his visual adaptation of 2001) so Apple has slavishly pursued this vision of pervasive and hugely interactive computing with acquisitions like Siri and innovations like the iPad.  Sure, there are many reasons for Apple’s market success in this post-PC era — but I would heap disproportionate credit toward building a corporate culture that cultivates, communicates, and ultimately has pursued that vision over the course of the past 30 years.

The tough nut to crack has always been the speech recognition part.  We are perhaps 25 years into a 50 year cycle in helping computers to understand most nuances of human communication.  Humans have ways to convey context, via body language etc., that computers cannot yet pick up.  Speech is not effectively used without all of these cues and there are many ships on the rocks of this technology frontier.  As such I and most of the consumer marketplace have never taken it very seriously, and I don’t expect this to change with Apple’s emphasis on speech reco this morning.

The question is:  When we’ve checked off all of the boxes from this video what’s next?  What’s the vision for 30 years hence?

Can RIM Make a U-Turn?

Much glee and angst is being expressed over RIM’s current “transition“.  The whole situation has become so theatrical and cliched that yesterday I was compelled to tweet my observation that RIM’s current transition in the SmartPhone market is not dissimilar from the Titanic’s transition in the iceberg market.  It’s clear that, along with a litany of 1990s tech giants before it, RIM is following a cliched playbook (pardon the pun) that has not borne long-term dividends for shareholders in the vast majority of prior examples.

The company’s angst, I believe, stems fundamentally from the fact that Apple and other vendors have come to understand that increasingly mobile phones are a consumer purchase decision, and not a corporate one.  And when people can choose, they choose the products they fetishize.  And no one has captured the consumer market’s imagination like Apple, with the iPhone and iPad.  But you, dear reader, already know all of this.

I firmly believe that any turnaround involves deep pain and difficult choices, and I have not seen any sincere effort by the co-CEOs (and now co-COOs) of RIM to make these decisions and brace for the sting.  In fact, judging by their actions it’s not even clear that Messers Balsillie and Lazaridis actually agree with the prevailing notion that there actually is anything wrong with their company.  These layoffs and strategic pronouncements feel mostly like lip service.

At any rate, in the unlikely event that I were to suddenly become the CEO of RIM, a company that is about 1,300 times larger than my own modest startup, here is what I would do:

1. Split the company in two.
   RIM is really the composite of two companies — network and messaging services for carriers and consumers, and smartphones which we users decreasingly hold in our hands.  For the majority of RIM’s lifecycle these two components were strategically and inextricably bound — cool devices with unique features drove demand for the services carriers needed to obtain in order to be able to fulfill that demand, and thus sell more devices — however now that RIM’s infiltration of the carrier market is largely ubiquitous that delta into the mobile network needs to be taken in two directions.  The devices and the network services are now loosely coupled, and the need to tie them together feels more like an albatross.  In order to progress on both fronts these cannot be constrained by the need to support the other’s objectives.
2. Kill the Playbook.
   I’m really not sure why anyone would enter a race not intending to take a stab at winning it.  We have lived with the PlayBook for months now and it still doesn’t have an email client — akin to BMW selling a car without an accelerator pedal.   It is clear to all that aside from the potential for limited enterprise and government sales there is very little chance for the Playbook market to expand.  It has no raison d’etre; no killer app; no je ne sais quoi.  Apparently RIM doesn’t sais quoi either, as the Product Manager for the Playbook and the one of company’s VPs of Marketing have just quit — not a good sign.  As far as branding and marketing is concerned, the Playbook is an attention and messaging sinkhole; and it almost certainly has distracted R&D, preventing RIM from building an iPhone competitor that we could get behind.
3. Focus on 3rd-party developers.
   It would be impossible to deny that much of the demand for iOS is driven by the myriad things that one can do with an iPhone or iPad.  In fact, the iPhone is actually quite a terrible telephonic device, with a bad chipset choice and terrible RF engineering, and it’s consistently suffered supply chain problems as Apple struggles to keep up with demand.  None of these issues matters.  Most iPhone apps suck.  But they suck a lot more on Blackberries, where they exist there at all.  Developers have to run a gauntlet of a horrifically bad developer ecosystem, fragmentation (the need to have multiple versions of each app) that reminds most of us of J2ME, a distribution system which is spotty, and even an enterprise policy shield which allows IT managers to lock down phones and prevent apps from being installed.  If I see an iPhone in someone’s hand I know I can get the ONE version of our app onto it.  If I see a Blackberry in someone’s hand the odds of that user being able to get and run our app may be as low as 3 in 10.
4. Understand that BlackBerry Messenger, and messaging, is the company’s strategic future and open it up to other platforms.
   RIM fears cross-platform messaging apps like Kik and WhatsApp enough to take steps toward actively blocking them.  However nothing could possibly be more powerful, or useful, than a cross-platform BlackBerry Messenger network.  This could subsume the lowly phone number as a primary identifier for communications, and subvert the wireless carriers in a way that Apple has actually been executing on much more poorly than you’d expect.  As part of this strategy I would help the company understand that messaging is not simply “WHAT R U DOING LOL” messages flying back and forth, but also includes Push Notifications for apps, call setup requests, and social networking.  As part of this strategy I would acquire Urban Airship, a modestly-funded private company that could be bought for <$100M and would become a catalyst for radical change within RIM, again leveraging the company’s delta into carriers.  Messaging is the one thing RIM has going for it that is hugely viral, and they’ve got a massive critical mass to build upon in the existing BlackBerry market that they simply need to unlock.
5. Stop dicking around with cheap plastic phones, and own the keyboard.
   One area in which Apple has exhibited significant leadership is the use of real materials, such as glass and metal, in their devices.  This gives them a stronger and indeed perennial feel, while the plastic on most BBs tends to fade in colour and begins to look tired and damaged within a few short months.  Everything about the BlackBerry needs to feel solid — including the keys.  Speaking of which, the domain of the keyboard is an area that the iPhone is unlikely ever to tread upon.  Use this to differentiate the BB and shame Apple.  There are many many users (among them women with long fingernails) who will NOT give up their keyboard for a touch screen, and a generation of teens who have known text messaging as their primary means of communication for more than a decade.  The focus on the keyboard is one of RIM’s core strengths.

I’ve purposefully attempted to avoid reading others’ prescriptions for RIM so I apologize in advance if any of these represents overlap.

I’ve been a shoulder to cry on for colleagues from Telus and Cisco often enough to not want to witness the death of what may well be the last great Canadian telecom company.  Even as recently as 5 years ago, RIM was lauded for its culture of innovation and relentless aggression.  However, the current wave of layoffs and strategic pronouncements are nothing more than hackneyed Wall Street pandering — a movie we’ve seen before at other declining giants that have never recovered — and these moves have already killed that culture.  I have seen what this kind of short-term management thinking and denial can do to a company’s culture, nurturing an internal environment where lifers sandbag their turf and the company’s former wunderkind rest and vest.  Neither behaviour is conducive to the kind of thinking or the can-do attitude that gets companies turned around quickly.  And really, who would want to be CEO and lead that sort of army into battle?  Not me.

Many columns of text and tweets are dedicated to the emulation of Silicon Valley tech companies in our industry.  My obvious response to this is:  why bother?  We will never have all of the same advantages of Silicon Valley — if you truly think that it is the best place to incubate your tech business, then you’d better grab the next bus because you’re wasting your shareholders’ money trying to compromise.  Less attention is heaped on the prospect that, even if you’re in the tech industry, maybe Silicon Valley is NOT the optimal place to be…

Over the past many years living in and/or commuting to Silicon Valley I have watched the tech bubble create a seemingly pervasive culture of adoption and exploration of new technologies.  It’s great.  This makes the job easier for tech entrepreneurs and is a real boost for early-stage web and mobile tech companies, a fact which is not lost on their investors.  One might be tempted to think that this culture breaks the ice for the broader consumer market, and that may well be, but there are plenty of examples of companies who still don’t get it right.  Entrepreneurs often mis-time or misdirect their companies away from bigger market opportunities by getting caught up in Silicon Valley penis envy.  And that’s a shame, because Silicon Valley <> Rest of World.

Here’s an example: If you lived in Silicon Valley, you would assume Palm was knocking it out of the park in the global mobile market with the TREO.  After all, up until recently when you landed at SFO, OAK or SJC and travelled up the freeways of the Bay Area you were bombarded with TREO ads.  And for years when you met with VCs, entrepreneurs, and techies more often than not it was a Palm or Handspring device they were distracted by, not a Blackberry.  But all the while it was the plucky RIM devices and eventually the iPhone that pummelled the TREO in the broader market, which eventually included Silicon Valley.  Why?  Because while it connected with geeks, and benefited from Silicon Valley’s accelerated adoption cycle, it did not quite so successfully fascinate the broader market.

I’m currently experiencing (and I may regret putting this on “paper”) the same phenomenon watching Quora.  Every day I am emailed when one or another geek I know “follows” me on Quora.  These are people who already follow me on Facebook, LinkedIN, or Twitter.  But the thing is: nothing’s happening on my Quora account.  Sure, plenty of geeks are participating in asking and answering geek questions.  A broad, non-tech question I asked three weeks ago pertaining to Vancouver has gone unanswered (sorry, tried to find a link to it but Quora’s UX is so poor I gave up).  I think it’s fair to compare sites like Quora and their older competitors like YahoO! Answers and About.com (which is highly curated), or even the much-maligned Mahalo.  Apart from the geek factor, I don’t get what makes Quora different (except that it’s much more difficult to use, and slightly “social”).  In the end I suspect Quora is perfect for the Valley echo chamber but it will be far more challenged when it’s time to play in Peoria.

There’s a reason some of America’s most successful and creative advertising firms host their creative teams in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago.  The innovative creative culture of cities like New York and Los Angeles would be obvious locales, you would think, however they tend to nurture a social form of introversion.  Living among folks that are more representative of the real marketplace is a huge advantage, providing both osmotic insight and the ability to test ideas cheaply and easily.  The same, I would argue, is true of the Valley — and once you’re embedded there, escaping that culture is really difficult.

Most Vancouver technology entrepreneurs (as well as most tech entrepreneurs not located in the SF Bay Area) that I talk to envy the accelerated adoption cycle of Silicon Valley.  But the early adopter cycle is also a fickle one.  And, more importantly, viewed in perspective it can indeed be a bubble outside of which seemingly “good” products fail.  Being outside of that bubble gives companies the natural ability to see beyond it, and to build products for broad markets (not just early adopters).  That is an advantage that those of us outside of the echo chamber have — unless we cede it by merely parroting what we see being said in the 650 area code.

Twitter didn’t grow into the social phenomenon that it now is because it was being reported on daily in TechCrunch.  Twitter crossed over when it was on Oprah, CNN, and various TV shows.  It crossed over in the New York Times and People Magazine, and through agents like Ashton Kutcher, Perez Hilton, and (yes) MC Hammer.  This may be as depressing as it is enlightening, but people outside the bubble do not read TechCrunch — and while it’s great to be covered, getting covered by @arrington generally only inserts you into the conversation within the echo chamber.

Still, some endeavours working within this sphere can be successful.  Vancouver’s Flickr famously mined that echo chamber — to the benefit of its founders and seed investors.  But how much bigger as a consumer phenomenon could Flickr have gotten if it had partnered with Wal-Mart, say, instead of getting bought by YahoO! ?  My guess is 10x, in terms of users and valuation.  That’s a lot.

Monstrous. Ugly. Expensive. Obsolete.

In 2008, PavCo, a crown corporation taxed with operating Vancouver’s 55,000 seat BC Place Stadium, announced a $150M renovation which would include the replacement of BC Place’s inflatable roof with a retractable cloth roof.  This was likely their way of addressing the rather dramatic deflation of that facility in the winter of 2007, when the ceiling literally collapsed during a storm.  This sounded like a good idea — it was anchored on attracting a Major League Soccer franchise to the city and for PavCo was designed to foil proposals for a ~$70M, 20,000 seat shoreline stadium fronted by Greg Kerfoot et al, owners of that MLS franchise (the Whitecaps).

BC Place opened in 1984 and has never once turned a profit.  Presently it loses approximately $6.3M per year of taxpayer dollars.  It was built for Expo ’86 and was designed as a modernist building in an era when the city around it was humble and underdeveloped — a shining example of the future, or what we thought it might hold architecturally, way back in 1980.  In the intervening 30 years, the City of Vancouver has very much grown up around it, both physically and spiritually.  Many glass and brick (honouring Yaletown’s storied history) buildings have grown up around it, and as a result BC Place now stands as an architectural anachronism casting its giant hulking bare concrete mass amidst what might otherwise be termed a neighbourhood.  I think I am not speaking out of turn when I suggest that it is objectively, fundamentally, and irreparably ugly.

At $150M though, retrofitting this beast with a retractable roof (which it always should have had) seemed more sensible than a new stadium which we were told could cost 3x-4x as much — of taxpayer dollars, of course.  So there we set the course.  Fund it.  Build it.  Move on.  Had this been any other city, any other country, or any other province it might have ended there.  But of course it hasn’t.

By January 2009, this $150M price tag was inflated to $365M.  Construction costs for the roof and supporting structure were attributed to “seismic upgrades”, “plumbing”, and other euphemisms to mask the fact that the project began experiencing overruns even prior to commencement.  Then by the end of 2009 it was announced that the official budget was now $458M… with no mention made of earthquakes or plumbing.

This now exceeded the cost of the proposed Whitecaps stadium (which was also to have a retractable roof) by 650%.  And rivalled the cost of building brand new structures around the world with retractable roof capabilities and much, much more.  Munich’s Allianz Arena, which I toured just after it opened, was completed in 2006 for a cost of €286M and seats 60,000.  That stadium houses two Futbol teams and is near capacity for every event.  In a disastrous project gone wrong, the good citizens of Indianapolis still ended up with a massive 70,000 seat stadium and conference centre for the bargain price of $700M (and which actually looks like it might fit in nicely in Yaletown).

By comparison, BC Place has 50,000+ seats — but it has almost never been full in 25 years of operational history.  Kerfoot’s earlier proposal highlighted the fact that Vancouver doesn’t need a 50,000 seat stadium.  So to get to a stadium of the size we really need?  An example might be Seattle’s SafeCo Field, which seats 30,000 for football, at a price tag of about $516M 10 years ago.

But not us.  We didn’t need a huge stadium but we’ve got one, and now we’re doubling down on a 30-year-old bad bet by Bill Bennett which, it was revealed today, doesn’t even work in the rain.  That’s right.  We live in the rainiest big city in North America, and the retractable roof cannot retract in the rain.

So… let’s see.  We’re spending more than the cost of building a brand new stadium that could be designed to fit into the neighbourhood around it.  And as the curtain is lifted on the publicly-funded project it’s becoming quite clear that the finished product is doomed to cast a huge, ugly shadow over the entire city, doesn’t function as promised, and has a capacity hugely in excess of that which we need.  Have I got everything correct?

Thought so.

** UPDATE Nov. 5/2010 – Bob Mackin reveals the new price tag is now an unconfirmed $563M.

In 1999 I was an obscure Product Manager working in the Packet Telephony Division at Cisco Systems.  After digging through the SIP specification I realized that, if implemented as I’d hoped it would be, SIP would be a tremendous catalyst for expansion within the world of communications.  More specifically, I wrote an internal white paper for Cisco about how small, nimble, venture-backed companies were best-positioned to capitalize on open protocols and the commodification of telecom to really change the range of services offered to the consumer, and thus create enormous wealth and demand for VoIP networking products.

I wanted Cisco to invest in developing relationships with these companies and to encourage them to deploy their solutions using Cisco equipment so that they in turn would create demand for mountains of Cisco product.

I was mostly ignored.  So I quit, joined a team already converging to build a service called BuzMe, and set to launching the first product in 2000.  Through a few twists and chicanes, BuzMe became RingCentral thanks to steadfast support and leadership from Vlad Shmunis, an early investor in BuzMe.  After architecting RingCentral’s product in 2001 with two guys named Vlad, I grew weary of Silicon Valley, and returned to Canada to tend to my igloo and pursue new dreams.

This morning I awoke to the news that Cisco finally got the message, investing in RingCentral’s Series C Financing.  So I’m feeling a bit smug today.