Obama's knockout punch?

Obama's Bain attacks on Romney have begun hitting home (expressed in their purest form in Obama's brilliant "Firms" ad), and Romney appears to have been knocked senseless by them.

There was a chance, a few months back, that the economy would do Romney's job for him. Obama would have had real trouble winning with unemployment stuck at nine or ten percent. But unemployment dropped to the low eights, and that economic improvement is baked in to the election. Voters have made up their minds about Obama's economic performance: it's not great, but it's not disqualifying. The economy won't move enough in the remaining three and a half months to change that conclusion.

Obama's job has been to solidify his disillusioned base, disqualify Romney, then show America a vision of the future. In December of last year Obama signaled a shift from moderate centrism, bending over backward in an attempt to accomodate Republicans, to core Democratic values in his Osawatomie, Kansas speech. He began putting each of his achievements -- auto industry bailout, stimulus, financial reform, race to the top -- into a progressive context. Then, as the election year began, he touched each base: women, with Sandra Fluke and Planned Parenthood; African Americans with Trayvon Martin; Gays with his endorsement of gay marriage, and Hispanics with executive implementation of the DREAM act. In each instance Obama's appeal to his base was also an appeal to the basic decency of the American people. By June Democratic enthusiasm for Obama had recovered and outpaced Republican enthusiasm for Romney.

Romney's job was to win his primary, then convince enough Obama voters to support him. Obama won in 2008 with significant margins, and new voters, more and more of whom are college educated or Hispanic, are much more closely aligned with the Democratic party. Romney does not have the option of simply solidifying his base, he must convince Obama supporters to switch. But Romney is so beholden to an extremist Tea Party base, which hates Obama with a passion, that he is unable to craft an appeal to people who don't. He spent the primary moving right as he faced more and more extremist candidates.

There are only a few months left in the campaign, Romney is running away from his record as governor, and he wants his tenure at Bain to be off limits. So Obama has a free hand to define Romney as an un-American, job destroying plutocrat. This message is aimed squarely at the white working class, Obama's most dangerous weakness and Romney's only real opportunity take Democratic votes. Some Democratic observers are still skeptical of Obama's chances, but at this point the possibility of a Romney win looks more and more remote.

The Latino hit

Obama's DREAM executive order is still reverberating through the campaign. It was well timed, just five months before the election, after the Republican primaries and after Republicans 'came home' and Romney's numbers bounced, just before a Supreme Court decision on immigration which would amplify Obama's message. Obama carefully used Sandra Fluke and Trayvon Martin to drive a culture war wedge between Republicans and most Americans back in March, then he endorsed gay marriage in May (giving a significant boost to pro-gay marriage efforts in a number of states). Immigration was the remaining big wedge issue. With immigration Obama was much less subtle. Each of these moves frame cultural issues in a way that puts Obama in a positive light to most Americans, and in a way that sends the Republican base into an alienating frenzy. Romney ends up caught between American values and an increasingly marginalized base. On immigration in particular Romney is effectively skewered and unable to respond coherently, while Obama opens up more opportunities in swing states, which generally have large and growing Latino populations. Conservatives tend to think of these moves as merely addressing the Democratic base, but in fact they present a stark choice to white Americans: do they want to turn back to the past or move forward into the future. Most of white middle class America is moving forward, and enough identify with Obama's vision of America's future to give him a sufficient share of the white vote.

Windows Phone 8 and Nokia

Microsoft has put another nail in Nokia's coffin with yesterday's Windows 8 announcement. Nokia is being squeezed from both ends of its market: it's low end devices can't compete with Chinese Android smartphones, and it's high end Lumia 900 is equivalent to a mid-range Android phone at best. Microsoft has announced that Windows 8 will not run on current Windows Phone 7 phones (it is too fat for those platforms) so Nokia will have to come up with a new line of much higher end phones that can run Microsoft's new, heavier OS. Those phones will not compete on price with high-end Android and iPhone phones, so Nokia's high end business will go nowhere. Nokia has no mid-range line, other than the now obsolete Windows Phone 7 handsets. And Nokia has just laid off many of the people who were working on a lighter, low-end OS, so they have no low-end platform with which to preserve their low-end business.

With this move Microsoft has finally abandoned the decrepit Wince kernel they had attempted to reskin as Windows Phone. But by dropping a bloated NT kernel into an embedded environment they made their usual mistake of assuming that Moore's law will make up for crap software performance.

Engadget ran almost a dozen brief takes on Window 8 mobile, but to me they read as curiously detached from any awareness of the reality of mobile hardware. These commentators seem to have completely bought into the pointy-headed notion that mobile and desktop platforms are now basically the same and that a unified OS, from kernel to UI, can serve them equally well. Write once, run anywhere is a common mistake that amateur programmers and people removed from actual development on these platforms make, the most recent major failure being Java, which morphed into so many different solutions over the past twenty years that it lost all coherence and became primarily a database language.

Mobile, tablet and desktop are distinct UIs, and require distinct interactive metaphors. Their display, memory, cpu, battery and bandwidth constraints are also distinct, and applications must respect each device's limits. A kernel designed for the ever expanding capabilities of desktop computers will never fit well into the tight confines of a mobile phone. Microsoft's developer support, which is also geared to the ever expanding desktop, will never cultivate developers who can build apps that run well on tablets and phones. They will develop crippled versions of desktop apps, just as Microsoft web development tools encourage web apps that are crippled versions of ancient client server applications.

Whither Nokia?

All Things D's Ina Fried reports on Nokia's latest earnings call. "The company said that its smartphone business is even weaker than expected amid stiff competition from Apple and Android products." As expected, Android is squeezing them on the low end, according to Elop:

The strength of Android, particularly as it pushes down in price point, is clearly something that has caused a lot of challenge.

In choosing Windows phone Nokia jumped from a burning platform into the fire. Nokia is closing facilities and firing tens of thousands of workers in an effort to stay afloat, but cutting staff won't win people over to the Windows phone platform. Sales of the Lumia 900 haven't had any impact on Windows phone market share, even after massive promotion from Nokia, Microsoft and AT&T. News of Nokia restating earnings and Q2 forecasts undercuts their claim that the phone is performing as expected.  They must change course to survive in the market. Nokia can't become Apple, so their choice is to adopt Android or fade out.

Update: Dan Rowinski at ReadWriteWeb weighs in on Nokia's options:

Elop today said during a conference call that Nokia needs to “compete with Android aggressively.” To do that, it must develop not just one great Windows Phone in the United States, but several. The Lumia 900 is a good device, but it is available only through AT&T. Nokia needs at least one major device on every U.S. carrier and then a mid-range device that spendthrifts will look to if the top phone proves too expensive. And it means teaming with Microsoft (which has said it will help) to create Windows Phones that are available across the world at entry-level prices.

 But there's no such thing as a great Windows Phone, much less several. The Windows Phone kernel is wince, app developers won't adopt it now any more than they did a decade ago, and squeezing it down to work well on entry-level hardware is a fantasy.

My Raspberry Pi

I got my Raspberry Pi from Newark.com last month.

Took me a little bit to get it working. My Nook simple touch micro-USB adapter works fine. My first microSDHC card in an adapter didn't work so I had to run out to Radio Shack to get a compatible SDHC card, but once I did and loaded their Debian image everything worked fine. 

I got MPD and NFS set up and tried using it as a music server. The forums are right, the PCM drivers aren't there yet. The sound was barely decipherable. I'll try a USB DAC.

Transferring lots of files to it over rsync via ssh killed the RPi, but NFS seems to work fine. I also want to get Go running on it. 

Google beats Oracle on copyright claims

Google's arguments on Java copyright have prevailed over Oracle's in their Android patent/copyright case. The copyright side of Oracle's case always struck me as much weaker, and much less was at stake in any case, but this ends Oracle's attempt to own some aspect of Android. Oracle can appeal, but their case was weak, their patent case gets weaker as one of their two patents is about to be invalidated, judge Alsup bent over backwards to accommodate Oracle, and his reasoning is clear. Oracle would have a much higher bar to clear on appeal.

Google always argued that this case was more FUD than substance, and they were right.

I'll update as I read more.

Android beats Oracle patent claims

The verdict on patents went largely as expected, no infringement. Most of Oracle's claims were dismissed before the case went to trial, one of the four two patents at issue in trial is about to be overturned, and software patent claims tend to fall apart once tested in court. Only people who think Florian Mueller is an authoritative source on software patents will be surprised by this verdict.

Oracle's copyright claims are all that remain at issue in this trial. The jury found only 9 lines of RangeCheck code as infringing, they could not decide Oracle's larger SSO claims on API headers. So the SSO claims are up to judge Alsup.

The only remaining patent threats to the Android ecosystem are Apple's "We have a patent on rounded corners" and "We've patented s/\b(999-999-9999)\b/<a href="call:$1">$1<\/a>/g", claims so weak that Apple won't take on Google directly, and Microsoft's behind-the-scenes machinations. Both of these are rear-guard attempts by aging companies to keep a lid on innovation, and both are likely to go the way of all the patent claims against Linux.

Hopefully Google will continue on the course of knocking down patents rather than settling. Knocking down software patents expands the competitive space for all players in the software industry, and makes room for small, disruptive players to transform whole business segments.