In the meantime I noticed that the webcast got inserted into my earlier post on going out the the IT World Canada office.   So, if we all did webcasts, then we wouldn’t need to type our blogs, right?   Anyway, not sure what your reaction was but I think better with my fingers than I do with a camera pointed at me.  I have new found respect for TV people who do this all the time!

So, I did indeed buy an iPhone with half the winnings (the other half is still going to charity).  I actually had a reasonable experience and got it on the first day.   I lined up first thing in the morning - right in front of my doctor, so I felt safe that I would be ok if I fainted with the excitement (joking!) - just to find out the little Rogers store across the stree from my office didn’t have any.  They didn’t know when they would arrive, and didn’t think they’d get any 16G versions.   As it turned out, they took my order and called me back in the afternoon to say they got 1 phone and they were trying to get it activated for me.  I also downloaded the Facebook client and got that going right away.  Sum total is that by 6pm I had my phone and it was useful a few hours later.  Oh yes, it found my home network and had no trouble connecting after I put in the password - now it connects automatically whenever I’m at home.

After upgrading iTunes to version 7.7 I had absolutely no trouble loading up my songs (which are also on my old Nano), uploading my Outlook address book and calendar, setting up my gmail account and an email address from my hosting account (don-i@concon.com).   All in all, a pleasant experience.

So far, the only thing I don’t like is that my thumbs are too big so the soft keyboard takes getting used to.

I hate to say it but I don’t think its going to take long for me to like it better than my blackberry!

I’ll keep you posted as I get more used to it.

Oh yes, if anyone can tell me how to download the webcast from the blog, let me know.

It’s the limited time nature of the plan.  A less cynical individual might assume that the August 31st expiry of the data plan was just to limit overall losses moving forward, but if any of you ran across the Boy Genius report on the AT&T after launch pricing, the limited time nature of the offer makes more sense.

Rogers knows that the vast majority of IPhone sales in the first 2 months will be from early adopters who really don’t care about price.  History with the gen 1 IPhone shows that many people purchased the units knowing they wouldn’t be able to use them here in Canada.  With rumours of Apple telling Rogers that it was re-routing the IPhone stock from Canada to other countries, Rogers can safely announce the plan as they just don’t have to worry about how many IPhones are sold, since they won’t have any to sell.  Once the stock starts coming back and the 2nd round of consumers start lining up however, they will be in a position to control the losses as the plan offering will have expired.

The second round of consumers are usually individuals who will be wanting to avoid the 3 year contracts and purchase the units outright under terms similar to what AT&T will be offering.  These consumers however will be forced to pony up for the higher priced/lower bandwidth plans, even if they avoid the subsidy and 3 year contract.

What’s more in talking to my Rogers rep today about the whole fiasco.  Roger’s last minute ability to offer the $30/6 Gb plan become apparent.  The plan offering is actually an extension of the promotion on their wireless-air cards for laptops.  It is not a plan that was tailored for the IPhone.

So your options are to pony up early for a subsidized IPhone with a “better” voice/data plan on a 3 year term, or wait till Sept/Oct when general availability will occur and play the “higher” data rates to avoid a contract.  Doesn’t seem like such a great deal does it?

“July 8, 2008 On Wednesday July 9, at 3:00 pm EDT David McGuinty, MP, will be making an official video statement on ruinediphone.com”

Let’s see if politics can trump commerce?

It is clear already that by including virtualization software on the upcoming Microsoft Windows Server 2008, Microsoft is moving in the right direction.

Bell, Telus, Rogers
Although Don is excited about the July 11 iPhone day, I was surprised to read that both Bell and Telus will now be charging $0.15 per incoming text message. This will mean that all the alerts you have signed up for and all the uncontrolled spam you might get will be billable. Rogers will not be making this charge. Is it time to create a facebook petition, or to simply switch to Rogers and to consider getting the iPhone too?

So with Roger’s price plans revealed for just how bad they are, you think Bell and Telus would be making every effort to differenciate themselves by offering better and lower cost service.

All the more reason to support Bill McGuinty and his “C-555 Get Connected Fairly Act“

A webcast seems a bit like an audio/video blog except you can’t re-read and edit what you say.

I think there’ll be some kind of article in the print paper sometime soon, so watch for it!

I’m away for a couple of days.  I get back in time for Friday’s iPhone event.  Its interesting watching the news on this one.  Lots of free advertising from what I can see.  Rates are higher than the USA, no doubt, but I wonder if that’s at least partly because their market is so much bigger?   And now we have the Samsung/Bell response - another choice.

I’ll let you know what happens Friday!!

This has incredible implications for clients of BCE and for telecom market competitiveness in Canada.  While this deal essentially allows BCE to remain a northern tiger, it will be a seriously declawed tiger for a number of years to come.  As someone who recently survived an OTTP buy out, I can say that BCE is in for a rough 5-10 years.  The rub of the deal is that BCE will be saddled with serious debt, easily in the 40 billion+ range.  Now any CFO will tell you debt is not an issue, but with this type of debt you can assume massive covenants on earnings and  debt-to-equity ratios.  Unfortunately for BCE that means the availability of capital funds for new projects, services, build outs into western Canada, the rumoured change over to GSM is not likely to happen any time soon.

Also for those who may have missed it.  Seems that my early comments about why Bell was introducing P2P filtering are being proven out by the data.  The commentators are pretty livid about just how much Bell is miss-representing the data to justify traffic shaping.

On the copyright front, again the best collection of updates appears to be on Michael Giests blog.  The funniest item is Peter Mckay tripping up on the issue.  The Fair Copyright for Canadians facebook group is now pushing past 85,000 members and the discussions forms are quite active as members discuss both copyright issues and the political and technological impacts of the legislation.  This is the first truely Canadian political item that I’ve seen gain this amount of grass roots support and seeing it played out on the IT front (FaceBook) is really encouraging for democracy in Canada in general.

As for Rogers, they are taking a real beating over the rate plans for the IPhone.  The petition over at RuinedIphone.com is now sitting at over 36,000 members.  That some serious numbers considering this is a commodity, consumer item with lots of competition.  Rogers better take note as even the US media has picked up on the story with articles in the Washington Post, and CNN Money.  Rogers marketing department is in heavy spin mode, with only a few bloggers taking their side.

Now, of course, I’m still waiting for the iPhone on July 11th.  I asked at the Rogers store if they were going to take advance orders from existing customers, but no such luck.

On Friday I’m taking a trip out to visit the IT World Canada folks for the official ceremony and picture taking.  Stay tuned!  They are even talking about a webcast of my thoughts on blogging - not sure I have anything much to say other than its both fun and challenging.

For me, however, I’d also prefer to get paid for my time, but I can’t imagine that happening in the short term.

In the meantime, quite a few posts ago, I mentioned that I had just bought a book called “Patterns in Network Architecture - a Return to Fundamentals” by John Day.  I’m now into Chapter 3 and am finding it a good readable book.  Its all about trying to divine the fundamental principles behind networking and a re-examination of the current state of the art in network protocols and services.  Well worth it for those who may be interested - its the first real textbook I’ve actually read in a few years.

I also found the Enterprise Architecture conference interesting, since I’ve had to do some work in that area on a contract I’m on.  The theme this year was Enterprise Architecture - An Evolving Profession.  This touches back on our week of discussing certifications for IT managers.  Is Enterprise Architecture a function of management or is it engineering?  One interesting session was a presentaiton from HP on their data center consolidaiton and transformation efforts - moving from 85 data centers to 6, and 6,000 to1,600 applications.

I’m sure that a lot of companies will go through that type of transformation and that’s where our discussion of cloud computing comes back again.

Anyhow, hope everyone is rested up after July 1st holidays (assuming you are from Canada) or just about to go into the holiday if you are more interested in July 4th.  Perhaps we’ll get some lively discussions going this summer……     

While desktop virtualization a la MS TS/Citrix/Thin Client computing has existed for years but never really took off due to the lack of “personalization”, or the ability to have an individualized desktop and computing experience.  It just seemed too “green terminal” for many people.  Yet with the introduction of VM Ware ACE and XEN Workstation, plus some of the other application virtualization technologies (MS SoftGrid, VMWare ThinApps, Citrix XENApps) in the last year, this market has literally exploded onto the scene and anyone contemplating a desktop renewal would be truly remiss if they didn’t at least take a solid look at if it would fit their organization.  While the pure capital cost doesn’t justify the complexity there are many key soft cost factors that may make this very attractive to your organization.

I’ll try and post a comprehensive TCO model over at Brian’s site in the next few weeks that summarizes many of these comments to allow you to see if the model is right for you.