Okay, technical elites. You’re the ones who are the most upset over Instagram’s policy changes. You’re also the most technically able to build new things, and wield influence over others (so you say, anyway) to change how we do things.

Well, you self-styled leaders, it’s time to lead. How about you actually stop using Instagram and start using something else? Put up and do something, or shut up and bow your heads down in servitude/while aiming your iPhone at your food to take another picture of it

Metro++

I love Metro. It’s clean, fast, refreshingly different, and beautiful. But that doesn’t mean it is perfect. I hope to write some blog posts on how I would improve Metro, and the Windows (and Windows Phone) experience.

In full disclosure, I am an employee of Nokia, the premier partner of Microsoft when it comes to Windows Phone. While I have the privilege of working with many teams on many exciting projects throughout the company, I do not work with our design teams, and if there is any suggestion I make that happens to be in a future Nokia product, it is a pure coincidence (although if Marko Ahtisaari/Peter Skillman/Kevin Shields want to drop me a line they are welcome to ping me on Lync J )    

Well, “World” in the sense that the “World Series” only covers North America:

Come hang out with me at the Nokia Ready.Set () {Code} hackathons! I will be at

5/31 – Houston

6/5 – Toronto

6/7 – Boston

6/12 – Washington DC (technically Chevy Chase MD)

6/15 – Vancouver

See you there!

Samsung (which sells more Google Android devices than any other company) is making its own mobile ad service.

Well. It’s a good thing Google doesn’t make its money from mobile ads, right?

Hey Google.

How are you? I’m doing fine (but then again you probably knew that already from all the data you’ve collected on me).

That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, actually.

Google, as you continue to make it easier for us to be tracked all over the Internet (and harder for us to opt out), it seems to be dawning on more and more people (though I would say far from a critical mass by any stretch) that the Google we all know and love is steadily creeping away from its original mission of simply being the world’s best search engine.

I’m not going to ascribe this to some sort of evil intent as others seem to be all too happy to do. I get (and rather love) capitalism, and understand you need to make money to continue existing. I understand that it costs money to build and run your awesome Internet services (I for one am particularly dependent on Gmail, contacts and calendars—all of which work swimmingly with my Nokia Lumia, thanks for that btw).

Right now the only currency I can use to pay for most Google services is myself—my eyeballs and my data, which are worth a certain monetary amount to you. Let’s eliminate the middle-man (advertisers) and let me give that money directly to you. In exchange for a monthly or annual fee, you will give me the Google services I know and love with no ads, and no tracking tools behind them. You can detect my device’s useragent to ensure an optimal experience, and my location if I choose to share it with you, but everything else about me remains my business and nobody else’s. I get a better service—cleaner, and without the analytics gobbletygook that is now pushing the size of a typical web page up to 1 MB, probably a good deal faster too.

Meanwhile, you get the same money you would have gotten—and possibly more if you charged a premium over what you would have made on ads (I don’t know if you make $100 a year on me now, but I’ve been known to pay that much for .Mac/MobileMe, and those didn’t even work).

Moreover, it’s not as if this were an unprecedented idea; it’s precisely how a growing number of apps work. For the typical Zynga game, there is usually the option of a free, ad-supported version and a paid, ad-free one. Apps give us a choice of pay or ads, why can’t Google? I know plenty (if not the majority) of your users don’t want to pay, and are happy to deal with ads to get Google services for free. But you should offer the option satisfy your power users. Think of it as the Android Nexus version of Google writ large.

Make Nexus premium brand across all of Google's properties.

The longer you don’t do this, the more likely it becomes that a competitor will—be it a nimble young upstart, an old wealthy nemesis, or newer and even wealthier nemeses will (or perhaps an old struggling nemesis looking for a Hail Mary?)

In short: Google, you deserve to be paid for your services. I just wish you’d take alternative forms of payment besides my eyeballs and my personal information.

Oh, and Facebook: Same goes for you.

Present Google intern (and future Windows Phone intern) Andrew Munn did us lay people a favor today when he revealed some insights into why Android phones are laggy (spoiler alert: bad engineering decisions).

But what’s interesting is that it also gives (still) more confirmation that Android was a copycat effort:

Work on Android started before the release of the iPhone, and at the time Android was designed to be a competitor to the Blackberry.

Translation: we started by aiming to copy BlackBerry.

The original Android prototype wasn’t a touch screen device. Android’s rendering trade-offs make sense for a keyboard and trackball device. When the iPhone came out, the Android team rushed to release a competitor product, but unfortunately it was too late to rewrite the UI framework.

Translation: we pivoted from copying the BlackBerry to copying the iPhone.

It’s weird being an “Apple guy” and attempting to write objectively about Microsoft.

For as long as I can remember in the software world (being 26, that would be from the early 1990s onward), Microsoft was The Dark Side, the Evil Empire…in other words, the Bad Guy. Microsoft was always threatening to condemn my beloved Macintosh to the digital dust heap of history as Amiga and leave us stranded in a Windows World.

Then, by the mid-2000s, when Apple began its growth streak, Microsoft somehow went from being seen as a malignant force of evil to simply being manifestly incompetent. Apple was cranking out hit after hit, while Microsoft seemed to careen from one bad move to another–be it stillborn initiatives (remember Mira?),  market failures (remember PlaysForSure, or the Zune?) to simply bad software (remember when the Windows XP security crisis was followed on by…Vista?).

The worst part of all this was that Microsoft’s leadership didn’t seem to get it. The PR statements coming from the company sounded completely detached from the reality of the world changing and Microsoft’s empire unraveling from below. Microsoft, as one prominent blogger suggested, was fast-becoming the Soviet Union of software companies.

Green shoots / The Reformists

And then, somewhere along the way, some good things started coming out of Microsoft: The Xbox ecosystem blossomed (sales are at an all-time high) while Sony’s PlayStation empire got bogged down in an unwinnable war with hackers. Windows 7 was a well-done OS that helped wash the bad taste from Vista and had some great UI features that I ultimately found myself duplicating with 3rd-party add-ons on my Mac. Kinect was an innovative hit that leapfrogged the Wii’s motion-controllers, and will soon make its way to products beyond Xbox. Microsoft even had the courage to start from scratch in the smartphone space, throwing out the hopeless Windows Mobile and creating Windows Phone, with its unique and beautiful Metro interface that will now be making its way to Xbox and even the next version of Windows itself. As someone who still uses and loves Apple products, I can for the first time say that Microsoft is making some innovative and well-designed things. And I’m not the only “Apple guy” who has nice things to say about Windows Phone–even Mossberg’s AllThingsD and David Pogue say Windows Phone is “a mix of elegance and whimsy that’s a treat to use,” and  ”gorgeous, classy, satisfying, fast and coherent.”

Nothing illustrates the divide between the two Microsofts like Windows Mobile vs Windows Phone

These products show that somewhere at Microsoft, there are some people who have seen that Microsoft has a problem, who have identified that problem as one of their products–they weren’t good enough. These “Young Turks” of Redmond concluded that products need to be redone, along with the processes that created them. Perhaps most impressively of all, they actually managed to push these changes through. Most of the people I’ve met personally who work at Microsoft fall into this category.

The Sultans of the Status Quo

Of course, these green shoots still exist in a company that is more known for its cringe-worthiness than for its creativity. For every sign that Microsoft finally “gets it,” there is another to suggest they still don’t. For every promising demo of a Win8 Metro tablet, there is a boisterous official claim that Microsoft’s middling Tablet PCs are the same type of product as an iPad. For every Courier concept, there is…well, a cancelled Courier project. For every move Microsoft makes towards a “post-PC era”, Steve Ballmer vaingloriously proclaims “Windows Forever” in a matter that would make Nikita Khrushchev blush.

These are the people who think the problem (to the extent they acknowledge there is one) is not one of the products, but just the business around them. They just need more advertising. These are the people who brought us the Mojave Experiment, the “I’m a PC” campaign, astroturfing, the Seinfeld ads, the “buy PCs because they’re way cheaper” campaign, and other manifestations of the idea that Microsoft’s pigs just needed a bit more lipstick. This video, asking “what would happen if Microsoft designed the iPod packaging” sums it up nicely (interestingly, the video was made internally within Microsoft, likely by one of the Reformers trying to illustrate just how screwed up Microsoft was becoming):

Right now both of these factions exist within Microsoft, and I don’t think it’s easy to pinpoint who exists where. I would guess this is something that would cut across Microsoft divisions, rather than neatly between them and affording us the luxury of saying “well the Office division has the ‘old’ thinking and the Xbox division has the ‘new’ thinking.” No, these divisions run through departments and perhaps even through the minds individual people within them.

The most recent example of this painful contrast between Old-and-Busted Microsoft and New-Hotness Microsoft was a Microsoft exec saying the difference between WP7′s TellMe and Apple’s Siri was primarily one of marketing and not the actual differences in the abilities of the products:

People are infatuated with Apple announcing it. It’s good marketing, but at least as the technological capability you could argue that Microsoft has had a similar capability in Windows Phones for more than a year, since Windows Phone 7 was introduced.

Microsoft, why do you do things like this when it just ensures that videos ridiculing your boastful claims become one of the top tech stories of the day? How can the same company that made such a brilliant mobile OS say such decidedly non-brilliant things about it?

Microsoft, why couldn’t you say something like this:

“Apple has done great work in raising the public’s awareness of the power of voice recognition technology to make our lives better. We have a great voice recognition technology of our own called TellMe. Right now Siri is ahead of TellMe in some areas of functionality, while TellMe is ahead of Siri in others. We are devoting enormous resources to rapidly improving TellMe functionality–and every other aspect of Windows Phone.”

One of Microsoft’s greatest assets is its staying power. Even if their first attempt is usually a bust, Microsoft will keep at it relentlessly, patiently iterating, improving, and spending money until they succeed (just look at the Xbox, which took a decade to be profitable, and their online services division, which still doesn’t make Microsoft any money). But to what end will this power be used?

Who will win the battle for Microsoft’s soul–Soviet Microsoft, or Metro Microsoft?

For the sake of giving the Apple and Google duopoly a real third-party challenger, I certainly hope the Metro-ification of Microsoft continues–and that it goes more than skin-deep.