Technology News and IT Business Intelligence

Since Windows 7’s final release last fall, some testers have been reporting that dual-boot network computers seem to consume power more efficiently running Windows XP than Windows 7. One example came last October from JKOnTheRun’s Kevin C. Tofel, who saw his own Toshiba notebook battery die 45 minutes sooner running Win7 than Windows XP. But even then, Tofel was skeptical of a few curious facts, including that Toshiba changed its power management utilities.

Since 1999, the system that has reported battery capacity and relative power levels to the operating system has been the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI), developed by industry leaders such as Intel, Phoenix Technologies, and Toshiba. But ACPI was developed with the BIOS in mind; and as PC architecture evolves, as even Phoenix will readily concede, the conventional BIOS is becoming an historical remnant. And history has also shown that as a lithium-ion battery degrades, its capability to report its own health degrades with it. Only now have batteries become capable of reporting their capacity — how much charge they can hold — as compared to their manufacturers’ specifications.

Recently, some Windows 7 users have become acquainted with a new “feature” of the operating system — an advisory where the operating system suggests it might be time for users to replace their batteries. That started feeding into reports that Windows 7 was degrading batteries faster than its predecessors, such as this from InformationWeek that cites members of Microsoft’s support forums. That helped feed stories that the operating system was “tarnished” by a battery plague.

The instigator of these complaints appears to be the advisory itself, which users may be interpreting as an indicator that Windows 7 has “eaten” their battery. In fact, as Microsoft Windows division president Steven Sinofsky told users today in a post to the Engineering Windows 7 blog, Win7 is merely reporting a fact of everyday life, whose information had not yet been standardized in the days of Vista.

“PC batteries expose information about battery capacity and health through the system firmware (or BIOS). There is a detailed specification for the firmware interface (ACPI), but at the most basic level, the hardware platform and firmware provide a number of read-only fields that describe the battery and its status,” Sinofsky writes. “The firmware provides information on the battery including manufacturer, serial number, design capacity and last full charge capacity. The last two pieces of information — design capacity and last full charge capacity — are the information Windows 7 uses to determine how much the battery has naturally degraded. This information is read-only and there is no way for Windows 7 or any other OS to write, set, or configure battery status information. In fact all of the battery actions of charging and discharging are completely controlled by the battery hardware. Windows only reports the battery information it reads from the system firmware. Some reports erroneously claimed Windows was modifying this information, which is definitely not possible…Every single indication we have regarding the reports we’ve seen are simply Windows 7 reporting the state of the battery using this new feature and we’re simply seeing batteries that are not performing above the designated threshold.”

As Sinofsky explains, batteries can report their capacity using ACPI in terms of Watt-hours (W-Hr); and from now on, Windows compares this capacity against design capacity. “In Windows 7 we set a threshold of 60% degradation (that is the battery is performing at 40% of its designed capacity) and in reading this Windows 7 reports the status to you. At this point, for example, a battery that originally delivered 5 hours of charge now delivers, on average, approximately 2 hours of charge.”

That’s a fairly simple calculation to perform, and theoretically, it’s been there since the turn of the previous decade. But it would appear that the readings reported by batteries may only have become reliable enough for Windows to rely on this conclusion, in only the last few years.

Last July, Microsoft published this document for hardware engineers explaining how Windows 7 polls information from new-generation batteries. Although Microsoft explains that Win7 can only read information from these batteries, it clearly advises engineers that it’s up to them to set their batteries’ firmware so that it reports the proper levels.

As the document reads: “Users who run their system on battery power sometimes use the system until the battery is critically low and must enter the hibernate state to save open programs and data. Windows provides multiple battery warning level and action policies that the system manufacturer can tailor to the underlying hardware platform and battery capacity.”

The four settings that the document states may be customized by engineers are low battery level, reserve battery level, critical battery level, and critical battery action. These are threshold values separate from the real-time indications reported by ACPI, like last full charge.

With Windows 7, Microsoft introduced a completely revised power configuration utility — a new PowerCfg, whose purpose is to enable engineers to determine the energy efficiency of a notebook computer. Just last month, Microsoft published a document explaining how the revised utility works:

“PowerCfg inspects the battery information during the analysis. It logs an information item that contains the battery manufacturer, the battery chemistry, the design capacity, and the last full charge capacity. PowerCfg logs an error if it cannot retrieve the battery information from the firmware. PowerCfg logs a warning if the last full charge capacity is less than 50 percent of the battery’s design capacity. PowerCfg logs an error if the last full charge capacity is less than 40 percent of the battery’s design capacity.”

There’s where engineers are given that 40% threshold mark for the first time — the 40% mark that Sinofsky referred to in his blog post today. So the fact that users are seeing “Replace Your Battery” reports for the first time now, may only be because the reliability of such a warning has only recently become viable.

“It should stand to reason that some customers would be surprised to see this warning after upgrading a PC that was previously operating fine,” writes Sinofsky. “Essentially the battery was degrading but it was not evident to the customer until Windows 7 made this information available. We recognize that this has the appearance of Windows 7 ‘causing’ the change in performance, but in reality all Windows 7 did was report what was already the case.”

Rather than create another new destination social network like Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare, Google today announced that it has added social networking and location-based features into Gmail, Google Profiles, and Google Maps with a new service called Google Buzz.

Late last week, rumors surfaced that Google was debuting a new “Social Gmail” this week, and that really is kind of what Buzz is. With it, you can post status updates and share links, photos, and location-based updates with your Gmail contacts, and the content being posted by your contacts is automatically ranked according to your interactions with that contact. Ultimately, it’s a lot like FriendFeed but with a Google flavor.

Buzz updates are read directly in Gmail just like an e-mail thread, and posts can be kept only between friends or be published to the Web at large under the user’s Google Profile like a Twitter feed. All posts and comments appear in real time, and they can come from Twitter, Picasa, Flickr, and Google Reader. Location-based posts can be sent from buzz.google.com through the user’s mobile browser. Additionally, the Google Maps app for Android and Symbian received an update today which adds a Buzz layer for plotting buzzed-about spots. In the Google Search widget in Android, users can simply do a voice search where they say “Post Buzz” and their location will automatically be posted.

The service will be rolled out to Gmail inboxes this week, the mobile site is currently live, and the updated Maps app is available now. Users who already have a Google Profile and Gmail account don’t need to sign up for anything, and can immediately begin posting.

Jeremiah Owyang, Web Strategist for the Altimeter Group said today, “To Facebook, this is a direct threat, these features emulate Friendfeed and the recently-designed Facebook newsfeed. Expect Google to incorporporate Facebook connect, commoditizing Facebook data as it gets sucked into Google and displayed on Google SERP…This is good for Twitter in the short term, as it’ll amplify tweets, and suck them into a new system and give additional reach. Yet over time, status features will become a commodity, and Twitter as a destination will fade into the background.”

By many measures, Microsoft is simply too big. The bigness is in the gut, like a middle-aged man who drinks too much beer and eats too many classic potato chips. In computing years, Microsoft most certainly is a middle-aged company. So is Apple, which by comparison is leaner and healthier. What’s up with Microsoft’s gut?

Based on communications with current and former employees, Microsoft’s midriff problem is one of middling middle management. The number of middle mangers swelled over the last decade, and they also are the employees making key management decisions, which includes who gets laid off or fired and where the remaining people work. What manager will fire himself or herself? (Before continuing, let me be clear that only former Microsoft employees will be quoted, and anonymously at that. Current employees would only communicate with me on background, for concern of risking their jobs).

One former employee, whom I’ll call Boris, had this to say about how last year’s layoffs affected him and his former team: “Out of a starting staff of nearly 20, four remained, all managers. I’m not sure what they manage.” Who made the decisions about whom to layoff? Another former Microsoft employee whom I’ll refer to as Fred said that a “dramatic increase in middle management, and the fat cutting the muscle, is right on target.”

I don’t have figures on how many middle managers Microsoft now employs. But various former, and even some current, employees say that their number of “reports” — meaning people they report to — has increased by five to seven managers above them during 2000. Typically that works out to double or more the layers of middle management over the decade.

“When I started at MSFT in 1996, there were six people between me and [Microsoft cofounder] Bill Gates,” Boris said. “In 2009, there were 13 people between me and [Microsoft CEO] Steve Ballmer.” Fred said, “the number of managers between me and the CEO went from six to 10,” during the last decade. Another long-time Microsoftie, whom I’ll call Barry, saw his reports go from six to 12.

Microsoft’s swelling workforce gives some hint of the midriff, middle management problem. In June 2000, at the end of fiscal 2001, Microsoft employed 39,100. At the end of fiscal 2010, even after 5,000 layoffs, Microsoft employed 93,000.

‘All Praise the Holy Reorg’

Microsoft manages middle management by way of seemingly perennial reorganizations. Every former or existing Microsoft employee I communicated with for this post and the accompanying “Microsoft Confession” series harshly criticized the reorganizations.

“How many reorgs have ever benefited anyone except the folks on top?” asked a former employee I’ll call Jack. “The people that need to be cut at MS are the managers that don’t support their teams and only support their own careers. I’ve watched countless super visionary managers get bogged in politics and leave.”

Another former employee, whom I’ll call Amanda quipped: “All praise the holy reorg, which is an approximately annual religious festival in certain sects, I mean divisions, of Microsoft.” Recent reorganizations — those publicly disclosed or uncovered over the last 12 months — include desktop operating system, developer tool, entertainment, mobile device, search and server organizations, among others. This year’s reorg affecting Microsoft’s TV products came with the departure of Enrique Rodriguez, a corporate vice president.

Bill Veghte is one of Microsoft’s highest-profile executive departures steaming from reorganization. Microsoft announced Veghte’s departure on January 14, after he failed to find a new position following the summer 2009 reorg that put Steven Sinfosky in charge of the Windows & Windows Live group. Weeks later, Microsoft acknowledged the departure of Mike Nash, like Veghte a 19-plus year veteran. At the end of 2009, Microsoft also lost Chris Liddell, as chief financial officer. The point: Microsoft is shedding top-level managers all while middle-manager ranks add bulge to the organizational structure.

The reorganizations can be looked at another way — as reflecting ineffective management processes that Microsoft tries to resolve by changing which groups report to which groups or to whom. In theory, Microsoft’s five business groups — Business, Entertainment & Devices, Online Services, Server & Tools and Windows & Windows Live — should be small enough to be nimbler than a company employing more than 90,000. But there are mitigating factors, such as reporting hierarchies that cut across different groups and supporting organizations, like marketing and services, that have responsibilities affecting all five Microsoft divisions. In many ways, Microsoft’s organizational structure is best described as a middle schooler’s messy room (also a Windows Plus! Pack for Kids theme).

Incentives that Discourage Risk, Innovation

Related to gut-bulging middle management: some HR review and compensation processes discourage many employees from taking the kinds of risks necessary for Microsoft to regain its competitive edge and, quite frankly, to innovate in truly meaningful ways. Microsoft’s definition of innovation, for most of its product groups, is anything that preserves the status quo — meaning extending Office and Windows and increasingly server software like SharePoint and Windows Server. Risk is a dirty word for many employees looking to advance at Microsoft.

A former employee whom I’ll call Rodriguez said of the HR review process: “Microsoft has become too ’scorecard’ heavy and highly litigated to the point it kills an employee’s spirit of free thinking and creativity, since everything a person does is closely judged by management.” Among the former Microsofties I communicated with over the last couple of months, Rodriguez was the harshest critic of Microsoft’s review process, which he observed is going on right now; fiscal year ends on June 30 and reviews occur midway.

Several former and existing employees tried to explain Microsoft’s seemingly complicated review and compensation process. People are hired at a certain level and can advance up levels, which have corresponding salary ranges. During reviews process, employees are graded with such designations as ‘exceed,’ ‘achieved’ and ‘underperformed’ commitment ratings. These are based on numerous criteria, which include management assessment of performance and achieving goals set during the previous review process. Other criteria include “contribution rankings.” Problem: These criteria sometimes work cross-purposes to performance. Fred explained:

Processes became more bureaucratic and individuals were less empowered to take action. In fact, oftentimes the incentive structure encouraged individual contributors not to do the right thing, but just to do what they committed to in their review the year prior. In other words, if you committed to include Feature A in Windows, and halfway through the year you realized that was a bad thing for Windows and Microsoft customers, the incentive structure actively discouraged you from trying to kill the feature, because then you wouldn’t have achieved your commitments.

Barry also made similar complaints about the “decentives” to doing a good job. “The metrics are too complex,” he said. “We were evaluated also on a client’s satisfaction with our work.” The client could range from a reporter for Microsofties working in PR to developers for employees doing product development or for anyone to other groups within Microsoft.

Several current and former employees wanting to do better or escape from stifling management situations would request transfers. However, many managers wanted to keep their staff in part “because it would reflect badly on them,” Barry said.

“I was put in ‘performance detention’ due to wanting to expand to another part of the company and ended up in the ‘crapper’ list,” said another former employee, whom I’ll call Mickey.

What About those 5,800 Layoffs?

Last year’s layoffs surprised many Microsoft employees. There are looming questions about whether or not Microsoft dismissed the right employees. From Friday through Monday, I posted four stories from former employees laid off in 2009. Each story reveals something about the layoff process and the middling middle management problems. Posted as Microsoft Confessions:

‘Killed over politics’
‘Deeply dysfunctional family’
‘Poor worker bees’
‘There were a ton of bozos’

These four stories and others I received but didn’t publish raise questions about whether Microsoft laid off the right people, whether certain groups were targeted and whether more middle managers should have been axed. Perhaps the most visible of the surprising layoffs: Don Dodge, who within two weeks of being let go was hired by Google.

Based on former and current Microsoft employee stories, five trends can be seen in Microsoft’s layoff of 5,800 employees during 2009. Laid-off employees tended to be:

High salaried
With the company eight or more years
Older — many in their late 30s or early 40s
At a status of what Microsoft calls “long at level”
In positions later refilled by younger, lower-salaried people
In positions the former Microsoftie resumed as a non-employee contractor

Several former employees proactively contacted me about these six similarities, but not all people used all six. Mickey said he was:

1. Over 40

2. Worked at MS for almost 11 years, industry almost 28

3. Pretty high salary

4. Senior guy but brought in underleveled

Barry, who had worked as a manager, clearly understood employee evaluations and he concurred about the six similarities. I should point out that in fairness to Microsoft, I’ve seen this pattern elsewhere, including journalism. Older and/or higher-salaried employees are laid off and either replaced by someone younger who is paid much less or the original employee returns on a freelance basis. For Microsoft, the returnee would a contractor. Barry is someone whom Microsoft laid off and took back as contractor doing essentially the same job as before.

Barry insinuated there was some age discrimination in the layoffs, but other former Microsoftie’s disagreed. Former employee Randolph (not his real name, of course) noted that four of the people he was laid off with were ages 36 to 59, with two of them being 50 or over. “Suspicious, perhaps, but just as likely a consequence of the team demographics,” he said. Two of the people remaining on the team were 48 and 51. The ages were provided with Randolph’s severance package. However, “the fact that they gave me the paper in the first place suggests they are sensitive to the implication of age discrimination.”

Then there is “long at level,” which refers to employees who have stayed in the same position or designated organizational and pay level for a long time. Presumably a long-and-level employee lacks ambition to outperform. But for a smaller product or services group, where an employee shows expertise, there may be nowhere to go but out. Other employees stay in organizations where moving up or out is discouraged or even penalized by the manager. I know of current Microsoft employees who change positions every few years simply to avoid being perceived as long at level.

In conclusion, no company’s organizational structure is perfect, because too many people put their personal ambitions before the company they work for. But companies can encourage mismanagement by the organizational structure, corporate culture and review and compensation processes. Based on my communications with dozens of former and current Microsoft employees over the last couple months, Microsoft needs to streamline its management processes, empower small groups to act like startups, reward risk-taking innovation and sharply reduce the number of middle managers.

Update: Mini-Microsoft’s blog and especially the comments can offer broader perspective on this post’s topic. While I purposely didn’t read Mini’s blog when researching and writing this post (I typically avoid outside influences when writing), several of my sources sent some of the comments they had posted to the blog. Mini has an active following of current Microsoft employees. I’ll resume reading now that I’ve finished here.

Now nearly a decade old, RealNetworks’ online music service Rhapsody is going to be spun off into an independent company. The spin-off will mean that RealNetworks will no longer have operating control over the service, and it will have no single majority owner.

Currently, Rhapsody is a joint venture with RealNetworks and Viacom subsidiary MTV Networks, with real owning 51% of the equity of Rhapsody and Viacom owning 49%.

Robert Kimball, president and acting CEO for RealNetworks today said, “Separating Rhapsody into its own independent company is a significant first step in making RealNetworks a more focused and profitable company. Rhapsody will be the largest pure play digital music service in the market. We have provided Rhapsody with the right team, and financial and intellectual property assets to succeed in the competitive market for digital music.”

Real expects the spin-off will be complete late in the first quarter of 2010.

The idea behind notebooks with switchable graphics processors is that the most common tasks are handled by the lower power integrated GPU; but should the user need more complex graphics, a discrete graphics processor will be able to kick in to take care of the hard work.

It’s been an option in certain notebooks for more than three years, and it has certainly grown more common as the technology has aged. But it has never quite been a perfect, on-demand solution. In the earliest switchable setups, the computer had to be rebooted for the swap to take place, and in later iterations, it required a physical switch to be thrown or sessions to be reset. and still others could turn on the discrete GPU, but not switch back to integrated once the change was made.
Today, Nvidia debuted its Optimus technology for GPU switching, which will soon be available in a handful of Asus notebooks (UL50Vf, U30Jc in the “ultra slim and light” series, and N61Jv, N71Jv, N82Jv in the Multimedia N series) Instead of requiring a conscious effort on the part of the user, Optimus-powered graphics processors balance the graphical processor load as a background task. Unlike ATI’s switchable graphics platform, which uses the discrete card when under AC power and the integrated graphics processor to be used in battery mode, Optimus switches dynamically based upon the needs of the running applications.

“We needed hardware support to quickly move the graphics data around in the system, so we created a fast copy engine. The Optimus Copy Engine is a new alternative to traditional DMA (Direct Memory Access) transfers between the GPU frame buffer memory and system memory used by the IGP. With Optimus we also removed multiplexers, called MUXs, so we use the integrated graphics as a display adapter or pass through,” Sasha Ostojic, Nvidia’s Senior Director of Notebook Software, wrote in Nvidia’s blog today. “The discrete GPU can do the heavy lifting and pass through the results to the integrated graphics chip to be displayed. By doing this, Optimus eliminated the need for hardware multiplexer and completely removed glitches associated with switching the display from IGP to GPU. Optimus transfers the display surface from the GPU frame buffer over the PCI Express bus to the system memory-based frame buffer used by the IGP. The key to performing the display transfer without negatively impacting 3D performance is the Optimus Copy Engine.”

Asus’ notebooks featuring Optimus are expected to begin availability some time in mid-March, with specifics pending.

We have seen a couple of mobile broadband hotspots come to market in the last year, the Novatel MiFi on Sprint and Verizon, and the recent Sprint Overdrive from Sierra Wireless. They’re pocket-sized, battery-powered devices with a 3G connection that can connect a handful of devices to the Internet wherever they’re plopped down.

Today, Netgear and Ericsson announced that they have created a 3G mobile broadband-connected router like these devices, except that it’s not pocketable and battery powered.

Instead, the new mobile broadband router, called the MBRN3300, is designed for fixed or semi-nomadic use. For example, it can provide a broadband connection to rural homes that don’t have the appropriate infrastructure for a DSL, Cable or Fiber; or it can be set up in mobile homes, boats, automobiles and trains.

It provides an HSPA connection to the Internet and both 802.11n and Ethernet LAN for home networking. The broadband speeds depend, of course, upon the service providers’ capabilities, but the current peak in U.S. speeds is 7.2Mbps and the average is around 4Mbps.

Though a number of companies have been pushing WiMAX as the solution to rural connectivity in North America, Southeast Asia and Africa (with 519 deployments in 146 countries), HSPA is showing strong growth across the world as well. According to the GSA’s latest survey (February 4, 2010) 315 network operators in 133 countries have upgraded to HSPA.

The companies will be showing off the new wireless hotspot at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next week, but carrier partnerships haven’t been mentioned yet.

11:35 am EST Tuesday, February 9, 2010 · In a test of Google’s willingness to take customer concerns this morning, Betanews Editor-in-Chief Nathan Mook — a new Nexus One owner himself who has not experienced either the 3G connectivity problem or the touchscreen tracking problem — contacted the Nexus One shipping support line with a technical concern. After getting off the phone with a live Google support staffer in San Francisco, Nate reported very positive results.

The problem Nate was having, he says, is minor: The phone’s automatic brightness isn’t working well, remaining too dark when auto-brightness is turned on. Plus, the phone’s touch-sensitive panel buttons at the bottom appear non-sensitive if you touch too close to the bottom.

Nate tells us Google’s representative very kindly put his concern into the system, and offered to set up an exchange of phones with him; he responded it was not necessary.

“She was really quite nice,” Nate reports. “She put my concerns into the system. Best customer support experience I’ve ever had from a big company. Better than Apple. I had zero wait time.” His previous phone was an iPhone 3G S.

10:46 am EST · With hopes of being able to talk to a real, live person for the first time, to address not only 3G connectivity issues but an emerging, separate problem with poorly tracking touchscreens, Google Nexus One phone users had hopes today of being able to dial a toll-free phone number and speak with a Google representative. But despite headlines blazing through the blog-O-square this morning, that number is only “for questions about your existing order,” as Google’s support page clearly states.

Immediately below the newly posted instructions for shipping questions, the “Technical Support” section now directs customers with problems with the phone to HTC, the phone’s manufacturer: “For technical support, please contact HTC customer care at 1-888-216-4736. For additional details and international support, please visit HTC’s website.”

This despite Google executives having told analysts during the phone’s premiere event last month that Google was the “vendor of record,” implying that it would be responsible for managing customer concerns.

“I knew it was too good to be true,” writes Nexus One customer xsyclubs to Google’s support forum early this morning. “However, I am still going to call daily.”

That may be just a symbolic act for now, as xsyclubs and others may end up being transferred to HTC. Over on HTC’s support forums, a bold message appears to have declared the 3G connectivity issue resolved. But an unusual message from Google employee Ry Guy yesterday told Nexus One customers that HTC was, in fact, declaring a different issue resolved: “The message…on HTC’s website concerns a previous temporary data outage, not the 3G connectivity issues that some users have been experiencing,” he wrote.

As 3G connectivity issues continue for many customers even after the distribution of an over-the-air software update, a growing number of owners are experiencing trouble with their touchscreens. In fact, defective touchscreens appears to be becoming a popular subject of YouTube videos, where owners everywhere are letting Google and the rest of the world see these symptoms for themselves.

The video above shows the touchscreen failing to respond to browser functions, but responding nominally to the home menu. Another YouTube video from a different customer shows the drawing program registering repeated taps on the screen as vertical lines starting the same distance (about an inch) below the fingertip, and ending at the fingertip location.

In the wake of scrutiny not only from Nexus One customers but Congress as well, Google decided yesterday to reduce its “equipment recovery fee” from as high as $350, as stated in its original Terms of Sale, to a maximum $150. However, that fee is in addition to whatever T-Mobile (for now, Nexus One’s exclusive carrier) may charge; and as Google’s revised terms state, the customer must agree that $150 is necessary to compensate for a kind of depreciation Google only describes as “market changes.”

Like many nighthawks across the continent, I found myself glued to more than one screen…all right, three. Plus my BlackBerry…as I watched this morning’s launch of the Space Shuttle Endeavour. I observed the spectacle with a curious mixture of excitement and sadness because after the current STS-130 mission, the shuttle program has only four more scheduled flights before it’s grounded for good.

It’s not the retirement that gets me. Every technology has its day, and it’s fair to conclude that a system largely designed in the early 1970s has now served its purpose and should logically be replaced. It’s also fair to conclude that this same system was and is too complex to ever be fiscally feasible. Despite the orbiters’ reusability, which was supposed to drive down the cost of spaceflight, extensive maintenance in-between missions made the program even more expensive to fly than conventional expendable rockets. The shuttle’s inherent design flaws (you’ll never see humans riding below any other part of a space vehicle again) pretty much sealed its fate.

The absent successor

What irks me about the whole thing is the fact that when the shuttle program is over and done, there won’t be another program waiting in the wings to take over. President Obama’s 2010 budget announcement last week virtually killed funding for the Constellation program, which would have resulted in new hardware to take humans more safely into orbit, to the moon and beyond.

We’ve been down this road before. After the Apollo program ended with the Apollo/Soyuz Test Project in 1975, nearly six years passed before the US once again launched its own astronauts into space. Then as now, NASA lacked the funds because the US lacked the national will to prioritize spending on sending humans into space. Then as now, NASA found itself going up against a wartime government dealing with frightfully uncertain economic conditions. Then as now, NASA lost the battle and spent years twiddling its thumbs waiting for its new ride to be ready.

With Constellation now virtually dead, NASA doesn’t even have that comfort anymore. Had the key components for the regularly scheduled program already in progress — the Ares I rocket and Orion capsule — survived the axe, NASA would have had at least a five-year gap before its next launch. Now, it could be buying seats on Russian Soyuz rockets indefinitely while it waits for commercial space interests to fill the giant void. While thousands of NASA employees wonder what tomorrow might bring (hint: it won’t be pretty) I can’t resist the urge to draw a personal connection.

Liftoff of Space Shuttle STS-130, perhaps the final nighttime liftoff in the shuttle program’s history. [Courtesy: NASA]

Of cars and spaceships
My wife and I cart our kids around in a vehicle we affectionately call the “wondervan.” Despite our guilt over contributing to global warming, our car is an essential pillar of life for us and our kids. Like all vehicles, it has a finite lifespan, and we’re already planning for its replacement over the next couple of years. The plan will be relatively simple: Save up a lot of money, do a lot of research and preparation, drive to the dealer in the old car, and return home (somewhat poorer) in the new one.

The same process applies in the real world. Planning for any technology platform’s end-of-life is a fundamental requirement of any business in any sector. The laptops that your employees use and the servers they connect to can only last for so long. When they reach the inevitable point of no return — where the costs and risks of keeping them in service outweigh an investment in followon technology — it’s time to take the plunge. Your business can’t afford to be without laptops and servers until you decide you’ve got enough money saved up. The time to get off your duff and do something about it is not just before the thing dies an inglorious death or the vendor pulls its support. If you fail to bake lifecycle planning into your operations, your fate may be even more bleak than NASA’s. The agency, despite countless layoffs, will exist in some form by the time this is all over. Your business? Don’t hold your breath.

For a variety of self-inflicted and externally influenced reasons, NASA’s new business model will see it walking the proverbial five miles to school for a whole lot of years before a new vehicle, likely developed by commercial partners, is ready. The agency failed to anticipate upcoming change, and now thousands of its employees will pay the ultimate price. I’m going to guess the former Can-Do organization will have a tough time convincing us to stay engaged while its human spaceflight capability remains grounded.

Who do you trust?

Despite their obvious differences, businesses and government agencies are equally dependent on trust. Once stakeholders lose trust, it’s over. Would you willingly do business with an organization that failed to anticipate end-of-life for its core competency?

As you scope out potential partners, supply chain members and, yes, even customers, you’re making one judgment call after another, typically revolving around whether you think this outfit has the brains and the moxie to stick with you for mutual benefit. If its leadership is so blind that it can’t anticipate normal technology turnover, do you really want to be aligning yourself with it in the first place? Would you have any trust in its ability to balance near-term and long-term goals? I’m going to guess letting something like this happen would erode your confidence a bit.

In a year or two, my wife and I will take that infrequent trip to the dealer and return home with something newer, nicer, and safer than the vehicle it replaces. By then, NASA will be well into its human spaceflight stand down, waiting for the figurative bus while nations with bigger budgets and different priorities pass them by. I do hope businesses are studying this monumental gaffe and revisiting their technology investment roadmaps to ensure they, too, don’t get caught without the basic ability to keep themselves relevant.

In a world where Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski’s six principles for net neutrality are enforced, everyone who makes a living on the Internet could conceivably be “unburdened by the unnecessary intervention of network operators or government regulators.” The exception would be when a pipeline provider such as Comcast merges with a content provider such as NBC Universal, to make certain classes of content viewable online only when it designates. That’s the opinion of attorneys for video rental service Netflix, in a filing last month with the FCC and recently made public.

“Netflix believes that the codification of the existing network neutrality principles, together with the addition of nondiscrimination and transparency, create an effective framework for preserving an open Internet,” begins Netflix’ filing, written last January 14 (PDF available here). “These rules will allow all parts of the industry — network operators, consumer electronics manufacturers, and edge providers of content, applications, and services — to continue to innovate at a rapid pace, unburdened by the unnecessary intervention of network operators or government regulators.”

The exception is when a dominant network operator like Comcast puts together a service like TV Everywhere, its lucrative on-demand platform for Internet streaming of content to subscribers. In a strangely familiar sounding refrain, Netflix warns that a bundling of the operating system, so to speak, with content makes it difficult for other distributors of content to compete at the same level.

“By bundling the traditional cable TV offering with Internet delivery of content, vertically integrated MVPDs and network operators are potentially extending and expanding their dominant market position at the expense of competitive online offerings,” Netflix’ attorneys write. “Moreover, the recent announcement of the proposed merger of Comcast and NBC Universal serves to exacerbate the growing concern that MVPDs will use their control over programming networks to stifle competition, including the growing competition from online video providers like Netflix.”

The company’s attorneys particularly point to a clause in the FCC’s notice of proposed rulemaking last October. There, the commission acknowledged that certain classes of service that use the Internet as their backbone, probably shouldn’t be managed the same way as the Web (based on HTTP, just one of the Internet’s many applications). So the FCC proposed the creation of a service class called either managed services or specialized services, that it describes as industries unto themselves, and as such, deserving of special recognition and treatment. VoIP service such as what Vonage provides, and multi-channel video offered by AT&T U-verse and Verizon FiOS, are obvious examples.

As the Commission wrote at the time (PDF available here), it was interested in public comment regarding how such services could remain managed while the Internet stays open: “We recognize that these managed or specialized services may differ from broadband Internet access services in ways that recommend a different policy approach, and it may be inappropriate to apply the rules proposed here to managed or specialized services. However, we are sensitive to any risk that the growth of managed or specialized services might supplant or otherwise negatively affect the open Internet. In this section, we seek comment on whether and, if so, how the Commission should address managed or specialized IP-based services in order to allow providers to develop new and innovative technologies and business models and to otherwise further the goals of innovation, investment, competition, and consumer choice, while safeguarding the open Internet.”

That’s precisely the section to which Netflix’ attorneys responded: “Netflix is concerned that network operators will use so-called managed services in a way that harms unaffiliated content or service providers that compete directly with services provided by the network operator, owing either to their vertical integration…or resulting from competitive threats to their legacy ‘managed services’ business. This concern is heightened in light of the fact that such ‘managed services’ are offered over the same physical network as broadband Internet access.”

The danger, Netflix believes, is that by even creating the exception class in the first place, the FCC could inadvertently create the very “fast lane” for the Internet that lawmakers in 2005, coining the phrase “net neutrality” for the first time, sought to avoid.

As legislative momentum for passing Pres. Obama’s ambitious public agenda has slowed, public support for the President’s policies as a whole, has waned. As a result, even net neutrality — something seemingly unrelated to health care, jobs, and the fiscal deficit — appears to have become yet another can to be kicked down the avenue, as yet another topic tied to Mr. Obama. Last week, as House members discussed the Comcast + NBCU consolidation proposal, even net neutrality’s principal backers appeared unwilling to take their own side, enabling Republican opponents to resume their counterattack.

House Telecommunications and the Internet ranking member Cliff Stearns (R – Florida) began last Thursday’s hearings by suggesting the entire net neutrality issue was being raised in the context of Comcast and NBCU just to be anti-competitive. Rep. Stearns cited the DC Court of Appeals, which last month indicated the FCC may not have enforcement rights with respect to how Comcast may deploy its Internet services.

“The Court, in fact, seemed skeptical that the FCC even had legal authority to impose these mandates. One of the judges asked the FCC counsel ‘whether he wanted to lose on process or jurisdiction.’ Unless a condition is narrowly tailored to a transaction’s specific harm to competition, it does not belong in this negotiation,” stated Stearns. “Since this deal will not materially increase concentration in either the distribution or programming markets, demonstrating such harm would be difficult, especially in light of the robust competition in the video sector…If Comcast and NBCU are right that this deal creates a stronger entity that can better serve viewers, I think it can succeed. If they’re wrong, it will fail.”

The ranking member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, Rep. Joe Barton (R – Texas, a former chair of the Committee), didn’t have much to add besides a smile and a wink: “It’s good to see NBC and Comcast sitting side by side. That doesn’t break my heart.”