Years ago my business partner at Red Sky, CEO Tim Smith, used to tell a story about having met Steve Jobs in a most unusual, almost comic, situation. Tim has, after all these years, felt the pull to write it for posterity, or therapy maybe.

My favorite picture of Jobs and Woz. It reminds me that you can achieve anything, from any starting point. Here, juvenile and awesome, Jobs inspects a home-made "Blue Box" which would allow them to hack the Bell System touch-tone telephone system and place long-distance calls from pay phones. My kind of guys.

Read Tim’s story here.

I never met Steve. I always thought I would some day, egoist I am.  The man shaped the lives and careers of so many of us, and we (I) invested so much of who we are in him.  He played such a central role in our days.

But as I sit here and write this I feel a tugging that I recall having only once before.  And although it was understandably quite a lot stronger and more personal then, I recognize the feeling.  It happened on the morning my grandmother, my father’s mother, passed away.

I drove to be with my grandfather and we spent the day together alone in their house.  It was an emotional day, her presence was everywhere.  But the most poignant moment came when the two of us sat down and, in thick silence, ate a slice of fresh pie that my grandmother had made only the day before.  Her fingerprints were in the crust.

Nothing had been said before, or subsequently, that was ultimately more emotionally meaningful to me than that moment. The feeling washed over  me as I realized simultaneously – that she was gone forever, but how fresh and delicious the pie was.

It was a strange, ghostly feeling – both utterly empty and yet full of meaning.

I guess sitting here, writing this now, I feel something similar that must be playing out in so many ways all over the world tonight.

I usually delete the following… but not today.

Sent from my iPad.

This week on: Battle of the Forgotten Media-Player All-Stars!

Wow, maybe doctors could deliver this news to test your yawn reflex.

It’s rare that something is so unbelievably boring that it transcends being ignorable and actually makes me want to write something about it, but man, did the folks at Rhapsody pull it off.  Now that I think about it – I never thought of Rhapsody as having “folks at” before now.

Both music service-cum-companies have hovered so far down the food-chain of cultural relevance that I’m sure those of you who are old enough shared my first thought which was – “Wait, there is still a Rhapsody AND a Napster?”

The whole thing is so low-rent, it smacks of having happened on EBay.   ”In your cart: (1) Napster – size: small, and (3) Pair Mens Socks – Black.”

Like those Batman sequels with the nipple-suits where they started pulling in 3rd tier villains like Poison Ivy and Mr. Freeze, you wondered who the bozos were that went for that.

I mean, once it went “legit” who the hell kept using Napster anyway?  BestBuy – of all companies – bought Napster.  Someone at BestBuy must have thought that was a big idea.  ”Gentlemen, my kids seem to know all about this ‘Napster’.  Can you imagine if we had  the Napster?  Why, we could appeal to ‘generation x’ and bring our brand into the new millennium using the world wide web.”

And then there’s Rhapsody.  That was RealNetworks big entry into digital music services so many years back.  I imagine through some crap,-how-can-we-get-something-out-of-this-before-it-tanks deal, Rhapsody was spun out of RealNetworks just last year.

RealNetworks was a big thing back in the 90s.  But you never hear about them anymore.  What happened?  Ah, the legend of Real Networks.

RealNetworks had the de facto cross-platform online media player, RealPlayer.  But they were also the guys who would stop at almost nothing to hijack and infest your computer, your browser, your system preferences, your subscription settings and anything else they could get their stealthy little hands on.  After installing the Real Player app or plugin you’d open a file and suddenly realize that all your preferred offline applications had also been usurped by Real Player.  It was your responsibility to locate and uncheck various territorial features that Real brazenly snagged without your consent.  You were consistently inundated with ads and offers and reminders to upgrade (and pay) or make Real the default for this or that.  You would have to research methods in your OS for wresting control back to the default apps that you wanted default.  They pioneered the method of designing web pages that appeared as though you were downloading a free version of the app – only to realize that the free version was almost outright hidden and you’d downloaded the for-pay subscription version instead.  Upon launching, you’d wonder why it was asking for a credit card for a 30-day free trial when you could have sworn the download button you clicked was for a “Free Version”.  Real seemed to stop at almost nothing to unwittingly force you to use their app.  To out-smart you.  To trick you.  To intentionally exploit a population of computer noobs who were themselves not expert users.  Which was most of the general population at the time.

And these tactics partly worked for a while because at the time there was no overt, popularly accepted etiquette for this kind of interaction.  I think it’s fair to say, in fact, that along side malware, Real Networks played a pivotal role in shaping the intuitive distrust in downloading and installing that many users have today and more so, the related etiquette that companies who offer downloads, newsletter subscriptions, messaging options, installers and uninstallers exhibit today.

Ultimately – it was Real’s surreptitious disrespect for users’ true control (breaking the 1st Interactive Axiom) that undid them as a standard.   If only Real Networks had focused their effort on continually improving their product in line with users’ best interest and respectfully trusting that users would gravitate to the best solution, they might be a, uh-hem real player today.

Well Real learned the hard way what happens when you disregard the 1st Interactive Axiom.  As their big lead began to tip downward, they moved too slow to strip themselves of the aggressive methods and then did what they could during the last decade-plus to keep up with Apple’s iTunes, having acquired Listen.com and founding Real Rhapsody.  But like so many others, the reliance on multiple 3rd parties to assemble a user experience ecosystem (media player software, content, and portable hardware) was an utterly doomed strategy.  They all tanked-  Real Networks, Yahoo with Yahoo Music, AOL, E-Music, etc. under inconsistent quality and confusing user experience which lacked anything resembling simplicity.

Now Rhapsody, has what’s left of Napster’s user-base.

…and I’m wondering if there’s any peanut butter in the kitchen…?

Oh sorry guys – um, that was the end.  Cool?  I promise next time I will have some actual news.

So I had to sit through yet another meeting today where some breathless 30-something expert urgently asserted that email and blogs are going away because, as we all know, “teens” signal what’s coming in the future.  And since teens use Facebook and Twitter and SMS, and don’t use email or create blogs, that naturally means email and blogs will soon go away for all of us.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg earlier defended this idea, employing a recent PEW report that only 11% of teens email daily (a significant generational drop).  Then she said:

“If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look at what teenagers are doing today.”

You’ve heard this elsewhere right?  A bunch of times probably.

And it makes a terrific little sound bite, and feels all edgy and smart and progressive.

And it would be – except for the fact that it’s completely dumb and wrong.  Maybe even backwards.

Theoretical beneficiaries like Sandberg’s Facebook, but also countless other less-well-positioned wannabe visionaries, parrot this meme because they love the idea that this mystical teenage behavior might be a reliable predictor of our future.

Depending on who you ask, the logic behind this theoried prediction tool follows one or both of the following threads:

a) Digital-immigrants that they are, those poor professional adults are so out of touch, so weakened by requirement for metaphor and instruction, and mystified by digital tools in general, that their use-case must naturally be antiquated and waning.  Whereas those brilliant little digital-native rag-a-muffins just seem like they can pick up any interface or game and play without instruction, so they must be the only ones who genuinely understand the true-use of digital media.

And/or,

b) Teens current technical preferences will inexorably follow them as they age and enter the workforce, ushering in sweeping infrastructural changes that will impact us all.

“So,” the expert goes, “uber-smart companies will prepare for that change, not get caught scrambling when it’s too late.  We should be progressive and develop new corporate communication policies that minimize reliance on email and involve the preferred tools of our upcoming workforce: Facebook and Twitter and SMS.”

OK, look people– the reason teens appear to inordinately prefer Twitter and Facebook and SMS over email is so simple –  they’re just talking.  Got it?  Chit-chatting.  Socializing.  Partying, labeling, posturing.  It’s what their life-phase destines them to do.  And like verbal communication, there is a high value on short response-time and convenience.  Conversely there’s not much use for persistence and record-keeping. So  Twitter/Facebook/SMS make perfect sense – they are arguably the right tools for the requirement.

Now let’s project ahead to the forewarned, paradigm-shifted time when these teens enter the workforce.  What is often ignored in the analysis is that those previously myopically social teens will suddenly be saddled with something completely new, something they did not carry as teens; suddenly they will have responsibility.  It’s a new life-phase and a related set of new needs will enter their use-case – the need to communicate officially and discretely, to record and execute plans, to manage interaction across teams, most importantly in all of these is the need to keep a persistent paper-trail, a record of their work and communication.

And all of a sudden email looks a whole lot less lame.  In fact – it looks indispensable.

Skype (or something like it) – not even on the panicky email-is-going-awayers’ list of tools for consideration – can do some of this and is way better suited to carry the torch, assuming it undergoes some significant design changes.  But email remains the best tool for that ubiquitous work-place requirement.

Will email go away?  The specific technical approach will.  Someday.  But not because teens don’t use it today.

Whatever as yet unnamed tool eventually rises to replace email – you can be sure that it will behave quite a lot like email.  Rather, it will essentially be email – only maybe faster with a lot more features.  But it won’t be Twitter, or Facebook, unless they reinvent themselves to be, well, emaily.

Blogs are another story.  Why don’t teens keep blogs?  They sort of did in the 90′s, what happened?  Well everyone did stupid things in the 90s.  But the truth is teens had no more reason to keep blogs in the 90s than they do now.  They just didn’t know any better then.  None of us did.  But again the lovers of those meddling teens predictive abilities don’t seem to recognize the fundamental difference in use-case between Facebook, Twitter, SMS and a Blog.

Blogs serve a very different purpose.  Most bloggers have reached a phase in their lives where they feel they have something to share with the world.  They have lived a certain amount of life, and or have acquired unique experiences they deem worth sharing. This can happen early for some, later for others.   As such, you might argue that blogging is a “mentor’s” life-phase tool.

And with all due respect to teens –  they are still experiencing the world.  By-in-large they are not yet the mentors/experts/teachers.  They are still filling their lives with experiences and knowledge that – someday – they will feel a strong desire to pass on.

And when they do enter that phase of their lives, they will look for a tool that does something a lot like a blog does.  Or they will write a book, or maybe start a company.

Teens are not tapped into some sort of advanced, predictive, knowledge-base.  There is no magic here.  Yes, they are “digital natives” and as such can learn to operate some technologies somewhat faster on average than “digital immigrants”. About the scan of an instruction manual faster, if I’m being generous.  But the frequency with which they use a technology once they’ve learned it, is no indication of changes to come for anyone but teens right then.

Most technologies will fall in and out of relevance over the phases of a user’s life and career, because as you age and advance, your needs change.  Adoption of one tool as a teen user, may or may not have any meaning as that user ages and gains responsibility into adult-hood and a career.

In short, teenagers will only dictate what technologies they themselves use.  And as they enter the next phase of their lives, don’t be surprised when it ends up looking quite a lot like what the rest of us are already using today.

If you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow, you look for solutions that improve your life today.

And then maybe tell a teenager about it – because they’ll probably have to learn to do whatever it is when they get older.

So we all saw the new Gap logo. It looked weird. It looked wrong. It looked like all sorts of other unbecoming words that were broadcast over Twitter and Facebook within hours of its unveiling.

Then, in what is going to be (or should be) remembered as the biggest corporate branding fail of the last decade, Gap caved in to all the little whiny Tweeters and defensively pulled its shiny, new logo.

Anyone who thinks that move was rational – that pulling the new logo was the best thing Gap could have done in the situation – is somewhere between equally ball-less and an idiot.

No, it was the worst thing Gap could have done in the situation. I’ve read a few posters who think the whole thing was an intentional rouse to gain attention. Far fetched. There are better ways of gaining attention than intentionally making your company look like a bunch of bumbling idiots. That’s not it.

I’m sure Gap thinks they were “using the medium intelligently to respond to consumer opinion” or something one might read in a Forrester report on social marketing. But really they are just pussies.

The fact is, any time you launch a logo redesign you have some people who complain. The new logo always “feels weird”. It feels weird because it’s different. Like the…

mirror image of a photograph which never feels “better” than the original orientation – until you get used to the novel nature of it.

Critics crawled out of the woodwork – and the internet lets their short-term opinions sound big. But a company has to differentiate between that kind of blip, and the long-term strategic reasoning behind their decisions.

The truth is – all those whiners would have gotten used to the new logo. And they would have come to associate it positively with the brand, so long as Gap continued to invest in it and in their creative marketing efforts as they have done.

When the iPad was announced by Apple – the whole world spent 2 weeks laughing at it and making comparisons to tampons. It was ridiculed. SNL did skits about it. People made YouTube videos roasting it. It was the laughing stock.

Who’s laughing now?

Apple had the balls to commit (this kind of thing really doesn’t take much in the way of balls – just the basics – which is why Gap is such a colossal wuss). And iPad’s critical consumer responses naturally waned, like all these things do. This wasn’t an oil spill for christ sake, it was a brand.

You know, I hate to say it now – but I sort of liked the new logo. I mean it was Helvetica, sure. One might argue that seems old. But so are 5 dozen other logos that use it quite well. And Gap, maybe even uniquely, has the minimalist heritage to have owned the execution. The black and white was refreshing.

So the little blue square was sort of lame at first glance – but who knows how it all would have manifested across other products and marketing devices over time. Guaranteed, Gap, the nay-sayers would have wound down, and a new crop of less outspoken advocates would have embraced the new logo quite well.

You just had to have the very slightest teensy little balls a company can have.

Instead you have displayed yourself to the world as an utter corporate whip. You’ve done more damage to your brand equity by pulling the new logo, than the blip of negativity that naturally comes with anything new.

Now I don’t give a crap how “tough” or cool your models are styled to look.

Now we all know – Gap is just a self-conscious little wuss.

I love Apple products. But something has been troubling me…

People have been calling me and my kind Apple Fanboys for many years.   Before that term was trendy they called us Apple fanatics. I used to resist these labels since from my point of view I was just reporting the obviousness between Macs and PCs. It wasn’t my fault Apple products were superior.

Anyway this isn’t about who’s better or who’s right . That’s old news.   Apple is kicking butt these days and most of the anti-Apple people I’ve known have finally let go of their irrational embrace of a Windows PC-only paradigm, bought iPhones, iPods, iPads and iMacs and we can finally move on.

And my story starts there.

Because as any true Apple Fanboy will tell you, it feels oddly disorienting to see Apple kicking butt .  Yeah, it’s what we fought for over the last quarter century, and yet now that we have arrived, the universe is out of balance, only perhaps not in the way you might expect…

iTudes

The other day I was ordering a bound photo album I made in iPhoto. The fastest shipping option I saw was still going to take too long, so I went in search of a more expensive overnight shipping option. I didn’t find mention of such an option, so I called the Apple Web Store Support line – since they would know about shipping Apple’s products. The first sales person I talked to naturally sounded cool – like a “Mac”. When I asked if I could overnight the shipping of my iPhoto Album, after it was printed, the line went dead. I was on my iPhone so figured AT&T’s connection dropped. I called back on a landline and this time got another cool-sounding “Mac”. Once again I asked about paying more money for an overnight shipping option, and this time I think the “Mac” mumbled: “Oh we ble…” he trailed off unintelligibly and the line went dead again. This time it was clear – he hung up. In my ear. Mid-mumbled-sentance.

And that’s how I learned, or intuited rather, that buying Apple products online through iPhoto is unrelated to say, buying iPhoto itself.

Thus started my troubling, mulling and stewing. Obviously, I shouldn’t have taken being hung up on twice by Apple representatives personally. There is obviously a rational explanation. And yet I did take it personally.

“Made in California”

An important part of Apple’s brand is it’s personality, embodied by a slightly cooler than you, slightly smug, rather naturally stylish Californian called “Mac” (and this was true decades before any commercials featuring Justin Long were deployed). And if you’re Apple, you’d recognize it would undermine your brand personality if US consumers dialed the Apple Store and were directed to random, heavily-accented operators in India who sounded like they had been hired by the floor-full, to save a few bucks. No, you would hire considerably more expensive, self-entitled, young Californian-sounding American College Students and you would save the money back by issuing a punishable edict that directed all “Macs” (operators) to move through those calls as ungodly fast as possible – even if it meant outright hanging up in the ear of some dumb customer who didn’t figure out that the information vacuum surrounding Overnight Shipping for iPhoto Products meant Apple doesn’t do that. Click – “Sorry, application ‘telephone call’ unexpectedly quit”.

Little Dog

Apple has always had a little dog attitude. You know- the way a Jack Russell will act all self-important, and snarl and snap like he’s all that. He has to do that because he’s so small and powerless. Otherwise he would be eaten. That was Apple for it’s first 20 years. But like me, maybe you have wondered what you would do if your Jack Russell Freaky Friday’ed into the body of a Great Dane or a Rottweiler. There is no room in our civilization for such a vicious K9, and Animal Control would probably put it down.

Well Apple has grown. And by grown I mean it has inserted itself into the body of a Microsoft, a gigantic swath of the population with iPhones, iPods and now trailing, Mac computers. Apple is enjoying more users than ever before in its history. You might argue that in areas, Apple has become a big dog. The problem, and the reason I currently think I would prefer Google own the digital universe despite their utter lack of aesthetic sensibility, is that Apple still carries itself like a small dog. Utterly arrogant, overly aggressive; a little dictator.

It was cute when the company had no power, it was necessary, endearing even. But now that so many lives are intertwined with that personality, now that a virtual ecosystem has begun to build itself around the company and its behavior, Apple’s personality needs an adjustment; the arrogance, once an asset, has turned destructive.

Knights of the Apple Table

If you spend any time in the Apple Discussion boards you have come across a recurring comment convention. Some aspect of Apple’s service or products pisses a customer off and by way of expressing the injustice, the customer will start by listing, in detail, all the Apple products he has owned over so many years; a precious few can even assert that they owned the first Macintosh Computer in 1984. As if such credentials should entitle them to some premier frequent flier status.
I used to laugh at those people – how lame, I thought, this is a company – you just buy their products or you don’t. Apple doesn’t owe you any more than that. The number of products you willfully purchased is a meaningless datapoint with regard to the little issue you are upset about now.

…and yet… I have begun to understand why they felt that way. Why some of them intuitively felt that Apple owed them a little bit more, perhaps more than all these new, fair-weather, iPod-gateway, converts. Why being shuttled through the same long cues and dismissiveness, as everyone else felt unjust. And why, after some real soul-searching – I now sincerely feel that way too.

Apple does owe us. Some of us. For we are the loyal minority. The long-timers. The knights of the Apple table. They owe us because we were the kids who fought off the countless bullies on Apple’s behalf at a time that Apple was weakest. We were Apple’s first line of defense. The ones who tucked our precious Mac OS under our arms and carried it away from threat of disaster. We protected it.

We defended Apple’s honor against an inescapable and humiliating tidal wave of proof that Apple was the weakling of the personal computing party.

We fought these countless adversaries with the most valuable weapon of all:

Our own credibility. Because Apple carried so precious little then.

To keep the company alive – in effort of defending the unacknowledged rightness of Apple’s mission, we put our very faces and reputations on the line in defense of an ideal that had not managed to manifest a meaningful footprint. Apple was weak, it faltered, it was shrinking to toy-like proportions, so as far as anyone knew at the time our assertive actions were reckless, self-destructive and ultimately doomed. But through it all – we fanned the Apple embers tirelessly.

These were the darkest years. Seriously, Gil Amelio? Really?  It took a level of courage and self-confidence to be an Apple supporter then.

My minuscule part in this legend was as the creative head of a highly-awarded Interactive firm at that time, and there was not one technologist, IT executive, or engineer who thought we should have a Mac in the shop. Like vultures they circled, “Apple is about to fold, Photoshop runs on Windows now, we need to move to PCs now”; it was their repeated and logical assertion.  It became an IT mantra.  And yet we fought.  My business partner and I, against the obviousness, we fought. So my company bought more ugly beige boxes from Gil because “Damnit,” I said, “the OS is BETTER. And I believe in their rightness.  They’ll come back.” Obviously I had no clue Apple could come back – just a deeply wishful belief in the justice of it all.

And I wasn’t the only one. There were more of us. A well-documented, miniscule percentage of the personal computing population – we evangelized, consistently, passionately, angrily even – to the near-death of our professional relationships.

Frequent i-er Program

Apple’s Steve Jobs died and was reborn to rule once more.

Could this have been possible had the believers ceased believing?   I don’t think so.  When I recall the relative viscousness of our fight, no, I don’t think so.

So I stand before you today, Apple, with the scars, and sacrifice that you survived long enough to rise to new power upon, and I ask you to remember.  Not to forget us.

Maybe… maybe you do owe those few something after all? Those few who stayed with you from the 80s onward?  It wouldn’t take much.

You could acknowledge our greater-than-mere-consumerism sacrifice by instituting a literal premier customer status that it takes years to acquire. A good friend of mine, had a simple suggestion: Lifetime Applecare.

Or maybe we just need you to grow up. Go the extra distance and show us all how such a great company – who survived thanks to a relative few fighting proponents – can mature gracefully. Lose the little dog attitude, and for Christ sake – respect your evangelists.  Find out who you’re talking to before you treat them like annoyances.  I know you think “Hey – this is awesome, look at all the new customers we have now!” But look more closely and you won’t see any evangelism in that body of new users. You’ll just see users. Uninvested users who follow trends. And that’s great, so long as you remain the trend.

Similarly, when you lose your loyal soldiers, the lifers – you’ll have another problem. A population of trained, outspoken digerati who know your strengths and weaknesses intimately and who share a new mission. Look at this post. It’s the inevitable byproduct of such a scenario. And a pretty mild one at this point.

Now that you are strong, it wouldn’t take a lot to get me back. But I… we, are not like the rest of your new customers.

We had an income in 1984. We bought every OS you have ever released and more hardware than some companies do.

The people who call us ‘Fanboys’, who lump us in with this iPod generation of trenders, totally miss the point.

We are not Fanboys.

We are the proud Apple Freemasons, and membership has been closed for a long time.

Apple Freemason Medals of Service

I started with a Macintosh Computer in 1985. I bought half a dozen beige boxes with names like Performa, LC, and Quadra. I bought a Duo. I bought the first iMac (bondi blue). And the second iMac (blueberry). I bought three Powerbooks. I bought the Cube. I loved my Cube. I bought another iMac (AV graphite). I bought two G3 towers(beige and blue), and two G4 towers. I bought several tube Monitors, and on the day it was available bought a 20″ flat Cinema Screen and then the 23″ Cinema Screen. I bought the first iBook. Naturally I bought the first G5 Tower, and then another faster G5. I bought two MacBooks (one white, one black), and I bought the first 30″ cinema screen (with the necessary video card upgrade). I bought an iSight webcam. I bought the first iPod with mechanical spinning click-wheel and surrounding buttons, the iPod with four red glowy buttons, The first iPod Mini, the first Nano (still the best iPod design), and the clip-on Shuffle. I bought the first iPhone, the iPhone 3G, the 3GS, and now 4. I bought the first Airport Base Station. The first Airport Extreme. Numerous Airport Express bricks. The new Airport Extreme 802.11n. And I bought a coveted AppleTV. I recently bought a spanking new Nehalem MacPro Tower. I bought a new 15″ MacBook Pro and an iPad.

I bought every Mac OS ever released. Every version of iLife and iWork. I bought Final Cut. I bought all manner of Apple adapter and cable and battery and mouse and keyboard in multiples. Apple, you kind of made me buy those adapters.

I have spent untally-able dollars at the iTunes Store on music, movies, TV shows, apps and books, as well as photobooks and cards through iPhoto (minus overnight shipping). I have been a dual-account holder of mac.com since it was launched (boasting Virex!), and maintain two Apple developer accounts.

I didn’t buy the iPod Hi-Fi. Sorry, that was the stupidest product I have ever seen. For a while I tried to pretend like I never saw it. So I guess I saved $349 there.

By my rough estimation, I have personally purchased well in excess of $70,000 of Apple products.

I additionally was directly responsible for ensuring that Apple products remained the dominant tools in my company of 550 people for the worst decade of Apple’s lifespan to date.

And this is just what I remember.

During the same period, I purchased maybe 4 versions of Microsoft Office.

You too?  Welcome to the Apple Freemasons.

It’s cold in hell today.  Well, in my private corner of it anyway.

That’s because my default home page – across all my browsers – was just changed to Microsoft’s Bing.com.

In my world – that’s really big news.  I have friends who have responded with utter disbelief.

For the last 24 years I have been, you might say, generally anti-Microsoft.  Or rather – I wasn’t impressed with this company that had defaulted, and then bullied it’s way, into ubiquity slightly ahead of availability of vastly better designed systems (cough – Mac OS – cough).

Yes, of course I was, and to a large degree, still am, an Apple fanboy.  And yet when I think about the companies that I would prefer to have rule the universe, I have always thought Google makes a slightly more benevolent ruler than either of the former.

Over the last 24 years I repeatedly asserted that the day Microsoft developed a product that is better than Apple, and later Google, that I would have no problem adopting it.  And of course that was so easy to say because such a thing had never happened.  Like ever.

But for the last month I have been trying Bing, and guess what, it doesn’t suck.

In fact, it doesn’t suck so much that it’s actually really great.  Dare I say – the greatest Internet search engine available today.

For over 10 years Google has held the status as the top subject in my private Internet kingdom.  The first logo I saw every morning, and the most used internet tool every day.  But all that changed today.

Using Bing, it’s pretty obvious that search results are more relevant, videos more immediate, dynamic and easy to navigate, and images are more relevant, numerous and easy to view.

And, gird yourself Google, I’m about to utter an alien phrase… it’s cooler.

Using Bing, I realized that Google, the search engine, just slipped, unceremoniously, into the bottom half of the hour glass as an artifact of a previous time.  A time when aesthetics necessarily fell by the wayside in favor of functionality and conservative technical etiquette.  Business models had to actually work after the bubble burst- imagine that.  And the growing tidal wave of newbie mom and pop internet users were still a little confused by all them thar buttons and interwebs and emails and such.  Google’s child-like branding and minimalist (read: mundane) approach to interface design and aesthetics made the company and it’s site friendly and accessible.   …Back then.

However, today, Google’s obvious repulsion against anything remotely related to aesthetic beauty or adventurous U.I. has left it with all the design gravitas of a pocket calculator.  Yeah, it works, but there is no joy in using, it’s not delightful, it’s not cool.

As a Google corporate outsider it’s hard to tell how much of Google’s home page (and logo) – which has changed glacially in the last decade – was initially accidental or the result of advanced calculation, but in either case it worked at that time, and it’s unlikely that anyone inside Google has been willing to take responsibility for messing with that success by fundamentally refreshing the product’s appearance and behavior.

“DON’T TOUCH IT!” is the more likely conscience on the primary-colored campus.

But technology runs to commodity.  And one day you wake up and the only difference between two competing products is aesthetics and an implied lifestyle.

In hindsight, “change it” is something Google needed to do some time ago.  Embracing the risk, reward and uncertainty of great design would have given the company a chance.  Might have pre-empted Microsoft’s bid altogether.  But you don’t write algorithms to do that, you employ artists, and unconventional U.I experts, you trust their intuition and taste, and you relegate to them some directorial control.  You don’t drown them in statistics, limitations and testing.  That procedurally kills good design.

Look at Apple – the poster-child of industrial design and aesthetics working hand-in-hand with great technology.

Apple gets it.  Pretty much always has.  Except for maybe when Gil Amelio was there.  And it’s not like they don’t do consumer testing.  they do – but they value great design.  And Google could learn a few things about consumers and marketing from the design powerhouse, if they would just pull away from the ones and zeros long enough to appreciate organic, intuitive creativity.  But alas, outside the occasional visiting artist who is paid to perform during the lunch-break (the videos we have all envied), Google does not seem to have any idea how to incorporate the intuitive creative sensibility into it’s products in a meaningful way.

I’m not saying Bing is some design nirvana – it’s far from it.  It even shares many similarities with Google.  And I’m not saying that it is so advanced that Bing can’t be unseated, but for now, it’s just better than Google.  And in the small, small world of search engine powerhouses, that’s all that matters.

I will add that it appeared to be a rather unbecoming defensive move when Google announced an operating system initiative – just as the obvious superiority of Bing’s search over Google’s was settling into the Internet stream of consciousness.  Perhaps a bid to steal some of Microsoft’s thunder – or keep them feeling the pressure of an inferiority complex that should be pretty well entrenched at Microsoft by now.

For now, Google’s well documented subservience to testing and data, and it’s aversion to artistic intuition has done it this one infinitesimally small disservice: it has turned at least one staunch Apple Fanboy and Google advocate into a Microsoft convert.

I’m writing this on a Mac.  One that has never revealed a positive thing about Microsoft.  And I even still want Google, with it’s slightly more trustworthy corporate mission to “do no evil”, to ultimately rule the technical universe.  And yet…

Bing is now my home page.

Sorry Google, you have some work to do, Buddy.

The iPhone mic snags on any button-down collar, um... but not t-shirts.

I can’t be the only one. The only lifelong Apple fan boy who wears shirts with collars on occasion. Am I?

I ask because if there were others, if maybe even one of us worked for Apple on the iPhone team, the iPhone headphones would be designed differently. It’s a fact – no two ways about it. That somehow this critical design flaw should never have survived the Apple design process, unless of course, they really all do wear t-shirts – exclusively.

Hey, I wear t shirts. Cool ones too. But now and again – and maybe more often than some, I wear similarly stylish button-down shirts with collars. And this is where the design flaw reveals itself.

See, the wired iPhone mic catches on your shirt collar. And by catches on your collar, I mean the sharp edge of the mic invariably snags your collar with enough force to tug the earpiece out of you ear, and then the earpiece and mic fall 4 feet to your knees mid-conversation. It never fails. Turn your head an inch too far and – pop.

“Wait, HELLO!? Hold on, I can’t hear you – sorry! Hello? you still there? Oh hi, sorry – my headphone just popped out of my….” Never fails. I really don’t get it.

Oh sure, it looks nice. It looks awesome. And it even feels nice in your fingers; that little wired mic. But by God, as sure as I am writing “mac genius” that headphone catches on my collar and pops out of my ear.

Maybe like you, I’ve become subconsciously sensitive to the problem. I have developed this acute reflex due to “the pull”. That feeling when the cord tugs at my earbud, the mic having snagged my collar. At the slightest resistance, my head freezes and I carefully bring it back to center, just shy of popping the earbud from my ear. There was a point where I would use my patented oval-head-move to release the mic from said collar. I’d gotten pretty good at that too, that oval-head-move; made me look like a pigeon walking down the street. But alas – whatever momentary satisfaction I may have had at releasing the mic – it only caught again a moment later. Without fail.

As a result I finally gave up and now walk around with one hand holding the mic to my mouth. Just like I did years ago with poorer sets designed by your average run-of-the-mill, low-end industrial designers. It would appear to most passersby that I am actually holding the mic to my mouth so that my voice is better heard, but no. The mic works fine without that. No, I am simply trying to keep the earbud in place, simple as that.

Naturally, this never happens when I wear a t shirt. And maybe that’s the idea.

ABOVE: Apple's 16GB iPhone 3G - in White. Optional keychain ring and free pink eraser not pictured.

When Apple started using the color white as it’s industrial design foundation back in the late 90s – it evoked all the coolest parts of Star Wars’ Storm Troopers, 2001: A Space Odyssey – and bathroom fixtures all at once.  It was a powerful design conceit that differentiated the company assertively for a decade – and big-banged out trends that are still rippling their way down the lower design food-chain today.

Then, with the advent of multicolored aluminum iPods, Black MacBooks and silver iMacs, Airs and Mac Pros, it looked as though His whiteness was finally, at long gasping last, bowing out.  And none too soon.

The fact is, the whole white consumer technology thing has been done to death.  There is all manner of non-Apple, white and plastic-chrome “iWhatevers” on the market.  So ubiquitous is the white and “chromed” plastic look that anything done that way today usually has “made in taiwan” embossed on the side or comes from a gum ball machine.

And then Apple unveiled the iPhone 3G.

When I saw the white and chrome iPhone 3G – an exclusive color way for the premium 16GB model – I remember mildly deflating and uttering, “…really…?”  And then I think I just squinted at it – waiting for the coolness to kick in.  A reality distortion field.  A different angle.  Anything.

But no – with all the industrial design ‘tump’* of Hasbro’s plastic iDog, here was my favorite company’s most awesomest product announcement on Earth and it carried itself in the housing of a 10-year old Hello Kitty school supplies compartment.  With free pink eraser.  I half expected to see a keychain ring hanging off one corner.

The application of ancient white plastic to the high-end iPhone model smacked of an obvious attempt to re-invigorate the material.  To wrest ownership of the scheme back from the i-mitators.  To scotch tape the bastard if necessary, back onto a pedestal, by serving as an indication of one having afforded the “high-end” model.

But instead, the thing felt old and just made me wonder if the exceptionally cooler looking 8GB model in black would be fine after all.

Turns out it is by the way.

I do have an old friend who chose the white model.  On purpose.  He said he thought it was cool. I said, “…really…?”  And he said, “Yeah it’s totally cool.”  I wasn’t totally convinced.  I know him better than you do.  I think, like a lot of people, he just liked the idea that it would passively communicate the status of his greater purchase price.

I asked my wife what she thought about the design choice – she told me that it was probably just targeting girls.  I look forward to my friend reading that.

Either way – I hope it’s the last time we see such a cheap use of shiny white plastic in Apple’s industrial design for a long time.

The Apple I love sets trends.  I’m willing to forget this ever happened if the next iPhone has that sweet black anodized metal border of the iPod Touch, and… it’s gone? Oh now that’s too bad.

*Footnote:  ”TUMP” is a word I learned years ago from my friend and business partner Tim Smith, who’s southern roots go a little too deep to entirely shed the stigma of banjo playing on the porch.  As it was described to me, it’s a cross between “tip over”, and dump and thump.  Both evoking an action and a sound, I have come to find it a surprisingly useful word, even when describing the unfortunate unveiling of the white iPhone.