But there is another path. The path taken by programming languages like Lisp and Scheme and by internally extensible software applications like Spreadsheets (host to the most common form of End User Programming) and recent Hypertext environments. Such systems, offer a range of powerful primitives that can be combined in an infinite number of ways to meet any given End User’s personal needs. They empower End Users to craft their own solutions or to mix and match components from other sources. They don’t discriminate between commercial and non-commercial solutions, since no one economic model is best at meeting real world needs, nor can any one vendor know which tools are best.

An optimal workflow will often draw on both free and proprietary software and when found, it should be possible to encapsulate such a solution so it can be shared. Indeed, it is this sort of compositional freedom that holds the greatest potential to empower End Users and simplify life.

Apple already enjoys a tremendous marketing lead with its iPhone and has a strong reputation for creating new functionality. But it also has developed an unquenchable thirst for control that leads it to consistently refuse to meet standing consumer needs in an attempt to insure that its customers are never quite satisfied by always leaving something important out. To sell more phones, it leaves out a built-in microphone and camera from its Touch devices that would let their WiFi capabilities moot the need for a cell contract. To boost App store sales, it denies users the ability to directly install third party software. To insure that developers commit to its native API’s so they can’t port their Apps to other platforms, it prohibits the installation of interpreters for programming languages on its phones.

All of these things you can’t do as a matter of business policy on the Apple platform led to Droid’s successful Droid Does marketing campaign. This is one thing the new Apple can’t bear, real consumer choice.

So rather than relax its strangle hold on its customers so they will freely choose its products and services, Apple has turned to the very dark side tactics of sowing Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt to attack the Android platform. It isn’t the copying of some specific technology that truly scares Apple, it is the fact that Google’s Android Platform is more Open than its own and has enough technical appeal and interface sophistication to hold its own in the market.

In the glory days of Apple Computer, the company embraced competition through technological superiority as it strove to empower its End Users. When the company dropped “Computer” from its corporate name it renounced the promise of End User Computing and sough to transform its once independent customers into mindless drones dependent on Apple for their next entertainment fix.

This new Apple fears competition and evidences utter contempt for consumers as it now turns to the courts in an effort to stave off the loss of customer defections of its own making.

If you hold Apple Stock, now would be a good time to make it known to management that trying to stifle innovation and consumer choice with IP litigation hurts the entire industry, could lead to a flurry of patent litigation by making it socially acceptable for other companies to go after Apple, and threatens to destroy the long term value of your investment. If you were thinking of buying Apple products, hold off and let Apple know that you don’t appreciate its strong handed attempt to gain a monopoly over mobiles devices.

[Obligatory FTC Disclaimer: The Institute and some of its officers, directors, staff & volunteers have made use of free Google Services which might in theory bias us in favor of positions that would advance Google's interests, which in this case run in concert with those of HTC which is being sued by Apple. Some of us also use Apple products and services. We have not canvased everyone to determine whether any of us directly or indirectly own stock in any of these companies, but that possibility no doubt exists. So the reader should assume that potential relationships exist and consider this to be a notice thereof.

That said, our writing is solely motivated by our desire to advocate for the interests of End Users like you and we only include this notice because it is required by the FTC to avoid the risk of running afoul of their regulations and becoming subject to substantial fines. If you are a blogger and have ever received anything of value or have any kind of theoretical relationship with an entity you are blogging about, you should consult with a lawyer to determine your disclaimer obligations under these new rules.]

This is another case of taking a very generic idea with utterly no novel engineering behind it and turning it into a patentable innovation by attaching it to a subject domain. This is almost the same recipe that cooks up most business method patents.

Take a generic idea like reporting something of interest, qualify it slightly, throw in some generic computing steps like turning references to resources into hypertext links to them, sorting items, or displaying some content, and be the first to the patent office with a permutation that hasn’t been patented yet.

In this case, “generate a news feed”, “attach informational links”, “attach links that let you perform some actions with the current item”, “limit who sees what (i.e. don’t display info about people the user doesn’t know)”, “sort the news items”, and finally “display them”. This sort of “innovation” is totally generic and obvious in that each step could apply to any kind of information stored on a computer and nowhere in such a patent does anyone learn anything they wouldn’t have thought of doing themselves if tasked with solving the same problem. In short, all that is being rewarded is paying the patent application fees to enrich the government.

Indeed, the innovation here is so trivial that no real programmer with an ounce of integrity would consider it worthy of patent protection or worth the time and expense of pursuing the same. Solo programmers and early stage startups simply don’t have the money to play the patent game. Moreover, a patent concept as broad as this would seem so unlikely to be granted before the fact that a developer would be highly unlikely to be able to raise the funds from outside investors to seek it.

Granting Software Patents on sweeping concepts only empowers big companies with deep pockets who can fire this sort of low quality buckshot at the PTO in high volume knowing that a few of their applications will slip through giving them the power to extract royalties from big competitors and to stifle the formation of smaller ones. Every time a patent like this is granted it becomes much harder for true innovators to get backing and bring real innovation to the market. The cost and threat of litigation forces them to sell out to a big player, to shutter their doors if challenged, or more likely to not even bother trying in the first place.

Unfortunately, we will never know how many jobs have been lost or never created because our legal culture falsely assumes that software innovation would not take place but for the existence of patent monopolies. Sadly, since small scale innovators can’t afford to lobby congress as effectively as the mega-corporations that benefit from the current system, patent reform is unlikely in the short run.

That leaves the onus on End Users like you to use your market power en-mass to punish companies that use sweeping software patents unethically. While you can’t do anything to influence Patent Trolls, you can bring pressure to bear on real companies that depend on your patronage as part of their business models.

Facebook is such a company and we trust that it will most likely do the right thing and commit this patent to the Public Domain or promise to only use it defensively if confronted by similar claims. Indeed, it was most likely fear of just his sort of patent being granted to someone else that drove Facebook’s business decision to pursue it in the first place.

However, if Facebook were to try to employ it offensively against innovative competitors, it would then fall on its customers to take action by abandoning its platform in large enough numbers to force it to rethink its course of action. Since the management team at Facebook is not stupid, it is highly probable that they will do the right thing!

Remember, the best defense against the abuse of Software and Business Method Patents is a vigilant global community of End Users willing to put up with a little inconvenience should the need arise to insure that sleazy business behavior is punished in the marketplace since that is the only way to make ethical business behavior the only profitable way to do business.

Sometimes, as in the case of the Apple Newton, the technology isn’t quite mature enough to deliver on its potential until the marketing damage caused by a poor first impression is irreparable to the brand.

Other times arrogance, avarice, and a failure of vision conspire to cripple a new device, before it even reaches the hands of its potential End Users. Such is the case of Apple’s much vaunted iPad which is only a worthy successor for the Screen of the Newton.

With a decade to improve on that truly innovative creation, we expected no less than a new OS with multi-touch support, as well as a stylus to drive state-of-the-art handwriting recognition, a forward facing cam for video-conferencing, preemptive multitasking, a zoomable interface, a full compliment of standard USB, ethernet, firewire, and solid state memory card ports, a core of deeply integrated notetaking, sketching, and communications modules with an open architecture allowing them to be extended in unforeseen directions, a fresh platform-wide programming language to simplify such development, User Swappable power packs, and an option for wireless video out to an optional transceiver that could be plugged into industry standard projectors.

We expected the freedom to purchase or develop additional software, without paying to join an Apple Developer Program or having to purchase only Apple Sanctioned content through an Apple Store that will probably add to our costs. We would have gladly paid a premium above even laptop prices for the kind of game changer Apple could have offered.

What we were offered was little more than an oversized iPod Touch optimized to act as a mobile cash register to fill Apple’s till.

The old Apple Computer understood that its End Users wanted power and freedom and were willing to pay a premium to have it. Perhaps even more importantly, it believed that we were intelligent individuals and not stupid drones needing to be coddled and told what to think.

How ironic that the face on the giant video wall dictating to the unwashed masses should be none other than that of Steve Jobs himself. Welcome to 1984.

Yet again, Apple has betrayed its core values.

At the IEUC, we still believe in End Users and Open Innovation and look forward to seeing what the rest of the industry will develop to leapfrog this latest affront to common sense.

The big question for End Users is what kind of a reader / tablet to embrace. Platforms like the Sony Reader actively encourage users to bring their own content whereas Apple’s offerings are clearly aimed at dissuading the user from doing so by trying to tie all sales to their online market, effectively placing an Apple Transaction Tax on every purchase.

Whether we will see such practices successfully challenged in the courts on antitrust grounds remains to be seen as does the outcome of potential litigation to prevent the practice of jailbreaking Apple devices to permit End Users to load their own 3rd party apps.

Jailbreaking will become an even bigger issue in 2010 if large numbers of Nook users take advantage of its Android foundation to subvert the Nook’s free wireless internet connectivity which is intended to provide a dedicated conduit to the Barnes & Nobel e-book market for general web browsing.

While a dedicated reader is very appealing, particularly for those of us normally accustomed to printing out countless academic papers and such equally critical is note-taking and reference management functionality which is unlikely to be well supported in a purely recreational device.

The Newton Messagepad still sets a very high bar for user interface functionality that has yet to be surpassed.

In any case, End Users should demand the freedom to install or buy digital content and apps from multiple sources. Given the ability to safely “sandbox” applications and restrict their resource usage if needed (as clearly demonstrated by Google’s brilliant Chrome browser), the claims of vendors like Apple that they need to control what you can run on your device to insure that it behaves sanely in a networked environment are of exceedingly dubious merit.

If End Users refuse to tolerate such practices and vote with their wallets for open ended platforms, 2010 could mark a real turning point for the better.

We should all be quite sympathetic to Microsoft’s concerns about software theft, but it is unconscionable to employ an authentication system that causes legitimate End Users so much anguish.

Particularly irksome is the Vista Help System’s Activation FAQ which omits the all too common question of:

“What do I do if a previously activated copy of Vista has deactivated itself and online activation fails with an erroneous report that one’s license code is already in use on a different machine and can’t be reused?”

Over the Summer Microsoft Research in Cambridge presented some extremely impressive demos of the Windows 7 user interface, but if their new OS employs a similar activation scheme to that used in Vista, one would have to very seriously think twice before investing in the upgrade.

That means that it is in both Microsoft’s and its End Users’ best interest to find a more workable alternative. One that protects Microsoft’s IP Rights but recognizes the reality that today’s End Users frequently upgrade their hardware and move legacy operating systems into Virtualized environments possibly under other host operating systems.

This strongly suggests that Microsoft shouldn’t try to tie Windows licenses to particular hardware configurations.

The next Windows should instead be licensed for the use of a single copy at a time by a single individual on any current or future hardware or emulation software he or she may currently or subsequently own. If one needs to run multiple copies on different machines at the same time, that would call for multiple licenses.

This model corresponds to the real world notion of using a physical Key and its computing equivalent, the Dongle!

A dongle is a small plug that goes into a communications port on a computer like a USB jump drive that contains custom hardware to authenticate a user.

Granted that some early dongles were usability nightmares (e.g. they lacked the now common pass-through port allowing other devices to be connected through them). But much has been improved over the years and this technology has much to recommend it.

Indeed, today, a dongle could be designed as a cryptographic co-processor to improve user security, handle licensing management for 3rd party software, and automatically store and retrieve passwords to access secure web sites.

Such functionality would be seen as a major feature that would drive up system sales, particularly if any given copy of the OS would accept any licensed dongle.

Then if one had 3 family members, each could purchase a license dongle, which would unlock his or her personal file space and identity, or perhaps even temporarily and securely access a cloud-based home folder from a total stranger’s PC.

One could even imagine the development of families of dongles, where one could purchase one or two master dongles and several subordinate ones allowing parents to access their children’s accounts.

If the dongles also incorporated a fair amount of nonvolatile memory, additional OS version and 3rd party licenses could be burnt into them to avoid having a proliferation of dongles chained together. In effect, each user would have one master keychain to pop into a USB port in lieu of a traditional easily guessed password login.

Of course, a conventionally encrypted copy of such licensing and configuration data, protected with a really long and truly random password, could be stored by the system provider on a remote server which would also facilitate sharing protected files with friends, transferring licenses between individuals, and invalidating any stolen dongles’ encryption codes.

This would entail sharing keys or deleting license keys and passwords from one dongle while adding them to another as part of a single secure transaction as well as changing the password used to encrypt any online authentication credentials. This would also permit the True Owner of local content to use the online backup of a lost dongle’s codes to access his or her encrypted files long enough to re-encrypt them with a replacement dongle.

In effect, such an approach would limit any data loss/exposure or unauthorized software access to local content/credentials stored on devices that fell into the wrong hands along with one of the matching dongles with which such data was encrypted.

To eliminate this final risk, some dongles or devices could readily be augmented with fingerprint readers or some other form of biometric authentication control to offer industrial grade security at a premium price point.

Such scenarios would offer countless benefits for platform vendors and their loyal customers including new revenue streams from dongle sales & cloud based security services for the vendors and improved security & ease of use for their customers.

Of course in a world of new hardware devices of every imaginable form factor, with OS X and Linux steadily on the move, Windows 7 in final development, and Google’s own OS just around the corner it is just a matter of time before such innovations reach End Users!