Last night, a follower on Twitter asked me the following:

Hey @getwired, how does someone become a Microsoft analyst?

January 4, 2012 12:16 am via SeesmicReplyRetweetFavorite

@robertmclaws

Robert McLaws

For those who don’t know, my day job is as a research analyst at Directions on Microsoft (DoM). Unlike most analysis firms that focus horizontally across various vendors in various markets, we focus exclusively on Microsoft (which DoM has done for 20 years this year). This single vendor approach has enabled us to dive deep and lets us answer questions about Microsoft’s software, services, hardware, and even complex licensing agreements at a level few other organizations can (sometimes even including Microsoft itself).

Like so many things, there isn’t really a “formula” to how I, or any of my analyst peers, arrived here. While almost all of us are EXMSFT, all of us have significant experience in some combination of the following:

• working at Microsoft itself
• writing about Microsoft
• advising, managing, or deploying Microsoft software in the enterprise

For me, I’ve had a series of fortunate events that have led to a career path that has been quite a fun ride. I’ve worked with Windows for 20 years this year as well, and worked on Windows itself (primarily XP and early on during Longhorn) for almost 5 years.

As I mentioned, there is no magic formula.  The most important parts are  an interest in Microsoft and general curiosity in the  enterprise (and increasingly, consumer) software  technology spaces, and a desire to help customers/readers understand it.

Last Friday I posted this on Twitter:

Netflix/Quickster, GoDaddy, Verizon… fascinating to watch an Internet beat-down cause a business decision to be reversed.

2011 should go down on record as the year that companies – some of them, anyway, experienced resonance to the point that they were forced to reverse a key business decision. I refer to resonance as the innate amplification of topics across the Internet as they reverberate from user to user that agrees with the sentiment. Amusing topics that catch people’s interest spread fast. Topics that agitate people or make them angry? Much, much faster. This is how Twitter works – it’s a sentiment amplifier. Sites like Reddit and Digg are not that different, though sentiment there spreads and amplifies differently.

While it is possible that Twitter isn’t solely responsible for this effect, I believe that the half-life of tweets on Twitter demonstrates that topics that don’t just “die out” organically in a relatively quick manner can turn into a pretty steaming pile pretty quickly. Become a trending topic on Twitter, and you’re likely to wind up on mainstream news outlets as the latest company getting “Tweeted in effigy” by angry consumers.

Sure, United, FedEx, and numerous other companies have experienced resonance at the hands of indivual employees. That’s unfortunate. But it’s also a different problem, since it is those individuals acting on their own and making bad decisions that leads to the problem.

But this is different – Netflix, GoDaddy, and Verizon experienced resonance made exponentially more impactful because they made decisions that, if thought about beforehand, could have been avoided completely. When making a decision that impacts public policy (GoDaddy), will take away features from your product or service (Netflix) or cost your customers more (Netflix and Verizon) especially while adding no net value for your customers, you need to ask yourself, as an executive at a business, “is this decision something that is going to either take away perceived value from our customers, or could it agitate people who don’t see eye to eye with our political viewpoint?” If it is, you probably want to know the answers to:

1. Why you are doing it?
2. What’s the cost of not doing it?
3. What is your worst case scenario if it resonates?

If you can’t answer those points, you should probably duck and cover, and hope for the best.

Businesses made decisions every day. I’m not saying that you can’t, or that you shouldn’t move forward as a business. But in an age of Twitter resonance, businesses need to be aware of just how fast the bad word can spread, and how damaging it can be to their brand. Be proactive on social media. Understand the emotions of your consumers. Be prepared to message your decision in a positive light, but understand that your consumers may not see it that way, and you need to prepare for the worst. For goodness sake, test it among a sample of customers before you do it if it will take away perceived value from your product or service. Don’t just shoot first. Because otherwise there will be way more questions later than you are comfortable with.

As a child, my favorite treat was a cheeseburger. Not just any, but a Burger King cheeseburger “minus mustard”. Years later, a cashier pointed out that BK cheeseburgers didn’t have mustard on them, but nobody had ever corrected me. Have it your way indeed. I’ve had innumerable meals out. I’ve eaten too much fast food, candy, sodas, and junk food. A few years ago, while we lived in Austin, my wife and I somehow began to contemplate eating healthier. I don’t know if it was the arrival of our second child, or what happened – but one of us started to consider the origin of our food, and it pretty much threw everything asunder. We started really trying to eat organic. Now, when I say try to eat organic, I really mean that. It is an ordeal for an American to truly eat organic, and it’s getting harder.

If you’re unfamiliar with organic food, this Wikipedia entry on organic food may familiarize you with it. By and large, the idea behind organic is that the “inputs” (seed/feed/and pest/weed controls) to create a food are not synthetic. So the use of chemical fertilizers, radiation, or genetic modification are all forbidden.

Unfortunately, as organic food has become mainstream, as books,  documentaries, and films such as Food Inc. (book/DVD), Foodmatters, King Corn, Super Size Me, Tomatoland, and even Fast Food Nation have changed how many consumers view their own “inputs”, many of the multinational corporations that sell us food have realized what an important revenue source organic food could be for them, and grabbed hold of one organic company after another. What happens then? This:  How “natural” claims deceive consumers and undermine the organic label. Most likely in order to reduce costs, reduce price, maximize market and maximize profit, organic ingredients are slowly removed from “formerly organic” products, resulting in products that were organic now being largely or entirely conventional. I found it sad walking the aisles at a grocery the other day, just to check them, and indeed a few Annie’s products said, “made with organic pasta” but of course there was a grab bag of conventional ingredients in there, possibly even including GMO ingredients.

So as we watch the US organic food market get consumed by the big industrial packaged goods manufacturers, and slowly shed most or all of its organic ingredients, what happens next? Stores like our local co-op, PCC, and Whole Foods, and anyone else trying to still offer organic foods to those of us trying to avoid eating GMO or other conventionally processed foods have to reach farther and farther away to find organic foodstuffs. Recently, I’ve started aggressively checking labels on our organic food. If you eat organic and watch closely, you’ll see more and more of your food being imported, because it’s cheaper, easier, or both, for manufacturers to source abroad instead of the US. So you get organic canned fruit from Asia. Frozen organic peas from China (yes, China). Organic honey from India, jelly from Italy… It seems like it gets farther and farther away all the time.

For me, this means a couple of things. 1) I need to start buying local organic, in season, and store it. 2) I need to learn how to jar and possibly can my own foods and jellies. 3) I need to find more locally sourced food direct from farmers.

I’ve been learning to make my own yogurt and cheeses, initially for fun, but as I do it, I’m starting to realize there may be a financial upside to it as well, in addition to the fact that I know all of the ingredients that went into it.

All that aside, it concerns me how organic is getting shoved farther and farther out of the limelight. It shocks me what some people will put into their body and call “food”. Yet the big industrial food concerns in the US control the message, they control the packaging, and they control labeling and government. Until we replace our current crop of politicians (outside of a few) with those who are more concerned with the health and well-being of citizens, not the whims of agribusiness, this won’t change. Until we overhaul the USDA and FDA to be organizations there to be citizen-focused first, and be averse to the desires of these corporations, this won’t change.

It shouldn’t be hard to buy sustainable, affordable, organic products in the United States. But I feel like it’s getting harder and harder.

Who doesn’t love a free lunch?

C’mon now – you know there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Yet why do countless people fall for “the inbox hustle“? I’ve been working on whitelisting technology for over a decade, and my sojourn has taken me far from where it started on Windows to the Internet at large, and to the base psychology at play when a typical person gets gamed by crap in their inbox, on Twitter, or on the Facebook wall of a friend (2 Free Southwest Airlines tickets. I know you’ve seen that recently – we all have), or even some of the more obnoxious ads you see crawling around the Internet. I’ll be blogging even more about this in the coming months – but I wanted to pass along a little of what I have learned when it comes t0 the most fundamental components of every Internet scam. In fact, it’s probably the foundation of every scam on the Internet. It is… The seven deadly sins. Regardless of any theological ideology you may follow, the basic premises of the 7 ideas expressed in the list underlie a few basic psychological drivers of humans.

There are countless  iterations of the seven deadly sins around – but at their heart, they’re almost identical. What are they?

• Lust
• Greed
• Gluttony
• Discouragement
• Wrath
• Envy
• Pride

In many ways, I’ve probably just told you a key secret to marketing. But with Internet scams, it is the key. If you can hit one of these chords, you’ll probably succeed. There are deeper tricks at play in most spam, and I’ll get to those in time. But if you step back and watch the email spam you receive over a week, the Twitter bots or Facebook linkbait you see your friends get sideswiped by, I can all but guarantee it will match one of those 7. In fact, most of it will match just the first two.

I’m a little strange. I collect spam. Most people delete it. I collect it. I analyze many aspects of it. Below, I’d like to share an example of each sin, in the form of an actual spam subject line I’ve received over the past year. I like to refer to the spam subject line as “The hook”. The job of the hook is to catch your eye. It’s the shiny object designed to distract your prefrontal cortex for a second, and trick your mind into thinking the risk/benefit of performing the action you’re about to do is actually in your best interest. Thus, the 7 deadly sins.

• Lust: View pics of singles in your area
• Greed: Lock in Low Rates with LendingTree before it’s too late!
• Gluttony: Enjoy A Week Of Subway Subs
• Discouragement: Weird Tip of a Flat Belly
• Wrath: News Alert about Avandia!  Has anyone in your household taken Avandia? You need to read this
• Envy: Search our list of foreclosed homes.
• Pride: 10+6^2=?? How Smart are you

Much like my recent post about the desire path, the reality is that it is practically human nature to want something for nothing – or want something we can’t have. The reality is that if everyone took a second to think before they clicked on every link to ask themselves, “is this too good to be true?“, nobody would ever get bitten by phish or malware. Luckily for criminals, many computer users will click first, and ask questions later. Feed them a link based upon the 7 deadly sins, and you can all but guarantee it, if the net is cast wide enough. Just look at the Love Letter virus, or so many other recent attacks. So many begin with simple social engineering to click a link or download an infected file. But the hook is, more often than not, a basic play on very primitive human desires.

Almost a year ago I posted a two part set of posts discussing “The war for the family room”, where I discussed an impending battle between the Xbox, Apple TV, and Google TV. Things are evolving quite nicely. Though Google TV has effectively flopped in it’s first (overpriced and overly complex) implementation, I’m sure Google will be back.

In the meantime, I wanted to take a bit of a look into where all three are now.

Apple TV – more content providers, but largely focused on iTunes, Netflix, Vimeo, YouTube, and several sports channel “apps”. No live TV (not shocking), but expanded photo support (a single iCloud Photo Stream) and iCloud retrieval of purchased TV content (and music, including ripped, if you use Music Match).

Xbox – new dashboard released yesterday brought a Metro look and feel and several new content “apps”, with more to come over the next few months around the world. I really believe we’re headed towards a world where some WinRT apps will run here in time. We’ll see.

Google TV – Well, they’ve updated it, but their partner story isn’t happy. They have an app store, but very few customers. IMHO, the platform is on hiatus. We’ll see if it gets renewed and taken seriously.

An interesting commonality with all three platforms is that you can now use the respective phone platform as a remote control for the device itself beyond the normal remote you would use with it (yesterday’s Xbox update delivered that for WP7 users).

In a conversation today, th0ugh, a very interesting difference came up between these three devices; their content acquisition stories.

Microsoft is partnering with quite a few content providers (some of whom are obscure to me, but perhaps it’s because I’m cable and sports-challenged). I mean quite a few content providers. Many of these still require a subscription, some of whom require a cable subscription (or cable with specific channels), though some are free.

Apple is being incredibly strategic (stingy?) about what’s on the Apple TV content list. Initially YouTube, Netflix, adding Vimeo and some sports coverage (NBA, MLB, NHL). I believe sports is a fundamental missing link that would prevent many cord-cutters from jumping to Apple TV (and off of cable). But by and large, bypassing providers themselves (also omitting Hulu – <grumble>. In essence, Apple has really focused on the content, not on providers.

Google, like Apple, also focused on content directly, at least initially. Google’s initial ethos was all of the content you want, direct from the Web. Pretty much every content provider kicked Google in the groin, and blocked Google TV devices from accessing their content on the Web (killing almost all of the device’s intended utility). I think in their refocus on Google TV, Google has taken much more of an approach like Microsoft’s and is trying to bring apps to the platform for whomever wants to play.

My concern with Microsoft’s, and possibly Google’s strategy is it doesn’t actually help cord-cutters (it doesn’t help you if you actually want to save money). While Apple may have less content in many ways through its direct content channels, the amount you save not having to pay for cable can in some cases justify actually buying TV content on iTunes instead of paying for cable to get access to the content channel. This is what we’ve found in my family; with the $60+ that we save by not having cable, we can either watch content live over the HDTV antenna or in a worst case, watch it on iTunes if it is available for purchase.

Over the next few years, video content will be shifting immensely. How we watch it, where we watch it, what we watch it on, what we pay for it, and what kind of advertising we have to/want to watch in order to access it. Much like iTunes and the Internet did to shift the music industry, and the Internet, Kindle, iPad, and eBooks as a whole did to publishing, cable companies, television networks, local affiliates, and television consumers should get ready – there’s some pretty intense tectonic events coming to the video content marketplace.

edit: An important omission. I failed to mention Amazon’s content play. Amazon is currently relying on several proprietary set-top-boxes to stream their content to your TV. I’m not sure they will be… content to sit this out. I have to think they’ll do their own set top box within the next few years in order to try and control the channel.

It’s been almost a year. I can’t believe it. For almost an entire year, pundits (including myself have been talking about ARM and Windows. We started the year with lots of questions. We end the year with almost all of those questions… unanswered.

It’s Microsoft’s prerogative whether to answer the question of how well enterprise customers will be able to port any of their line-of-business (LOB) or ISVs can port any of their apps to Win32 on ARM. It was a huge question many of us walked into BUILD with, and several days later, walked back out with. The other day, Mary Jo Foley brought up the unanswered question again – “Microsoft to drop Desktop App from Windows 8 ARM tablets?“. It’s Microsoft’s question to answer when they’re ready. But I know Mary Jo’s readers, as well as my readers (and many of Microsoft’s partners – many of whom are also our valued readers) really would like to see some answer to this. We’ll find out, when Microsoft is ready.

As I look back on the year and Windows, I recall four distinct posts talking about Windows 8 and ARM . First, where I pondered whether we would see any announcement of Windows on ARM, pondered what SteveB’s pronouncements at CES almost a year ago meant for ARM (which raised many questions not answered yet, or not answered until BUILD), talked about the Win8/ARM announcements at D9/Computex in June, and talked again about Win32 after BUILD when many were writing Win32 off for dead. I also sang a little ditty about landscape vs. portrait oriented tablets, but I don’t think anybody ever read that.

Of all of these, I believe my post on September 20th on Win32  is the most important. In that post, I highlighted the important role that Win32 plays in Windows – even in the BUILD preview we received. I also do not believe any fundamental rearchitecture has occurred in the last 3 months or will in the next two that could calve off Win32 from the product.

Many have been stating that there would be no “desktop app” in Windows 8, as Mary Jo’s piece did. As far as I can tell she was not the originator of this errant term – it may have even been a proper noun that originated at/near BUILD that I either missed the pronouncement of, or have forgotten – perhaps out of a desire to forget it.

Let me be pointedly clear. There is no “desktop app” in Windows. Not in Windows Vista, not in Windows 7, not in Windows 8. Explorer is the host process for the Windows shell – even the new one, even in Windows 8. If there is no provision to show the Win32 desktop, that’s fundamentally different – but as I’ve said on Twitter – that’s not removing the room from the house, it is spackling over the door.

Given the large amount of code in Windows 8 that still runs on top of Win32 itself (including WinRT), even on ARM such as Task Manager, Notepad, and several of the deeper caverns in the dark cave that is the Windows Control Panel (I saw it myself at BUILD, at the partner pavilions). I don’t believe those are going away. I strongly believe the Windows desktop (or as errantly referred to, “the desktop app”) will remain. It’s just a question of how well developers – recompilers of existing apps, largely – of Win32 applications will ever be able to target it as a compile architecture using Visual Studio.

I can’t be certain, but I personally believe that Microsoft has elected to not discuss Win32 on ARM for one (or both) of two reasons. 1) Win32 on ARM performance isn’t peachy, and they’d rather people didn’t focus on that as the endgame at all, and 2)WinRT is the application platform for Windows 8 – any muddling of that message risks the viability of ARM completely.

Earlier this year I noted:

Throughout it’s life, NT has supported quite a few non x86 architectures – but in the end, every one has been deprecated – even the Intel Itanium (IA64) architecture is now end-of-lifed – leaving x86 and it’s descendant x64 as the sole Windows architectures. Again.

That’s very, very important to understand. Whether 1 or 2 above is the reason why Microsoft won’t discuss ARM and Win32 in the same sentence doesn’t matter. Win32 application portability has always sucked on any non x86-based processor. Even if you can get the entire OS fundamentals available for Win32 on the non-x86 architecture, either the horrible performance, some section of missing, broken, or changed Win32 calls, or a vacuum of partner redistributable libraries that prevented app porting fatally hosed every platform port other than x64. Really. Things haven’t ever worked out as planned except with x64, which is a fundamentally different case than any other architecture.

WinRT is Microsoft’s bet on the future. Even if little niblets of Win32 are available on ARM in the end, even if you can run certain .NET apps or certain recompiled PE binaries using certain redistributable libraries there, WinRT is the bridge Microsoft is betting on.

In many ways, this isn’t unlike the origins of Windows NT, which as I noted earlier this year was largely done on the Intel i860 RISC  processor, and not the Intel x86, in order to encourage platform portability. Surely Steven Sinofsky and a few others at Microsoft know just how much of Win32 will be customer visible/usable in Windows 8 on ARM. But they don’t want you to think about that. They want all eyes on WinRT – far above the processor architecture, as WinRT needs to have a breadth of apps available in order to cantilever Windows 8 on ARM to success by leveraging apps written on x86/x64 Windows systems.

Even if you’ve never heard the term, you’ve used a desire path. We all have.

It’s the shortcut with the well worn path between the two houses on your way to elementary school. It’s the path between the science building and the engineering building at your college, where the ornate fountain in the middle and the circular/intersecting sidewalks looked pretty from above when they designed it, but meant many people wouldn’t take the long way all the way around, and would instead cut across the grass.

Growing up in Montana, desire lines were especially apparent in winter, as kids on their way to school would figure out the “fastest” way to school, even if it meant trudging through a foot of fresh snow (and getting soaking wet in the process) to do so.

Desire paths (also sometimes called desire lines) are all around us. Human beings are creatures of habit. Once we realize something we do regularly, we often (sometimes unconsciously) seek out ways to “simplify” that task.

Consider a few examples; Trains, cars, and planes are all desire paths that are much faster than walking or taking a Conestoga wagon. The TV remote control, the “programmable” (arguably) VCR, the DVR, Netflix, are all desire paths that are much more convenient than turning the TV to the exact channel at the exact right time and putting your posterior on the couch for the duration of the show. The telegraph, telephone, cordless phone, and cell phone of course each became desire paths to communicating easily over a distance, with increasing flexibility.

Today, I see so much software designed with the thought “Oh, all the features that users will love in our product!” Wrong. Simply, surely, wrong. Technology (software, hardware, or most importantly, the fusion of both sold as a product), should never be about what users “could get done”. Done right, in a manner that users will fall in love with (and come back to buy again), it’s a matter of putting yourself in the place of the user and understanding what they want to get done – what they need to get done. It’s understanding the tasks they need to accomplish – the tasks they already do today, without your technology, but it’s your job to consider that entirely and take note of what’s standing in their way from accomplishing those tasks now in a faster, easier, more reliable, and more thoughtful way.

Look around you at any piece of technology that appears on a strong uptake. The technology that consumers are buying in droves. Look at it carefully. See something common in them?

• The iPhone was a desire path to simplifying the process of making phone calls, listening to music, finding directions to a location, or finding something on the Web, wherever we were.
• iTunes was a desire path to making your CD’s more portable and then simply a way to get new music (then movies, then… you get the idea).
• The iPad is selling in droves likely because it is a desire path to accomplishing the relatively simple tasks that so many users wanted to accomplish with computers, such as e-mail or Web browsing, but without the overhead necessary to use a computer running Windows or even Mac OS (software management burden, hardware complexity, power management and power plugs, let alone upfront sunk costs to buy the device).
• The Xbox Kinect is a desire path to home console gaming without having to learn arbitrary gaming controllers, instead using your hands to interact with the software directly.
• Google is a desire path to helping people finding answers; for a long time, search engines were a great example of desire paths, as users would change in droves like a murmuration of starlings as a new search engine found things faster or returned more accurate results.
• Facebook built the desire path many of us always wanted, to be able to more easily keep in touch with family and friends.
• Siri, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, is also a good example of a desire path – it asks the questions, “how can we help users accomplish the tasks they already use their phone for, but faster and easier?” and “how can we help the user find things around them?”

Many of these ideas also had first mover advantage working for them, which is quite hard for a latecoming competitor to unwind. Often competitors will offer compensation or gifts of some type (Microsoft is doing this with Windows Phone 7, and Google is with Google+, both latecomers to their respective battlefields. However, compensation rarely results in loyalty. To overcome an entrenched first mover, the desire path you help the user establish must be shorter, more convenient – users must find that accomplishing things is faster or easier than with earlier, more established competitors in the field. You have to point out how long the established competitor’s path is compared to yours, but do so in a manner that truly emphasizes and empathizes with the way the user already walks that desire path – how they use your competitor’s device today. Playing up a new interface design won’t sell in volume. Users rarely buy based purely on a design, they buy based on emotion of how their life will be different if they make this purchase. They see themselves using this piece of technology – this software or hardware, and how it could improve their life.

I’ve seen quite a few startups recently who can’t really pitch what they actually do in any meaningful way. “We’re a social network for sharing pictures with people near you.” “We’re like Facebook, but limited to your closest friends.” Huh? How exactly are you helping the user? Why will they switch the way they live today, with the limited free time and energy they can dedicate, to using your solution? What’s in it for them? Do you understand how your users accomplish tasks today  can (and should) help guide design and business decisions – understanding how your users live, what they do, and what they wish they could do faster, easier, with less complexity.

If you’re a startup, or if you’re the world’s largest software company, or an electronics manufacturer and  you hope to broadly adopted and have huge sales, a huge user base, huge ad revenue (whatever your business model is), you must be able to answer this question about your users:

“We take <insert complex part of a user’s life> and we make it easier/more convenient by <insert how you provide a desire path they’ll fall in love with and use all the time>.”

There is an ugly side to the desire path als0 – the side that encourages humans to not exercise, eat convenient food even if it’s bad for them, or circle the mall parking lot for 10 minutes just to find a parking space when they could park in the farthest space and walk in in that time. Perhaps I’ll discuss that mode at another time.

I remember the original iPhone well. I remember incredibly slow network connectivity but pretty darn good battery life. The iPhone 3G I replaced it with pretty evenly swapped those. I learned that it was worthwhile to turn 3G on when I really needed it and off when I didn’t. 3G giveth bandwidth and taketh away battery runtime.

My iPhone 4 today runs close to an entire day on a charge, which usually includes use for email, Twitter, Facebook, and Pandora. However, when I go to conferences, I find that the phone doesn’t last the entire day. Between more screen time, more Twitter synching, more email, it just tends to last about 75% or less of a day.

At a conference in October, I thought about this, and pondered something. Almost no apps on my phone actually need 3G all the time. In fact, most of them for background tasks (aside from Pandora) work fine with the older EDGE network. Apple has also been making WiFi connections a bit more promiscuous as well (such as WISPr for AT&T subscribers to connect to AT&T WiFi networks automatically, which likely results in battery savings as well when WiFi is available).

In order to improve battery life, when the iPhone isn’t in active use in the owner’s hands, Apple should run with slower (more power effient networks) such as AT&T’s EDGE as the default network connection if WiFi is not available and no app that requires background 3G (Pandora, Spotify, etc) or foreground 3G (Safari, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc). In essence, when the phone is interactive, it still would run on a legacy network unless the app (as specified by the app developer at design time) pulled it to use the higher throughput network.

It may not prove viable on some networks if the carrier charges more for legacy network access than newer network connectivity. But where carriers do not charge a premium for legacy access, it could well provide a solution that would allow consumers to conserve battery life while making users do very little to get it.

The same could theoretically apply to 4G connections as well where devices or carriers would be using them – of course, Apple does not support any “4G” connectivity to date, but likely will in time when the market is there, costs are reasonable, and battery consumption is no longer abusive.

I am noticing a frightening trend. On iOS, there is a growing collection of “security” apps.

There is no such thing as a third-party security app on iOS (or on Windows Phone 7 for that matter). They don’t exist. There is no such thing.

On iOS, there is (thankfully) no framework for the background task approach that “classic” antivirus has used for the last 25 years. More importantly, due to a vetted application store, the need for such an approach is not present.

That isn’t to say that security vulnerabilities don’t exist in iOS, that they won’t continue to occur in iOS in the future, and that they cannot be exploited by those desiring to try and infect iOS devices – however, Apple does not (and Microsoft does not) believe that an active background process is the correct way to protect mobile devices from those kinds of attacks; which is wise, since it isn’t the correct way. Android is a separate matter, since the store is not vetted

That brings me back to my original point. Why are there a growing number of apps that claim they provide security protection on iOS? They can’t do that.

If your app has to be in the foreground to provide any protection, it’s not protecting my device or my data.

If it has to be running and in the foreground in order to help me understand the security context of my phone (whether my phone is up-to-date or connecting to insecure wireless networks), it’s worse than not protecting, it’s dangerous.

As a technical user, I understand that security apps on iOS cannot possibly provide comprehensive protection. Non-technical users who don’t understand the limitations of iOS with regard to background tasks, and that these apps cannot provide protection in real-time are being provided a disservice, and frankly, a dangerous illusion. They are told that these apps can provide protection – but telling me if my phone is insecure only if I opt into launching your app, or telling me that my phone is infected when I’ve really just connected it to a Windows machine or Mac and you’ve found that I might infect another Windows machine or Mac if I connect it (yet still requiring me to run the app to know this) is not helpful.

What service are you providing the consumer? It’s disingenuous at best to provide an app on iOS (or Windows Phone 7) that claims to provide standalone security, but frankly, it’s harmful. Most also don’t provide any actual protection beyond apps and infrastructure already available from Apple in their own apps (Find My iPhone and iCloud backup), let alone in Apple’s own enterprise management framework or through Exchange ActiveSync (both of which do not use apps to perform their work – they do so using security fundamentals built into the device itself).

Unless Apple elects to provide a background active scanning framework for anti-malware (PLEASE DON’T!), I believe they should not approve apps in the Utility category that claim to provide security protection to users when the app is only able to perform that obligation when it is active in the foreground.

Also, Apple, while I’m at it; what’s the deal with approving any app with “security” in the title, but it’s in the category of “Entertainment”? Effectively all of these are all cutesy junk like that frankly preys on non-technical users to pay for them, but do nothing. You shouldn’t ever approve that kind of app. There are also apps in the Utility or other categories doing this as well – but the ones in Entertainment are by far the worst offenders.

I’ve long been critical of Google’s lack of “local” search focus. In particular, I think that they’ve missed a lot of opportunities to try and connect with local restaurants (no, not those with logos with you’d recognize – rather, those with food you’d remember), but it goes far deeper than just restaurants.

Google licensed Yelp content for some time, and even tried to acquire Yelp back in 2009 to try and fix things like this, and when that failed, Google apparently tried using Yelp’s content without approval, and Yelp accused Google of lifting their content.

Yesterday, I took a look at the newly released Bing for Mobile app on iPhone. It looks good, and provides a good face for Bing on the iPhone. Just for grins when a co-worker asked how well it worked for search on maps, I tried speaking “Find taco” into it – it did purport to have known my location. Don’t know why, but that’s what I thought of. Since then, I’ve been asking search engines everywhere, “Find taco”.

I then tested Siri on my co-worker’s iPhone 4S (still haven’t replaced my 4, yet). Siri is the only search engine that got it. While Bing and Google both think I’m asking about Taco Bell or Del Taco (neither of which, I contend, actually make tacos), or find restaurants nowhere near me, Siri did what I would hope. It pointed me to the recently opened, relatively popular, Milagro Cantina across the street from our offices (try the fish tacos!), and found several more restaurants as the scope moved farther away.

Some have contended that Apple missed the mark with Siri, that it can’t search “enough stuff”. I think Apple did the best possible thing they could have with Siri, and it mirrors the way Apple approaches everything else, constrained and minimalist, and beginning with the user first. It starts your search by, well, pretending the Internet doesn’t exist. It only goes to Google if you REALLY want it to, and it can’t find any other context for your request. It truly changes what “mobile search” means, and begins to really deemphasize the importance of other search engines on the iOS platform – or at least on the iPhone.

If you’re reading this, this generalization probably doesn’t apply to you. Like me, you probably treat Google as another lobe in your brain. But the reality is, most consumers don’t randomly search the Internet while mobile. No, they don’t. If they’re searching for something while mobile, odds are they either want to do something or find something geographically near where they are or where they will be soon, or perform some immediate action based upon information on their phone (Contacts, Calendar, E-Mail, Reminders, Notes, or Messages).

That’s why the combination of 1) Voice as the (hands free, relatively quick vs. typing) input mechanism. 2) Siri as the interpreter of your words. 3) The iPhone as the vehicle of your location, your persona data context and your Internet connection. 4) Most importantly, Apple’s seemingly constrained (but actually conscientious) choices of data sources for Siri are brilliant.

While Google, Bing, and every other Web search engine tries to find the parts of the infinitely expanding Web that are geographically near you, based on your location + their enormous indexes, or that could conceptually relate to products or services that you may be physically looking at at that time, Siri is working the other way – using Siri to parse your words, then starting with you and your location, and working through Yelp listings, your “data relationships” on your phone, as well as Wolfram Alpha and very finite data sources to see what is literally around you that may relate to your search. For reference, the sources Siri used to use prior to Apple are here – not sure how many continue today, but I believe the list could well be shorter, not longer.

Mobile search doesn’t begin with the Web. Mobile search begins with the user.

Update: Some have pointed out that depending on the entry point and/or the device used to get to Bing (the Tellme voice engine on WP7, for example), the results can be far more accurate than what I saw. On Bing for Mobile and the Bing Mobile Web site, the results returned still don’t return joy on my iPhone 4. It’s also very much the case that my quick, arbitrarily weak, statistically insignificant use case doesn’t provide a comprehensive test of either Siri (which has foibles – it isn’t perfect and can miss broad categories of queries, such as movie reviews in some cases), or the best examples of Bing or Google (which can definitely deliver good local searches in the right situations). I find that some of the blog posts I enjoy writing the most are done ad hoc, and released without me “sitting on them”. I did that with this yesterday night. I think that Microsoft has the right focus with Bing (as a “decision engine” rather than a “Web Search Engine”). For mobile search, the sources, the contextual processing of the query, and a consistent experience regardless of entrypoint mean everything. Without the context, and by throwing “what from the web matches this” at every query. I also think that Siri is most significant, and most damaging to Google in the long run simply because… It’s the new search verb on the iPhone – the new single-touch launch point to search what matters to you. You don’t Google on an iPhone 4S. You Siri.