I’m curious – what percentage of emails generated internally are deemed as being useless by the people sending them? I’m guessing that would be something closer to 0%.

I’m not being flippant. I think it’s the crux of the problem. While I applaud Breton’s desire to increase productivity and to reduce the encroachment of work into people’s personal lives, I’m afraid he’s misdiagnosed the problem.

The problem with email today is not an ever-decreasing signal-to-noise ratio. Spam filters are doing a pretty good job. And while I concede that I certainly get a lot of unimportant emails every day, I find it takes me no more than 30 minutes to clear the rubbish out. I’d rather spend my 30 minutes doing that than waste it sitting in a meeting room getting nothing done at all. And, prior to the world of email that’s what we spent our time doing. The most common phrase uttered in the 90’s across work cubicles the world over was – “skip the meeting, send an email.” Email emerged as the centerpiece of collaboration and workflow for good reason.

The problem with email is not the volume we see each morning, it’s the stuff left over after it’s been cleared out. It’s the list of things we can’t avoid doing. And that list keeps getting bigger. That’s the true essence of most people’s complaints about email. It’s not a volume problem. It’s an obligation problem. Email “inboxes” have become a misnomer. What we have are email “to do lists.” Woe unto the person that doesn’t stay on top of their email – whether it’s on holidays, at dinner, or on a date. For that person faces a stress-inducing mountain of obligations when they eventually have the heart to log onto their email account(s).

The essence of the email problem is that a global asynchronous one-to-one/one-to-many communication system radically increases the ability of people to seek assistance, create and delegate tasks, update colleagues and coordinate activities.

There is no technology solution to this problem. You can try to parse this out into different applications but the problem remains – as I believe Atos will soon find out.

The only solution, IMO, is to tackle the ballooning administration and bureaucracy overhead in organizations that is fuelling the number of emails being generated. Specifically, our criticism of email as a collaboration tool needs to shift towards the unchecked growth of bureaucracy it enables. And in this context, it is but one piece of IT that is driving the problem. Ask sales reps what they think of CRM. It doesn’t increase their productivity – it drains it as they have to spend increasing amounts of time filling in the system which, in turn, generates more email requests. BPM can standardize best practices – it can also spin out a set of obligations which land in people’s inbox. Every exception to these practices requires streams of emails to associated cc lists, forwards and reply-to-alls.

There are parallels with the argument “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Email doesn’t erode productivity and encroaches work into our personal lives, bureaucracy does.”

So don’t fault the tool. Fault what it enables.

I’m sure that a lot you, personally, like iCloud for similar reasons.

Personally, I’m also quite sure iCloud will send a huge number of enterprise IT managers into a state of apoplexy.

For all the cool things that this well designed solution will provide you, as an individual, I can assure you that many, many IT departments will fixate on one single fact. iCloud creates a potential situation where corporate IP will find it’s way into people’s personal clouds thus out of reach and control by the company.

Does iCloud create IP headaches that IT organizations will have to deal with? Yes. Does iCloud provide opportunities for IT organizations in delivering innovative solutions to staff. Yes. But when it comes to Apple, the glass is half empty for many IT departments. It’s easier, and more satisfying, to hit the “ban it” button then to look for creative ways to take advantage of the new solution.

So here’s my prediction. Because iCloud is provided as an automatic and free service with iOS 5 we will see IT departments, fixated on this problem, seek to prohibit staff from upgrading their iPhones and iPads. Whether they can enforce this or not is immaterial. Whether a whole lot of other tools that create the same potential risks will be left unnoticed will also be immaterial. We’re talking about those IT organizations with an inbuilt dislike for Apple getting a taste of blood. If you’re currently working for a company that has blocked access to Facebook and Twitter because they fear a loss of IP, you can count on this happening. If you’re a sales rep working for a company that demands all your client’s contact details are entered the corporate CRM system then prepare yourself for the email telling you that iOS 5 upgrades are banned.

And of course all new iPad and iPhone acquisitions, once they start getting shipped with iOS 5, will need to be put on hold. It doesn’t matter whether they’re company or employee funded or made available through agreements with the mobile provider.

For a whole lot of organizations out there, the battle between corporate users and their IT departments is about to escalate.

And that will be a shame. Because at the end of the day this will just delay the inevitable.

Apple’s vision of personal computing has unleashed a massive, pent up demand amongst people. That is undeniable. But they are just one of many companies having success in reaching out directly to the user rather than granting to the enterprise IT department the status of rightful proxy to these people’s requirements. It is also clear that people are no longer prepared to separate their personal and professional digital lives in the way the IT department would like. These two intersecting trends are challenging underlying assumptions of what enterprise computing is all about. Enterprise IT departments can rage all they want about these providers. The thing is they won’t change for you. Nor will the users. Ultimately the enterprise IT department can, should and will probably be the ones having to change.

I am not advocating that IT governance controls simply melt away to make room these consumer-oriented providers. But I am suggesting that some creative thinking might yield innovative solutions that can integrate this very different class of provider into the fabric of the IT environment. Consider something like PC fleet management. How can this process be adapted to deal with a range of devices that will be acquired directly by the employee (there is no such thing as a global iPad rollout driven by the IT department)? How should software version control be governed when some systems will be updated automatically by the supplier through the cloud? You get the picture.

It has been my observation that enterprise IT organizations are some of the most resistant departments to change. Conversely, when change becomes absolutely unavoidable they display an amazing ability to craft intelligent, finely-tuned governance controls to deal with the new reality.

I’d like to suggest to all of you in enterprise IT organizations that changing to adapt to a world of what I call DTTU providers (that’s “direct to the user”) has become absolutely unavoidable.

You might as well start adapting with iCloud.

It’s 5am. I’ve been up for the last two hours. It seems the Tylenol PM didn’t do it’s job of knocking me out senseless for the 8 hours I needed to avoid the jet-lagged induced fog I’ll be dealing with around 3pm this afternoon.

So, I’ve been up in my hotel room here at the Hyatt Regency in Old Greenwich reading some great articles I’ve been meaning to get to. One of these is “Feature Bloat: The Product Manager’s Dilemma.” The other is “The Laws of Simplicity” by John Maeda. Both sets of authors stress the need to proactively reduce feature sets in products in order to maximize the long-term value that users obtain from them while, at the same time, increasing the organization’s brand value.

As I’m digesting the implications of this message on the way we think about software design I decided to get myself my morning cup of coffee. In fact, I’m slightly surprised I lasted this long without some caffeine cursing through my system. I look, and look…and look. No coffee machine. How could this be? So, I call down to the front desk and I’m told by an extremely polite young man that the hotel doesn’t provide coffee machines in the rooms. Instead, there is complimentary coffee by the elevators which is available from 6am onwards.

Arguably, the Hyatt Regency in Old Greenwich did exactly what Maeda, Rust, Thompson and Hamilton told them to do. They removed a feature. Namely the existence of a coffee machine, a couple of packs of ground coffee and some sugar and non-diary creamer from a guest’s room. And I can see the logic of the hotel’s management. After all, they haven’t actually removed free coffee from the hotel. They simply changed the location of where it’s obtained. And, in the process, they reduced the capital cost of putting coffee machines in every room and the ongoing cost of providing the coffee and condiments.

Win-win. Right?

Wrong!

See, first of all, I don’t want to have to wait for the time hotel management feels is appropriate for me to have my first cup of coffee in the morning. And, if I’m sounding a bit surly, it’s because I’m writing this before I’ve had any coffee. Second, and more important, I feel that the appropriate attire needed to make coffee in the morning is a bathrobe and a pair of glasses. However, I do not believe that the sight of a bathrobe-clad, groggy, stubble-faced middle-aged man wandering around the corridors of a hotel in some caffeine-depraved state of confusion mumbling something about Ethiopian blends is something people should have to deal with in a five star hotel. I know I don’t. So, when the coffee finally arrives, I’ll need to throw something on and make myself slightly presentable. Just for a cup of coffee.

The management of this hotel apparently sees coffee as an amenity of the hotel. They’re missing the point that the coffee is not a feature of the hotel – it’s a feature of the room. A hotel room is an experience and when it comes to the business traveler the experience they’re aiming for is a home away from home. When I’m at home I make coffee when I feel like it and in my PJs. I don’t slip some clothes on and walk up to the top of my street.

Am I then suggesting that Maeda, Rust, Thompson and Hamilton are wrong about reducing features? Absolutely not. The process of removing superfluous features from a product is as important for a hotel as it is for a software designer. The question is how you make the decision. The essence of making the right decisions comes back to the need to get the conceptual design of the product accurately defined at the very outset. What is this solution achieving for the user? Does a feature enhance, or detract from that objective for a majority of the people this solution is designed for? Do we know who those people actually are? Do we have effective feedback loops to assure our decisions are accurate after they’ve been implemented?

The less you understand about the users’ objectives the more likely you’ll make mistakes either in expanding, or contracting, the feature set of a solution.

Now, if you’ll excuse me I need to get myself ready to get my cup of coffee.

Sadly the default solution to most patent infringement cases is a confidential, negotiated settlement. I say sadly because everyone else is left to wonder whether it was the quality of the patents that brought the defendant to the table or whether it was a simple economic decision that the cost of the agreement was cheaper then the cost of litigation.

So then, a big, fat shout out to Barnes & Noble. After having been sued (along with Foxconn and Inventec) by Microsoft for infringing a few of their patents in their Nook e-reader, they’ve decided to submit a court filing refuting Microsoft claims. And it looks like they decided to take the gloves off before doing so.

It has been my long held view that software and method patents are needed to support innovation in the IT industry. Especially since they’re a better option than the available alternative. Unfortunately, software and method patents are being debased as an entire category of IP protection by a slipshod review process. It’s gotten to the point where it’s nearly an act of faith to assume a software or method patent is valid before it runs through the court system. The presumption of patent validity, I might add, is a key point that Microsoft is arguing against in the Microsoft v. i4i case being heard by the Supreme Court at this moment.

If you’ve ever had the patience to wade through the dense and overly complex claim language surrounding most software and method patents you probably found yourself muttering “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen this before,” or “well, duh!” These are the types of responses that would indicate a patent claim is not valid. So it was quite insightful to read Barnes & Nobles’ careful examination of the novelty and non-obviousness of Microsoft’s patents they’re being accused of infringing upon. Consider their observation of patent 6,891,551 – Selection Handles in Editing Electronic Documents

“The asserted ’551 patent relates to using handles to change the size of selection areas for selected text. By 2000, when the ’551 application’s provisional was filed, text was routinely selected when reading, review or editing, and handles were routinely used to change the size of selections. The simple act of using handles for their very purpose–changing the size of selections—was neither novel nor non-obvious.”

Or how about patent 5,889,522 – System Provided Child Window Controls

“The asserted ’522 patent relates to nothing more than putting known tab controls into an operating system for use by all applications, rather than providing these tabs on an application-by-application basis. However, the specification of the ’522 patent makes clear that before the filing of the patent, prior art operating systems were already providing applications with a toolbox of common controls to utilize. While the prior art purportedly did not disclose the claimed tab controls in this toolbox, numerous applications already employed tabs to allow users to navigate between pages of information in the application. Simply putting existing tab controls into the toolbox already provided by the operating system was not inventive or patentable.”

On face value I think Barnes & Noble are making one heck of a compelling rebuttal. Of course, we need to wait for the courts to sort this out and I for one am hoping Barnes & Noble is prepared to see this through. Should they do so, and should the courts agree with their position, then that might well give many organizations pause to consider the veracity of Microsoft’s claims to a high quality patent portfolio.

But that’s not all folks! This filing also sheds light on manner in which Microsoft seeks to reach licensing agreements around their patent portfolio. Based on Barnes & Nobles comments it would seem Microsoft is prepared to use a negotiation style reminiscent of the its pre-DOJ days.

When this suit was originally announced, Microsoft Corporate Vice President stated “We have tried for over a year to reach licensing agreements with Barnes & Noble, Foxconn and Inventec.” Apparently a significant part of that time was negotiating an agreement simply to see where Microsoft believed their patents were being infringed. As Barnes & Noble points out:

“Microsoft had prepared claim charts purportedly detailing the alleged infringement but insisted that it would only share the detailed claim charts if Barnes & Noble agreed to sign a non-disclosure agreement (“NDA”) that would cover the claim charts as well as all other aspects of the parties’ discussions. Noting that the patents were public and that the infringement allegations pertained to Barnes & Noble’s public product, Barnes & Noble refused to sign an NDA”

Sorting this out took nearly five months but once an agreement was reached Barnes & Noble asserts:

“Tellingly, although Microsoft had insisted on entering into an NDA covering these claim charts, the charts did not contain confidential information but instead did nothing more than set forth the published claims of certain Microsoft patents on the one hand and publicly known features purportedly employed by the open source Android™ Operating System and the Nook ™on the other hand”

This certainly begs the question of why an NDA was being sought. I’m guessing that some people might conclude that a primary motivation could have been to limit the ability an organization using Android to coordinate a defensive response. Just as interesting was Microsoft proposed pricing. As the filing states:

“After sending the proposed license agreement, Microsoft confirmed the shockingly high licensing fees Microsoft was demanding, reiterating its exorbitant per device royalty for Nook™, and for the first time demanding a royalty for Nook Color™which was more than double the per device royalty Microsoft was demanding for Nook™. On information and belief, the license fees demanded by Microsoft are higher than whatMicrosoft charges for a license to its entire operating system designed for mobile devices, Windows Phone 7.”

Here again, if these assertions are accurate this would call into question the extent to which Microsoft is prepared to support a regime of reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing around its patent portfolio.

One issue Birks has with me is what he sees as a misrepresentation of AIIA’s focus relative to it’s member base. Specifically he takes exception to the assertion I made that the “AIIA’s position on IPR represents the aspirations of the world’s largest, multi-national IT vendors.” As Birks sees it, this statement unfairly paints AIIA’s position as uniquely focused on the desires of large multinational IT providers when the AIIA is representing a much broader group of industry participants, particularly local small and medium enterprises (SME).

OK, duly noted. But this was a passing comment in a blog almost entirely dedicated to questioning the logic behind the AIIA’s own published reasons why governments should grant IP rights to suppliers as a default contract negotiation position. The point I was trying to make is that this is not a parochial Australian issue. Regardless of the composition of AIIA’s membership, or the process it uses to elect board members, the multi-nationals’ advocacy of this position on IPR means this is a topic of interest to readers outside of Australia. Needless to say, I really don’t think any more keystrokes need to be wasted on membership debates – it’s a red herring. The real issue is whether their position on IPR makes sense to the government – or any of their clients for that matter.

And on that topic, the needs of SME IT suppliers is a central theme in Birks’ rebuttal. So much so that he states:

“This SME consideration is connected with another fundamental point you seem to have skipped, which is that all Australian governments, and particularly state and territory governments, have a very heightened interest in supporting local ICT industry development through their activities and including in their procurement and policy positions.”

Birks’ position is based on the premise that providing benefits to individual suppliers manifests itself as a collective benefit to the industry as a whole. After all, that’s what they’re advocating – that individual suppliers are granted the rights to newly-created IP that the government paid for. But when it comes to intellectual property, things don’t work out that way. Suppliers can leverage this IP to obtain patents which grants them ownership over the underlying algorithms in the code they’re paid to produce. They can use non-compete clauses to keep staff with specific areas of commercial expertise from moving to competitors. The reality is that IP is increasingly being used as the basis to constrain competition rather than foster innovation. IP is also increasingly being used to source licensing fees from 3rd party product development rather than it being used exclusively for internal product development.

There is another very important dimension to IP that Birks perhaps doesn’t realize himself. Specifically, the value of IP increases with mass. Individual pieces of IP are notoriously difficult to value. But when they are combined into a portfolio they provide an organization a unique set of capabilities in their ability to seek license fees from third parties and to fend off requests to pay license fees themselves. The growth in IP portfolios is an indisputable trend in the IT industry.

But this is a particular problem for SME suppliers. It takes a lot of resources to be able to craft, maintain, and exploit IP portfolios and that essentially limits this activity to all but the largest organizations. That means that Birks’ assertion that:

“In truth, the freeing up of IP on a specific piece of Government business is highly unlikely to be a make or break issue for a multinational as their ICT business models are varied and diverse…”

is not actually correct. For one, we are not talking about specific pieces of government business. We are talking about the collection of IP coming from all government business. That will naturally be much larger for the big multi-nationals because of their market position. More importantly, it is these organizations which have the resources to exploit these assets in the context of a larger IP portfolio. The differences in business models are immaterial.

Therefore, if the broader objective of the AIIA in advocating the changes to IPR policy in procurement policy is to support local SME ICT suppliers, than this strategy is misdirected. In fact, I can think of no better way to harm local SMEs over the long term than to gift, by default, the rights to newly-created IP to suppliers. The growing use of IP portfolios will create one of the biggest obstacles to SMEs in their ability to freely innovate and to flexibly respond to market requirements.

On the other hand, supporting local SMEs could be achieved if the AIIA insisted that newly-created IP from government contracts was placed under an open source license agreement by default. That would provide open access by SMEs to the IP even coming from contracted business with the largest multinationals. Such a position is entirely consistent with The Statement of Intellectual Property Principles for Australian Government Agencies. But such a suggestion is nowhere to be found in the AIIA’s white paper to the NSW Government.

But the part of Birks’ response that I find most troublesome is the point where he says:

“It is very progressive of governments in Australia to recognise that the IP is far more sensibly held by the supplier in the vast majority of cases. Those governments that follow this course of policy are directly recognising that they are not typically in the business of commercialising IP and that by being innovative in this sense that they are providing a very real support to local ICT industry development.”

This can only be described as squatter’s logic. It’s the belief that if you don’t use your property in the way I would use it then I have a valid claim over it. This is the thinking that pervades the AIIA’s position on IPR.

I’m operating from a different principle – no one has the automatic right of ownership for something that someone else pays you to produce for them. Nor does a person, or organization, have the right to dictate to their customers the manner in which their property should be used.

Do I believe that a nuanced approach to IPR can help organizations achieve broader strategic aims? Absolutely! But progressive organizations don’t do that through isolated procurement policy changes. Progressive organizations focus on establishing, and implementing, comprehensive IP management programs. Doing so allows them to understand the value of discrete pieces of IP. That would allow an organization to quarantine IP that is important in differentiating itself. It would allow organizations to seek a fair market price for IP that they grant to to third parties, like their IT suppliers. It would allow them to assess the broader benefits of providing open access to the IP.

The bottom line is that the AIIA’s position on IPR will result in some short term gains in expediting ICT contract negotiations. That will come at the long term cost of a needless loss of assets and revenue to the Australian taxpayer. And the benefits which supposedly will flow to local SME suppliers are not only dubious but impossible to quantify. The trade-off is simply not worth it.

There is nothing that Ian Birks or the AIIA has said so far that would have me change that assessment.

AIIA’s Response
On behalf of the AIIA I think I need to directly counter some of the misrepresentations provided in your blog piece and also enlighten you on the broader view to the so called “bad policy” positions that AIIA has been working hard to achieve.

Firstly, in your blog you appear to characterise AIIA as a group that is working to uniquely achieve the aspirations of large multinational ICT vendors. This is absolutely false and ignores the past history of the organisation and its current composition.

The AIIA has over 400 company members and more than 75 percent of these are domestic Australian Small Medium Enterprises. The association features 6 domestic ICT company representatives on its Board and also other domestic ICT representatives represent the vast majority of AIIA’s state and territory branch committee leadership.

You should note that the AIIA Board composition is primarily made up of elected industry leaders who are voted for by AIIA member companies on a one-vote per company basis – and therefore even if there is currently a majority of multinational companies represented on the board, the important point to understand is that this situation has come about because they have been democratically elected by a membership which is comprised of 75 percent SMEs.

It is critical to understand that AIIA takes its role as the leading organisation representing Australian ICT SMEs very importantly and that role has been highly instrumental in the changes to Government procurement terms and conditions that you mention at the start of your article. Of the 12 major contract outcomes featured in the AIIA’s recent negotiations with NSW Government a number of them are specifically focused on benefits for SMEs such as lower caps on insurance levels and limitation of liability changes.

Furthermore, the primary motivator for the push from AIIA to address the treatment of IP in Government contracts is not as you suggest in your blog a move specifically motivated to help multinational ICT firms, but much rather a move designed to all industry, and most significantly assist SMEs that are doing business with government. In truth, the freeing up of IP on a specific piece of Government business is highly unlikely to be a make or break issue for a multinational as their ICT business models are varied and diverse but I am aware of specific situations where it has directly assisted local SMEs stay in business or considerably enhance their business by being able to further promote IP they have developed in one government contract into other government business elsewhere. If you like I will directly introduce to a significant number of local Australian software developers SME CEOs who will unashamedly reinforce this value point. Which makes me wonder – how often to Gartner analysts talk to local industry SMEs about their research positions? How many SME customers do Gartner have?

This SME consideration is connected with another fundamental point you seem to have skipped, which is that all Australian governments, and particularly state and territory governments, have a very heightened interest in supporting local ICT industry development through their activities and including in their procurement and policy positions. It is very progressive of governments in Australia to recognise that the IP is far more sensibly held by the supplier in the vast majority of cases. Those governments that follow this course of policy are directly recognising that they are not typically in the business of commercialising IP and that by being innovative in this sense that they are providing a very real support to local ICT industry development.

Brian, I would close by advising that AIIA would welcome your considered input to the development of our industry positions which are achieved in an open and consultative way with our broad membership. We have a number of member-driven forums in this area including our Government Business Taskforce and our Legal Forum. Within these groups the industry companies that choose to be involved develop industry-wide propositions on how to best take our sector forward. I’m sure the members of these groups would be very pleased to explain to you why streamlined Government procurement, and treatment of IP in particular, are vitally important issues for the industry and government to address.

Ian Birks
CEO, AIIA

Does that mean organizations committed to building, and exploiting patent portfolios are going to be chucking in the towel while saying to themselves, “oh well, this patent thing was good while it lasted.” Doubtful…very doubtful. In all likelihood they’ll be shifting their focus to those patents which will be easier to take advantage in a cloud computing environment. Gutierrez made exactly this point when he said:

IP to do with the user interface – the part of the service that’s actually exposed – will become more important, and will become the identity of the person providing the service. We need to go back to our toolbox of IP rights and dust off some.”

I think he’s right. And I think you – the enterprise IT organization – had better absorb this quickly. Why? Because if you think the cloud computing phenomenon is strictly about IT vendors delivering infrastructure, platform and software services to you, then you’d be missing a key part of its disruptive potential. Cloud computing enables every company – whether they’re IT providers or not – the ability to deliver their own IT-enabled capabilities. IT-enabled supply chain services, for example, might just as readily be consumed from supply chain management companies as they will be from SCM application providers that offer a cloud computing option.

The seemingly never-ending stream of patent infringement cases has largely been a sideshow for enterprise IT organizations. This has been saga played out between the IT vendors and only rarely becomes a problem outside that community. But the expanding desire of IT vendors to directly commercialize their IP portfolios will slowly start to erode the reticence they have had in pursuing organizations they currently deem as being their customers.

And here’s the thing – cloud computing, over time, will blur the lines of what it means to be an IT provider. And that means every organization becomes a potential patent infringement target for those companies with portfolios bulging with UI and design patents. The chances of stumbling into a UI-related infringement action will be very easy given both the range of overly-broad patents in this area and the serious lack of attention that most non-IT vendors pay to their own potential infringement in the realm of information technology.

Sadly this will likely drive more organizations to start building their own patent portfolios. After all, one of the most consistent motivations for organizations’ interest in creating, and growing a patent portfolio is to secure a meaningful defence against patent litigation.

The patent arms race will only continue.

I really hope that he was either misquoted or something was lost in translation because in a meeting with Latin American journalists, Rincón says, in comments targeted at the Brazilian government, that

when you do not can compete, you are declaring open. This masks incompetence.

Hold on Mr Rincón, to quote Microsoft’s own stated position on open source:

We are actively participating in open source and share the common industry view that software users will continue to see a mixed IT environment of open source and proprietary products for years to come.

And a quick look at the list of their open source projects shows a pretty comprehensive number of initiatives across a very broad range of their product portfolio.

And here I was thinking that Microsoft was demonstrating a nuanced understanding of open source that was deftly supporting the company’s strategic aims. Could it be I was wrong and they’ve just been masking their incompetence all along?

He goes on to add that

free programs require more work and investment from the government to keep them running and updated – which does not happen when companies take care of that for the government.

This, of course, is just bizarre. There are many, many IT staff in government who are needed to run and update proprietary software. And a fair percentage of those people are software developers using Microsoft technology and products to create needed solutions which will never be run or updated by Microsoft themselves. Not only that but those solutions could easy be placed under one of Microsoft’s own open source license agreements – like Ms-PL or Ms-RL and posted on Microsoft own open source hosting site Codeplex.

But the insights don’t stop there. Rincón also says, “governments have to ask: what business is to serve their citizens and develop software? Innovation is at private sector. ”

Thank goodness the US government didn’t considered this advice prior to inventing the internet.

For Microsoft’s sake I sure hope this was a misquote. They don’t need their own executives shooting their open source foot

And we all know the cycle by now. File infringement action, issue press release, enter cone of silence while negotiations take place, work out cross license agreement, issue press release, provide no further detail.

But with news of Oracle’s patent and copyright infringement action against Google one thing strikes me as different. Oracle is not a company that has made a sport out of pursuing cross-licensing agreements off the back of infringement actions like Microsoft has. The most notable example was their action against Alcatel-Lucent which was settled before a trial. Besides that, there’s not much else in the way of other offensive patent actions.

But there’s another case that might be more relevant here. Oracle v. SAP – specifically the action they took after SAP had purchased 3rd party Peoplesoft/JDEdwards support provider TomorrowNow.

Why is this relevant?. First off, Oracle’s primary issue was copyright infringement – TomorrowNow was using Oracle’s copyrighted material in order to provide support at significantly lower prices to Oracle customers. Oracle clearly had no intention of working out a deal with SAP. Instead they hammered them in court. That resulted in SAP shutting down TomorrowNow and losing their investment.

But that’s not all. Just last week SAP made a legal filing agreeing that they were prepared to pay Oracle tens of millions of dollars in compensation. Oracle’s view? Nice try, but we’re looking for BILLIONS of dollars in damages.

So before we write off Oracle’s action against Google as another attempt to obtain a tidy little license agreement let’s realize that we could be dealing with an IP pit bull here. If Oracle sees Android as being as much a strategic threat to their business as TomorrowNow was, then this has a higher probability of making its way to the courts than your average infringement action.

If it does, and if they prevail, then look out Google!

Maybe the average age of Google employees is proof that they grew up with this type of reward system because it sure seems they want a special participation award for their efforts with Google Wave. Just consider their announcement of the product’s demise. They talk about their gee-whiz features like playback. They remind us how “jazzed” they were internally and how they “enabled” third party developers.

Too bad that “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked” (whatever that was). That doesn’t matter. At least they tried.

No apologies for wasting people’s time. No effort to make alternative arrangements for those invested in the product. It’s “look at me, look at me – I’ve just crossed the starting line.”

Not that there aren’t those out there ready to give Google a big E for effort. Karim R. Lakhani at Harvard Business School “applaud(s) the company’s decision to pull the plug after it was clear the market wasn’t interested in Wave.”

Well sorry, I don’t buy it.

Google Wave was a launch of phenomenal proportions and that means that its a failure of phenomenal proportions. That, however, was not a technical failure. The code is still out there and Google certainly got a lot of insight that they’ll be able to apply to other products. No, this was a behavioural failure of the highest order. And the crux of the problem is not that they decide to pull Google Wave – it’s that they launched it in the first place.

Let’s face it. Google Wave was the IT industry’s noisiest beta testing program. But as Guy Kawasaki points out, it doesn’t matter when you go into beta testing – what matters is when you come out of beta testing. And there was a mountain of evidence to prove to Google that Wave would never come out of testing. Certainly there were a lot of commentators questioning whether the capabilities of Google Wave were comprehensible to average users and whether actual usage would look anything like the slick demos. And there were others, myself included, that pointed to evidence showing that the simple emergence of a new and “improved” digital collaboration tool doesn’t change collective behaviour in it’s own right. Even Lars Rasmussen, the lead developer of Google Wave admitted that email, the technology he had such a problem with, emerged over the course of 40 years.

And yet the product was released to the masses. And not in a small way. As the interest in Wave exploded and user accounts expanded one has to wonder whether Google stopped to think what might happen to all those people if the product didn’t pan out. At a minimum there should have been some appreciation for the time and energy that people were investing in Wave and, therefore, investing in Google. And with that, one would think would come a sense of reciprocal responsibility. Especially since a cloud-based offering like Wave which is brought to an end-of-life must inevitably be turned off leaving those who actually built workable solutions in a lurch.

The only way I can reconcile their behaviour is to conclude that Google’s corporate culture puts a higher premium on the needs of their engineers than their responsibility to users. Launching Google Wave seems now to have been an exercise in providing the Wave development team with both public accolades and an army of unpaid testers that would help them in their future endeavours.

If, on the other hand, Google was primarily focused on their responsibility to users than there would have been significantly more design work, user analysis and testing upfront. That would have taken time. It would have been costly. It probably would have presented the development team with significant new challenges that they weren’t expecting. It may have delayed the product for months, maybe years. I could have killed the project before it saw the light of day. It would also have been the right thing to do. But apparently there seems to be a view at Google that users are part of their fail often-fail fast model of innovation.

If that’s your cup of tea – helping Google figure out what works and what doesn’t – then this obviously doesn’t rank as a matter of great concern. But if you’re someone who believes that the effort a technology company puts into preparing a product for market and it’s willingness to stick with it once released is indicative of its commitment to its customers than the demise of Google Wave should give you pause to think.

Is Google the type of company you want to rely on?

So tough luck Google. No participation award for you. Instead you should go straight to your room and think about what you did. And you can come out when you’re prepared to say sorry and can show you learnt from your mistakes.

And it better be sincere.