Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Today’s wrap up of the news of the week focused on microsoft yahoo and skype.

The discussion on microsoft - yahoo was about their financial results and testosterone levels… I’ll let you listen to the podcast below to get more on this.

While skype achieved its goal with their mobile release: We were talking about them and a few callers were actually getting excited about Skype again.

Enjoy the podcast and see you next week.

 

 Squawk Box april 25 [28:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The Technical Image Press Association today crowned the Nokia N82 camera phone the “Best Mobile Imaging Device in Europe“. The specs on the N82 are virtually identical to the N95, but it comes in a sleeker candy bar form factor. The jurors said “This Carl Zeiss Tessar focuses from 10cm to infinity and produces sharp prints up to and beyond A4 size. Several scene modes are also available to optimize the Nokia N82 for great images, whether shooting portraits or night shots.” As a journalist’s tool, the N82 also supports mapping, and geotagging of the images.

Although I’ve become a huge fan of the Apple iPhone, it’s also clear to me that Nokia phones are head and shoulders above the crowd when it comes to photography and other advanced media capabilities. Today’s award reinforces that the N-Series devices are far more than the simple phones of yesterday. They’re serious tools.

On March 11, I wrote a very upset blog posting about an AT&T error which resulted in my being over-billed hundreds of dollars.A reader, Jason Yeung, suggested I write AT&T President Randall Stephenson, and was even kind enough to supply several email addresses for Mr. Stephenson, and his telephone number. So I did.

Two days later, March 13, one Janee Jackson, a customer service specialist from the AT&T Office of the President, contacted me. Apparently Mr. Stephenson has his own cadre of customer service reps who can solve problems that the regular ones can’t. In any case, within days Ms. Jackson had agreed to reverse the charges. Then the wait began, as the cumbersome process of obtaining the refund check began. First Janee had to wait until April 10th before submitting the check request (a minimum of 33 days after the last payment). On April 15th, I was told that a refund check had been cut, but that it would take two to three weeks to be sent.

Today, I opened this letter to find a bill that showed that all the charges had been reversed.

Now all that remains is for the check to finally wend its way here to Canada. Perhaps it’s travelling by donkey train. In any case, I’m happy to be receiving it.

Moral of the story? If you find yourself in need of extraordinary customer service, the best thing to do is to contact the Office of the President. Details here.

It seems everybody is jumping into the mashup platform game these days. Just yesterday, Broadsoft pumped out a release announcing their new developer program. According to the release, the new Broadsoft Xtended Developers Program “allows software developers to integrate BroadSoft’s carrier-grade voice applications with unified communications solutions and leading Web-based business and consumer applications such as Facebook and Salesforce.com. ”

Also mentioned in the release was the creation of the Xtended Marketplace, a site where developers can post their mashups, and market them to carriers. According to Broadsoft’s Omar Paul, “Already, some developers have been engaged by our service-provider customers after posting their mashups on the Xtended Marketplace. That’s what sets our developers program apart from others: We have a customer base of hundreds of service providers and millions of end-users willing to pay for new apps that add value to solutions they use every day.”

Hmmm.

Carriers are mostly aircraft carrier sized businesses that have trouble steering more than 10 or 20 degrees of their current course, while developers tend to be jetskiers wake jumping outside the carrier’s path. I can’t say that I’ve ever had a great experience, as a developer, marketing applications to a carrier. It makes for good PR that “some developers have been engaged by service-providers”, but the question that is left unanswered is whether the carriers will respect these “engaged” developers in the morning.

Who’s making money from these telecom mashups Broadsoft?

There’s a fascinating blog discussion going on here, here and here. The conversation is around Marc Andreessen’s refusal to trash Microsoft and Bill Gates on stage.   Andreessen points to the way in which the company drove the industry forward in the 1990’s, and Mathew Ingram says “love them or hate them, at least Microsoft standardized the operating-system market”.

The operating system war of the 1990’s was actually not that important, and today we can look back at that and understand why.  Up until Windows 95, IP stacks were third party add-on’s to Microsoft’s products. Difficult to install and mostly buggy, TCP/IP was a distant third on most corporate IT managers lists of networking strategies.

Microsoft pushed its own proprietary LAN Manager and unroutable NBF protocol in the early 90’s. The strategy of the day among network software vendors was that if proprietary protocols could be maintained, then locks on entire corporations networks might also be maintained. When that strategy failed for Microsoft, it first reverse engineered Novell’s IPX (because Novell wouldn’t license the technology - it was part of their competitive DR-DOS), in order to allow Microsoft’s operating systems to interoperate with Novell Networks.  Realizing that only strengthened Novell’s position, Microsoft ultimately championed the open standard TCP/IP protocol.

At the risk of sounding very geeky, it was Microsoft’s decision to include IP as a native component in Windows 95 that was the company’s seminal contribution to today’s computing world. The company didn’t invent IP, didn’t own any intellectual property in TCP/IP, nor did it profit directly from it. However, by ensuring a relatively bug-free implementation of IP on the dominant operating system platform, Microsoft forced an open, standard and routable networking protocol on the world.  Without that protocol the Internet, the World Wide Web, blogs, podcasts, the iPhone, etc etc etc would never have been able to be developed.