Come on. Whose internal networks are always available? Articles like this are based on an unspoken premise that as long as you’re not in the cloud, you’ve got 100% uptime and accessibility. But of course that’s nonsense. The workforces of all businesses and other organisations, large and small, that do not rely on the cloud experience relatively frequent unavailability of applications or data. Those who have moved to serious cloud providers like Google Apps or MS BPOS benefit from much greater uptime.

Why do I say this? Because today I read in the FT (not providing link because logon required — that’s what you get, FT!) that Nokia’s strategy now is to be a “services” company. We’re talking about music, e-mail, social networking, that sorta stuff.

Nokia became what it is today by being the maker of the world’s best mobile phones. But it no longer makes the world’s best mobile phones — that is now being done by Apple, Palm, RIM, and possibly HTC and others who make Androids. The mobile phone future is in smartphones, and Nokia’s Symbian sets just don’t cut it anymore. Symbian is the past. The immediate future is iPhone OS, WebOS, Android, and maybe Blackberry (and maybe not).

So now Nokia wants to re-invent itself and be a provider of “services”. Well, Nokia has totally re-invented itself once before, right? It’s legendary how Nokia once made rubber boots and stuff like that, and then suddenly became the breakaway leader in mobile phones. But there are a couple problems with trying to pull this off again with a move into “services”.

First of all, when Nokia started into mobiles, the field was open. Sure, other players were also there — notably Motorola — but the entire market was there to play for because almost nobody had a mobile phone and the technology was very young. That ain’t the case with whatever Nokia is now calling “services”. Everyone’s already got email and music and social networking and what have you.

Secondly, I don’t know what they’re smoking up in Espoo, but whatever it is, it’s done in their memory and they’ve forgotten the lesson of CompuServe and AOL. Walled gardens will ultimately fail. The “services” people want the most will always come through the rough-and-tumble, competitive, genius-strewn Internet. That’s where the big successes always happen. (True, iTunes and the App Store are notable, not to say blinding, exceptions to this rule. But then, Apple has always been exceptional, and Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo is no Steve Jobs.) And as Apple first showed with Safari on the iPhone, the Web can work great on a phone, and as Google shows with its mobile-web-based Gmail, web-based applications for which one only needs a browser and an Internet connection can be as good as any device-based app. So it’s still all about the Internet, App Store notwithstanding.

Hey Olli-Pekka: it ain’t gonna happen, old fellow. You’re just creating a new CompuServe. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!

The two biggest good things about Gmail are the volume (basically limitless) and the awesome, awesome, awesome search.

The biggest bad thing? That I can’t turn off the threading. Okay, okay, I know that plenty of heat has already been generated by the debate between lovers and haters of Gmail’s “conversations” approach to presenting email in the UI. And I’ll be the first to recognise that this is a question of taste; I’d never try to argue that “conversations” are objectively superior to an Outlook-like reverse-chronological stack.

But I myself, quite personally, prefer the latter, and so do so many other people that I find it simply baffling that Google refuses to give us that option.

It’s as if Google IS saying that their taste in e-mail handling is objectively better than mine. “We know best how you should manage your e-mail, and we are going to teach you. You WILL do it our way” (excuse all the caps in there but I’m doing this on my iPhone and there don’t seem to be any text-formatting options in the WordPress iPhone app).

In the usual flame-war over this issue, the position taken by the pro-threading crowd is mostly some variation of “if you’re too stupid to comprehend that threading is better, then it’s just your own due punishment that you have to live with it.” As often as not, this is expressed with a rich helping of profanities.

I mention this because I’m having difficulty seeing how Google’s own position isn’t essentially the same, minus the non-corporate expletives. And so, Google, I can’t help asking: WTF? Why not just give your customers what they want? What, is it your mission to bring Truth and Enlightenment about e-mail threading to the masses? Please. How much can it really matter? Your motto is “Don’t be evil”, but I’ve got a better one for you: don’t be religious.

The new deal between MS and Nokia to put Office on Nokia’s phones has got a surprisingly massive blast of media attention. The civilian media are breathlessly reporting this as a big-huge world war against RIM. The tech crowd are correctly more sceptical of the importance or significance of it. My own main thought about it is, “How is this even a story? Who cares? I can already open most of the attachments I get; what would I want Office on my phone for?”

What does one need on their mobile device in the email attachments department? The ability to open and read PDFs, Word Docs, and, sure, maybe have a look at a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint presentation. On the very rare occasion, maybe you’ll want to do a minor edit to a Word doc or a presentation. But are you really going to sit there in your hotel dining room, or in your car in traffic, or on the beach, fiddling with a spreadsheet on your mobile phone? That’s what I thought.

This has one inevitable downside, though, and that is greatly reduced control. All of a sudden you’re no longer really an Admin — not if you think back to the days not long ago when you had everything on-premise and you could do whatever you liked with your Exchange Server. One look at the BPOS Admin interface will make it obvious to any Admin how and why he’s going to save a lot of time: it’s because there ain’t much he can do. You can create and delete users, assign e-mail addresses, add domains, set mailbox capacities, and, well, that’s about it.

Most of the time, I’m happy to no longer have to take care of an Exchange Server, but every now and then I miss having total control. Like today, when I realised I wasn’t going to be able to change the user password policy. BPOS requires each user to change their password every so-and-so many days, and disallows use of the most recent x number (I think it’s 24) previously-used passwords. I had a similar policy applied to all users in my company — except to myself; I gave myself a slightly more lenient policy (simply for the convenience and because I know how to be careful with my favourite password and I know if and when I’ve compromised it and need to adopt a new one).

Ultimately, it’s a small price to pay. After all, one of the reasons for my move into the cloud was precisely so I wouldn’t have to maintain an Exchange Server anymore. And 98% of the time, I don’t miss it. But once in a while I do miss being in full control.

On their front page today, under their “InformationWeek Blog”, is an article about Facebook’s acquisition of FriendFeed from a site called Internet Evolution. The article displays a profound lack of rather basic knowledge of the Internet and the business world that would be unremarkable were it not coming from a site that is supposed to be all about just those things. And were it not featured by InformationWeek.

First and perhaps most trivially, the author finds some significance in this wording on Facebook’s press release: “Facebook Agrees to Acquire Sharing Service FriendFeed”. The word she finds remarkable is “agrees”. This is, of course, a standard phrase that is frequently used to report that a deal has been reached. Nicole Ferraro, though, thinks it’s significant: “Agrees?”, she writes. “Was there begging involved? Perhaps FriendFeed aggressively Poked Facebook until the company consented to the purchase?” Yet of course FriendFeed might easily have issued, simultaneously, a release that said “FriendFeed Agrees to be Acquired by Social Networking Service Facebook”.

Somewhat less trivially, Ms. Ferraro practically boasts that she can’t see the point of the deal. She thinks that “The difference between the two sites is their traffic” and heaves a “Sigh” at the silliness of it all. “Unnecessary”, she calls the deal, and suggests that Facebook’s CEO ought to step down. Now, I wouldn’t expect the man in the street to understand this deal, but Ms. Ferraro is the editor of a site called Internet Evolution, which InformationWeek seems to consider serious enough to feature on its own home page. She would be perfectly within her professional rights to disagree with the deal. But to utterly fail to even understand it? Very strange.

Maybe she’s just too bright. Her bio on Internet Evolution’s “About” page states that

As a member of the world renowned IQ Crew, Nicole welcomes any opportunity to engage in high IQ debates with readers on the IE message boards. She is also always right.

Update August 8, 2009: I worked it out. “Track in CRM” links the e-mail in question to the entity (account, contact, lead, etc.) whose e-mail address is also found in the header of the e-mail. “Set Regarding” is a way to link the e-mail in question to any other entity as well.

I booked the relevant .tel domains for my company and brands once the “sunrise” period (during which a domain purchase required proof of trademark ownership) ended this past March and the prices came down from the hundreds to just a few dollars per domain. I’d have done that even if I didn’t expect the TLD to go anywhere, but in fact I thought it just might, and have remained mildly curious about it since.

So, ten months after the launch, what’s happening? Are companies using .tel domains as their central publishing point for their contact information? Are individuals getting their dot-tels and using them to stay in touch with all their friends and acquaintances? None of that appears to be happening.

True, a couple hundred thousand .tel domains have been registered. But my impression is that almost all of them have been registered by domainers and only a fraction of them are being used in the way that the sponsoring organisation, Telnic, advertises as being their purpose. I also have the impression that there is this “.tel community” that is fairly self-contained, with few, if any, significant links to the rest of the economy so far, and almost no visibility to the outside world.

I have always wished Telnic every success. They certainly seem to be nice people. But I think they are just too late with this offering (not entirely their fault; ICANN held them up for years). These days individuals think of LinkedIn and Facebook as their central contact points if they think of having central contact points at all, which I suspect most don’t. And a gorilla called Google Voice looms large.

The company Telnic may or may not make money. But what fascinates me is this whole “.tel community” out there. What is it feeding off, economically? Are any, not to mention most, of these people making money, and if so, how? From what?

It’s not just that if you ask the man on the street whether he’s got a .tel, he’ll look at you as if you’re from Mars. It’s also that if you ask the woman sitting next to you at a business meeting whether her company has got theirs, she’ll very likely also be baffled. It’s all still completely under the radar, it seems to me.

AT&T has been the logical scapegoat in the App Store rejection, and surely over time the inclusion of the application on the iPhone could eventually lead to a reduction in minutes used by AT&T’s customers. But while AT&T may have voiced some displeasure to Apple over the application, the service provider has done nothing to remove vestiges of the application from the rest of its network–they haven’t denied the application from other devices (BlackBerrys), nor have they blocked access to the Google Voice Web application (www.google.com/voice).

…

But, really, if it was solely AT&T looking to block Google Voice’s entry into the App Store, couldn’t Apple simply certify the application for international markets but not release it in the U.S. store? There have been plenty of instances in which Apple has certified applications in the United States but not made them available internationally. (Skype in Canada, anyone?) Surely Apple could do the reverse, if it was interested.

By the way, that last paragraph is an interesting point in itself, quite apart from the whole Google Voice thing. I don’t live in the US, and I do sometimes chafe at having to do without things that American online consumers, of not only the App Store but other services as well, have access to.

Like Google Voice, for example.