photo by Digital Papercuts

I don’t think anyone will disagree that today’s election is one of the most important elections in recent history.  And the estimates of the number of people who will vote in this election should be record setting.  Especially the number of people who voted early; this morning I have heard on the radio that there are 17 million registered voters in California and estimates are that 1/3rd of them may have voted early.

All this early voting has raised the question: will all those early votes actually be counted in the election?

While this statement could be construed as politically motivated for one side or the the other (for the record I’m an independent voter), it’s more of a question of technical procedure around how our voting system works.

As I write this, both the McCain and Obama campaigns are preparing celebration/concession parties for this evening. And that same scene is being played out on the national, state, and local levels for all elected officials in some form or fashion.  In our instant gratification, data driven world, we expect to know who our President Elect will be in by the wee hours of the morning at the latest.  And what usually happens is that based upon exit poll data and estimates, one candidate will concede to the other within the next 24 hours.

Could the winning candidate concede?

While watching a San Francisco news station this weekend, a San Francisco election official made a passing comment that they could be counting ballots up to Thanksgiving.  The reason for this being that they have to count all in person ballots cast today first. Then they count the early voter/mail in/provisional ballots after checking them to make sure no one votes twice.  With the high number of early voters, these ballots might not be counted until well into the near future.  (Note: I have been trying to find verification of the specific vote counting process with regards to early voting for the past two days; After searching San Francisco’s voter website, Contra Costa County’s voter website (my home county), and California’s voter website the only information I have been able to find during my non-exhaustive search was California Elections Code Section 15300-15304.)

The problem with this is that the news organization will be using exit polls and estimates to try to call the vote one way or another for candidates tonight.  They will be calling the vote with a large number of unknown votes that are locked away for future counting…the early voter ballots.  Candidates might cede their contests based upon this potentially inaccurate estimates.

So I ask my question again: does my early vote count less than a vote cast today?

And I’m honestly asking this question.  I’m not an expert in voting process.  I have not be able to find an online source of information about the voting process that helps me answer this question.  The main stream news media has not, from what I can tell, grasp this potential situation that we face–the previously mentioned local news program had the election official mention that early ballots are counted after election day and the ramifications of that comment went right past he news anchor.

If someone out there can provide details on this in some form or fashion, please do!  Unfortunately, I don’t have endless amounts of time to invest in researching this…I’m busy trying to do my part to turn around the economy by creating value.

(Note: In an effort to figure this out, I posted this question to NPR’s Political Junkie: Ask Ken Rudin)

This weekend I was able to watch the PBS Frontline special The Choice 2008.  Without getting into a political party debate, I feel that this is an important enought documentary that every one who plans on voting this November should watch.  Rather than being rehetoric filled in an attempt to influcence or radically energize the viewer one way or anther, this documentary does a great job in evenly describing both McCain’s and Obama’s pesonal and political history up to the point of their party nominations.  Invest 2 hours of your time to learn about both sides before casting your vote.

Tomorrow afternoon I’ll be heading over to Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco to check out the exhibition floor and possible the HP keynotes.  Looking forward to seeing a number of friends and collegues tomorrow at the show.

You can now check out the new Calendar page to see other future events I’ll be attending.

Part of my post VMworld decompression was to impliment a new blog theme this afternoon.  Last weekend my I was helping my sister to migrate her blog to WordPress and she found this wonderful theme that was highly customizable and well designed.  After helping her install it on her site, I liked it so much I wanted to install it on mine (I never was happy with the theme I had installed a few month ago…).  What was most impressive is that I got the new theme installed and looking 90% of what I want in about 10 minutes.

So, expect a few subtle changes over time and likely a new banner of my own photography.  I’m sure this will be my theme of choice for a while….

I came across a posting today about the 9 VCs You’re Gonna Want to Avoid and found it both hysterical as well as scary. If you have ever worked on starting up your own company, know any founders who have, been involved in raising money, or know a single VCs you will instantly recognize a few of these archetypes…a few rang clear and true for me.

The author’s other posts on How to Work the Room and 8 Tips on How to Get Mentored are some other great reads.

I am glad to announce that the rumors of my blogging demise are not true. The past few weeks have had me heads down on a customer project; I have been working with a Fortune 100 financial institution on a project involving a enterprise SOA initiative.

The good news is that there are numerous lessons to be learned (and shared) from this project. The bad news is that the timing of the project correlated with other things going on and resulted in me having less than no time for some items in my life (like contributing to this blog).

I appreciate everyone’s patience while I get my head back above water.

Wow! That’s what I said this morning as I noticed the changes that occurred over the past 24 hours in the Technorati graph that I included in my previous posting. Exactly 24 hours ago, that graph showed a little over 1,000 mentions of the new Apple iphone, now it has skyrocketed to about 21,000 mentions. I guess I underestimated the speed at which either

1. people were blogging about the phone (is that in indicator of how long it takes people to break away from Steve Job’s gravity field?)
2. or the speed at which Technorati indexers work.

Either way, after spending a few minutes jumping between blogs this morning to validate my hype-pothesis, I’m sitting here writing this with a small smirk on my face. Way too many of the blog entries fit square into my general hypester category (Apple’s Marketing teams must be very smug right now knowing that people are spending hours building cardboard iphones…).

Amazing thing about hype, how it can be used to distract you from what is really going on (I think that is a parallel to the De Tocqueville model). So, Mr. Jobs…how is that stock option backdating investigation coming along?

As I write this, it is exactly 24 hours since Steve Jobs gave his keynote address at the 2007 MacWorld conference. By now, the word has spread like wild fire about the iphone (oh yea, and that other thing Steve announced too…). I did a search on Technorati this morning at exactly 9:00am PST for “iphone”. This search revealed 55,035 blog entries that featured the word “iphone”.

My plan was to use this 24 hour period to highlight a point that has been bothering me lately. That point being how much hype powers the blog-o-sphere. What I expected to find were tens of thousands of blog postings about the iphone that hit within the past 24 hours. I was surprised to find that in reality there were only a little over 1000 blog postings. (Side Note to Technorati…how about adding the ability to search for blog entries based upon date of posting…I was astounded to see that your advanced search didn’t contain this option!) Most of the blog entries were pre-announcement hype about the iphone. Here is a chart from Technorati for posts that contain Iphone per day for the last 30 days.

Digging a little deeper, I did a Google search for “+blog +iphone“. 2.38M hits as of this morning. I’m mentioning both sets of statistics as it is still hard to find any type of statistics with regards to blog postings that don’t have accuracy issues of one type or another…

Surprising to me was how long the iphone hype was spinning out there in the ether…especially the spike right before Christmas. Generally speaking, I don’t become obsessive compulsive about tracking and contributing to the hype (I see it as being as fruitful in the long term and as stressful in the short as day trading stocks…I’m working on reducing the stress in my life, not increase it). So while I heard rumors about the Apple cell phone, I never really cared enough about to give it a second thought.

And Hype was the point I was hoping to make using the iphone as an example. How the content of the blog-o-sphere is so skewed in the direction of hype. Unfortunately, it is so hard to gauge the amount of solid content that exists in the blog-o-sphere in comparison to the hype..this measurement is subjective anyway. (I sense a tangent post coming soon about what the true value of the blog-o-sphere…). There is solid content out there, but like anything precious, you have to work to find it.

Yes, I know…I’m not the first by a long shot to make this point…but this thought has been swirling around in my head for a while, so this is just my way of working through the thought and getting it out.

I look at the hype as coming from two sources: general hypesters and professional hypesters:

General Hypesters

How many times have you seen a blog entry that contains less than a paragraph of content? And usually that same blog entry is just talking about a blog entry that some other person wrote. It’s almost like there is this compulsive need in people to be the first one on the record to say something, regardless of the value of what they are saying. I could spin down a path of analysis of the ego here, but I’m not a qualified psychiatrist (but if someone is looking for a thesis topic…). My hypothesis is that these general hypester bloggers become flashes in the pan, quickly having their interest being pulled in some other direction. This is the reason you find so many blog titles in use but abandoned on the free blogging sites…you go to the blog and find the most recent posting being over a year old.

Some of General Hypesters get a small or medium sized following (I’m being vague here on purpose), place a few Google ads on their blog and just keep on churning out the hype as long as the advertising revenue keeps flowing in. (ever notice all those magazines at the checkout isle of your grocery store?)

The net-net of my description for general hypesters is the fact that their content is not adding any real value but only adding to the chaff that is flying through the air.

Professional Hypesters

These are the guys who tend to be the fan that starts all the chaff flying in the first place. They can be people who have migrated from the trade rags to the blog-o-sphere, or they could be people who are secretly writing for a company or organization to help create the hype. Sometimes they are just people stating their opinion that build a big following. Follow the source of the general hypesters and their postings will refer back to the professional hypesters.

Occasionally they will be openly employed for and by the company or organization they are creating the hype about. Many company sponsored blogs are purposely not hype machines (my current company included). Sure, they all tend to have some bend of marketing and opinion guiding to them with regards to what the company does, but that’s true about all blogs (and a lot of “reporting”) today. The small percentage that aren’t are blatantly or inadvertently hype machines.

One example I can think of most recently is the “SNAFU” that a small software company out of Washington state made (they have gotten enough air cover out of it, so I’m being vague on purpose). They gave fancy laptops out to bloggers in the hope of the bloggers would write about the new version of the companies software and the fancy laptops. They said in essence ‘keep the laptops’. A day or two later they retracted that statement and said ‘we meant that you should preferable give the laptop away or send it back or keep it’. There was more blog entries about the retraction that there were about the review of the software! (and a lot of them were by the general hypesters)

Was this planned by the company or just an accident? Either way they got a lot of air cover out of it.

My Point

My point was just to state my opinion about how much Hype is out there in the technology industry. I’m hoping that I get you to think about what you’re reading a bit more by putting on your critical thinking hat. Is this something of usefulness or is it just hype? The obvious ones (general hypesters) are easy to spot. The professional hypesters are not always as easy…that’s why they are professionals.

Should we be concerned about the hype in the technology industry? Absolutely. We all remember the internet bubble. Look around, how many other bubbles do we see out there today?

(I’m focusing this on technology industry related hype. If by the end of this you’re thinking this only applies to the technology industry, consider getting yourself a better hat…)

Dictionary.com defines protectionism as such:

pro·tec·tion·ism /prəˈtɛkʃəˌnɪzəm/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciati[pruh-tek-shuh-niz-uhm] –noun

1.	Economics. the theory, practice, or system of fostering or developing domestic industries by protecting them from foreign competition through duties or quotas imposed on importations. …

This is the phrase that came to my mind a few days ago when I read the article about Microsoft’s Linux Support Subscriptions. Microsoft and Novel have teamed up and are brandishing the Microsoft patents at the technology community in an effort to stem the incoming tide of the open source community and fear of possible outgoing tide of revenue. Novel has struck a deal with Microsoft to have Microsoft bless the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (essentially saying that SLES has no unlicensed Microsoft technology in it…any Microsoft-ish technology that is there is now licensed). Microsoft is also hinting (not so subtly) that they might sue anyone who may have unlicensed Microsoft IP (or something that might look like Microsoft IP) in their open source projects. This then causes a ripple effect to commercial providers who may include open source components in their products (like Apple’s OS X) and the business who use these open source and commercial products. (sniff, sniff…do I smell SCO in the air?)

As a business person, I’m a strong proponent of IP protection and patent law. But eventually in a complicated soup like the technology industry, where stuff has to work together and interoperate, there needs to be some consideration of the best interest of the customer. Throw the open source ingredient into the pot and you get technology vendors who don’t believe or understand the open source movement looking for ways to protect their interests (i.e., revenue streams).

This is nothing new in the wider economic sense. All you have to do is do a Google news search for protectionism. You get examples ranging from the US government’s protectionism of the US Ports to the EU’s protectionism of sportswear imported into the union. The underlying goal of each of these examples is to protect one group form changes that are occurring in the larger world. There are lots of social and economic reasons that can be given for why the protectionism is needed, but the real reason is anchored in the fact that it’s hard for people to change. And in today’s change accelerating world, it’s only getting more and more difficult.

The technology field has been going through it’s own core changes for the past five to six years. The over spending of the bubble years led to the cost cutting and maturity of the use of IT within business. Large IT “deals” started to decline; programmers who were lured into the cycle of self-destructive levels of work and productivity for the false hopes of quick wealth started to turn their energies to the altruistic endeavor of open source development; businesses started to see real value and security in the open source projects.

A technology company is no different than a person…change is hard. Many companies fail because they either don’t change when they need to or early enough, or they don’t change fast enough. Then look at the biggest, they can delay the change through the use of their legal armies. Figure out a way to use the legal system against those that are causing the change. Boost your own declining revenue streams by instilling fear in your customers (all customers love vendors for doing that…ever hear of a license audit?). The move by Microsoft and Novell is nothing more than technology protectionism.

So Microsoft is scared. Windows Vista hasn’t been going as smoothly as they need it to. All of the cool features it was supposed to have have almost all disappeared due to technical difficulties of implementing them in the hodgepodge of legacy code. Apple’s computer and OS popularity has grown. Deja vu with the Firefox browser’s popularity continuing to grow. Another 800 pound gorilla by the name of Google has been invading it’s part of the jungle for a while now. How is the company going to keep or grown it’s 28% profit margin in order to keep another 800 pound gorilla (the street) happy? Release the IP lawyers.

An so business start to protect their own self interests and pay into the protectionism scheme. Of course these business need to save face themselves, so they change the name of the scheme 180 degrees from protectionism to interoperability. Wouldn’t you do the same if you had a well funded ($34B) army of lawyers marching toward you?

I just don’t buy this spin that this deal is about making Linux and Windows more interoperable. If that was the case, there are open standards that Linux has supported from it’s inception that Microsoft could start to fully support (interoperability is about more than just two companies products). This is all about Microsoft protectionism. I think the pressure that Microsoft is feeling is greater than what the general press is talking about (personal opinion). Rather than trying to inovate their way out problems they face with the changing technology marketplace, they are taking the protectionism route. Beat up on the marketplace by threatening to sue unless they buy a Linux License from Microsoft.

I’m calling shenanigans on this use of the De Tocqueville model.

Today a colleague and I were chatting about some random topic (so random I can’t honestly remember what it was) that spun into a discussion of that “SeatGuru Guy”. My colleague mentioned the Fortune article that talked about how the guy behind SeatGuru makes $120k/year (back in 2004) from advertising on his website that he originally started as a hobby.

This then lead to a discussion of my friend’s HotSpotr community driven wifi database site. Andre built this web application as an exercise in Ruby on Rails development, made it accessible to anyone to add hotspot info into it, and then began telling his network of contacts about it. About 4 months later, it has grown into a DB of 1100-ish wifi spots from around the country. Andre has invested a bit more time to add new features to it and the site’s community continues to grow. Now, in itself, this application isn’t anything unique in nature…wifi database sites have been around for a while and there are a number of them that have many more hotspots listed than Andre’s. But I still use Andre’s.

Why? Because it’s the best functioning wifi application I have found! It’s mashed-up with Google Maps, provides useful ancillary information about places with free wifi, allows me to find what I’m looking for with only two page views, and recently even provides a mobile interface (which I have used a number of times while on the road). It works, it works very well, and it’s getting better. So I tell everyone about it and give back to the community by adding new spots when I find them. (Keep up the great work Andre!)

At this point, it’s still advertising free. Andre did this as a project to learn a new technology in his spare time but also to develop something that he hoped others could use. Back in the early days of the web (the Mosaic era), I created something similar–a free service listing Freenets/Community Networks around the country. I did it because I was involved with my local Freenet, and thought others would find the service valuable (they did, I even won a few of the early “web awards” for the site). This is the altruistic root of community…and what makes most great community web sites great.

My concern here is that we are loosing our understanding of what is meant by community. How many of the other hotspot sites out there make money off of their service though the advertising fees? There is nothing wrong with that in itself. I’m sure most of these sites started off just like Andre’s. But when these sites start focusing more on the form of how to drive more advertising revenue (i.e., make users visit more pages before they find what they want, plaster as many ads on the page as possible to drive up the revenue per view) versus the function of how to provide great value, they lose sight of why they started. Form wins over Function. The trust of the community is broken.

[I'm using Andre's site as an simple, personal example. You can see this same thing in the histories of a number of the Web 2.0 companies. The most successful (the measurement of which ranges from number of users to acquisition cost) understand this battle and have walked the fine line of pleasing their community by still providing value while having the community fund them in a fashion that doesn't alienate the community.]

In the debate of Form versus Function, I’ll side with function every time. However, I’m also a pragmatist…I have a mortgage to pay just like others and I understand the reason behind placing ads on a site. If Andre’s site becomes popular enough, I wouldn’t blame him if joins Google’s AdSense network. It’s when the Form starts taking precedence over the function of the service originally offered that I’ll have to have a little conversation with Andre (most likely over drinks…Delusion Andre?).

This leads me a new little twist in the eternal battle of Form versus Function…Gimme Some Candy. Gimme Some Candy is the way zefrank, my current favorite vloggers, funds his video blog the show with zefrank. I stumbled across his vlog when a fellow business travel showed it to me in the concierge lounge of our hotel during a recent trip. zefrank created this idea to fund his vlog without advertising by simple letting people donate money to him if they like what they saw. Each episode, you can give him some candy by donating to sponsoring his show. The more you donate, the bigger and flashier the icon you get. These icons (and any text message you want to share with the world) are then displayed on the following episode. So not only is zefrank funding his show, he is providing a way for the community to rate his shows and also allow the sponsors to do some advertising (the text appears as a tooltip for your icon) .

(pssttt…ze: bring back your “favorites” list of the shows that brought in the most candy…)

What I love about his concept is the simplicity and elegance of it. Function wins with a creative nod to Form. The community supports the service and service provider (capitalism at it’s best).

In a word….Brilliant!

Lately, I have been doing some advising for a friend of mine on a new technology business. They are in the early stages of building out a new SaaS offering and they are planning out their technology infrastructure. The discussions that we have been having would be all to familiar to those of us who sold through the “bubble years”. How big do you plan your infrastructure?

The enthusiastic ones talk about the thousands upon thousands of possible customers and millions of visitors per day (at least that part is different from the bubble…back then it was millions of customers and 100′s of Millions of visitors…at least I was fortunate enough to work with a couple of the companies who actually did that type of volume). The cautious ones talk about minimizing the number of moving parts and not make it too complicated. The pragmatic ones (I consider myself part of this group) try to strike a balance between the two.

During the bubble you needed to spend literally millions on infrastructure to run an Internet company. Today, open source packages enable you to do this for close to nothing. You can build out a very robust, flexible, and scalable infrastructure based on open source (can you say Google?). But the question still exist, how much do you need and at what point.

The specific question comes down to a single source for user information (most specifically their authentication) for the customers and visitors to the web based service. One thought is to implement an LDAP system right away for future grown and flexibility. Another thought is to just build it into the web site.

For the record, I’m part of the LDAP camp. I think it will provide the flexibility of a single source of truth for users right now and is standard enough that most open source packages can hook into it for authentication. The plan includes adding multiple services that are either free or for charge, and a users set of services could belong to both groups. The thought of trying to synchronize user authentication information between multiple systems across each service just adds too much complexity.

If anyone has any opinions to share on this topic, I look forward to hearing them. How are others out there implementing their infrastructure for similar situations?

For the past few months, I have been working with two well know Financial Services firms around “SOA” initiatives. I put quotes around SOA because different terms describing services are used in each firm for various reasons (usually politically in nature). At the core, each firm is looking at how to use services to facilitate greater levels of reuse within their development organizations. One interesting fact to note is each firm’s primary driver: one is doing this to reduce the rate of increase in IT spend, the other is hoping to increase the velocity of their application development cycles (shorten the cycles to get products out faster).

One of the most interesting aspects that has come out of this work is the acute awareness of the social aspects of SOA and how important that is for the success of any initiative. (Steve Vinoski has written a wonderful article about the Social Side of Services).

Firm A has invested considerably in socializing the concepts of SOA and reuse through out their organization (up to the highest levels of management). They have a very clear plan on how to implement services across their organization; understanding of new positions that will need to be added to ensure services succeed; functional technical areas that will need to be addressed to enable services; mechanisms to measure the amount of reuse in order to track their progress; programs to educate the developers on services and reuse. All this work was done by the Office of the CTO and took time and effort to put in place, but Firm A realized the need for this and made this investment.

Firm B decided over a year ago that they needed to do SOA based on all the hype in the market place. This decision was made by the business side of the house versus the technology side. Services were soon showing up in project requirements the business side was sending over to the IT Development groups. There was no real centralized planning or coordination with regards to services. Now IT is playing catchup and trying to make sense of all services currently out there. One of the big problems they have is that most of the services that are available are not really reusable by most others, just services internal functionally from applications.

Doing a postmortem on Firm B’s services, you see a number of number of mis-steps that has been taken with their SOA initiative. One issue is the fact that the business side of the house needs to provide functional requirements, not technical requirements. A second, more important, issues is that fact that Firm B totally ignored the social side of SOA…they never took into account the political, organization, and cultural changes that need to be implemented to make SOA really work for them. They never did an analysis of how services could benefit their application environment.

While on paper Firm B has been doing SOA much long than Firm A, Firm A will see value from SOA much sooner than FirmB. In this case, a little investment will go a long way for Firm A.

It’s still amazes me how much technology development or implementation (even at large companies) occurs without taking into consider the social impact of the technology. Even when it’s the social impact of technology on techies (i.e., developers or managers of technology).

I’m curious to hear from others with regards to the social techniques in use within their organizations when it comes to SOA or technology in general…

I just happened to surf over to the Sun website today and ran across Proejct Blackbox. a quote from the website: “Project Blackbox is a prototype of the world’s first virtualized data center–built into a shipping container and optimized to deliver extreme energy, space, and performance efficiencies.”

I didn’t spend more than 10 seconds thinking about this before I thought…that doesn’t make sense. The whole concept of a ‘portable’ data center for quick capacity addition make sense. Take a shipping container, insert a cooling system, power system (with one huge plug!), and 1U servers and presto…instant portable mini-data center.

The problem…why in the world would you paint the thing black? (I’ll get to the logos in a bit)

Let me see if I remember back to my high school physics courses….black absorbs light, white reflects it….got it. Big steel container with hot computers running inside of it. The container is designed to just be dropped off in the parking lot next to your data center…most likely in the direct sun. Let’s paint it black so it get even hotter and paint a big Sun Log on it so everyone knows what it is (psst: guys…ever wonder why most of your customer’s data centers don’t have big signs out front that says “XYZ Corp. Data Center”?)

This seems to be a great example of Marketing taking over a technology project and making bad decisions based on the need to add value (note: I have worked in marketing, and have great friends who are marketing wizards…). Let’s hope that common and business sense takes over for Sun on this project before this prototype goes into production.

This weekend was a series of technology distractions…something that happens from time to time much to the chagrin of my ever growing “not done yet” list…

Somehow, I discovered that Google finally ported their mobile Google Maps to the Palm OS. When was this released and how was it that I missed it until now?!?

Google maps running on a BlackBerry was one of the envy’s of mine since I first saw it. To have the power of Google Maps in my Palm Treo while traveling would be pure luxury. Especially with the nature of business sales travel…rushing to a meeting without directions, sudden changes to schedules, new customer locations, not knowing where the nearest Peet’s Coffee is…oh how business travel has changed with technology.

After using Google Maps for the past few days, I think it has made to the list of “must haves” for my Treo. The real time traffic info was a life saver already. And the satellite imagery is as cool as always…I was amazed at the zoom level on the phone…it almost seems to allow a closer zoom than Google Maps online. I guess I finally have to get around to trimming that tree in the front yard and figuring out who’s white car that is in my driveway?

Today I came across the new Treo 680 smart phone. The latest phone in the Treo line is targeted to be a “low cost” Treo for the masses. Treonauts has a wonderful review of the new phone. Upon first review, there isn’t a whole lot of new features in this phone other than the obvious change in form factor and color options. It makes sense that a phone targeted at the masses wouldn’t have a whole lot of new capabilities. The questions that immediately come to my mind is why has it take Palm so long to come out with this phone? There was a substantial gap between the Treo 650 and the next Treo Phone. I would have expected the 680 to have been along within a year of the 650.

I have been a palm user since about 1998 and an addict to my Palm 650 since the first day I had it. Finally, mobile email, my phone, and all the palm apps that I have embedded into my life in a single device! Sure, there are issues with the 650 (speaker not loud enough, lack of an easy way to switch from ring to vibrate to silent, wholly inadequate built in mail applicaiton) but it was a Palm! And Palm would fix those usability issues with the next phone right (well, not with the 70X series, but surely with the 680…can’t wait to get my hands on one to find out…)

But why was I addicted? It’s not because the Treo is the best phone or the best phone/PDA combo. The primary reason I have been addicted to my 650 is the fact that it runs the Palm OS. I have been using the PalmOS for so long that the thought of switching to a different platform scares me because of the all the applications and data that lives on my 650 and how dependant I have become upon them. Thinking of how much time it would take to integrate a new device into my work flow as well as converting the 10,000+ contacts scares me.

The real question that the 680 raises from me is the viability of the palm platform. What was the cause of the significant gap in time between the 650 and the 700 or 680? There are rumors flying around like crazy about Palm pushing Microsoft to let them develop a more “palm like” interface to Windows Mobile; of Palm porting the PalmOS to Linux; etc.

The real question is, should I start suffering through the pain of a conversion off of Palm?