John C. Abell

The other day Glenn Britt, the chief executive of Time Warner Cable, got on the wrong side of history. He stuck with the television networks. On Monday he spoke out against Dish Network’s “Auto Hop,” which allows viewers to avoid the lifeblood of the TV ecosystem: ads. As Brian Stelter of the New York Times reported (emphasis added):

Mr. Britt said that if such ad-skipping became more prevalent, the reduction in ad revenue would be made up through higher subscriber fees or a lower total amount of production of television.

It got me to thinking. Maybe scaling back should be a promise instead of a threat. Television doesn’t serve social and cultural needs as it did generations ago, but what we get from it should be much better. And we already know how it can be, from the Web- and cable-savvy people disrupting a medium that disrupted everything.

When I was a kid I had access to seven TV channels – which was a lot and thanks to my living in New York City. Most places had at most three: network affiliates of CBS, NBC and ABC. Some places in the United States could pull in only one of them. And – horrors! – they actually went off the air for a few hours every day at around 2 a.m.

Now, we have a 500-channel universe. We have access to hundreds of programs, 24 hours a day, and yet there are no more memorable programs produced these days than in the Golden Age (and some may argue, even fewer). By cutting back on the pursuit of infinite programming, creative people can again do creative things, when the muse hits. TV should be more like the theater: It happens when it happens for as long as it happens.

First, let’s dispense with the fiction that disrupting the business model always destroys the business. We’ve heard all this before, and it’s always been wrong. TiVo didn’t kill TV. VHS didn’t kill Hollywood. Since the advent of DVRs there is more TV programming than ever, and anyone who still thinks that VCRs, DVD players and even torrents have killed Hollywood need only look at the numbers for The Avengers – which will only be multiplied once it goes from theaters to Blu-ray players.

Of course, the relentless pursuit of 24/7 programming for hundreds of channels increases the chance that something worth watching will be produced. Fire a shotgun, and chances are you’ll hit something. But in the last two decades it has been non-broadcast networks, whose business models have previously depended on curating second-run content, that have brought us original programming that is actually in the best tradition of television: AMC’s Mad Men and The Walking Dead; HBO’s The Sopranos and Game of Thrones.

These alternative networks don’t waste their time trying to fill 21 hours a week. They win by cultivating great work, one hour at a time, while immersing us in the best of the past until there is something new and worthy to share. They break other rules, too. Mad Men and The Sopranos went off the air for well over a year during creative hiatuses and contract disputes, and the audience came back to make them commercial and creative successes.

Need more evidence that this is a new era? Uber-disruptor Netflix, which made its name distributing DVDs and then streaming movies, now emphasizes old TV shows and original content. Hulu, a consortium of most of the networks, is a good-enough, time-shifting service that includes few ads and offers original shows of its own. TiVo’s elegant controls make recording programs, and racing through the ads, virtually idiot-proof.

There was a time that TV filled a void. It was a permanent night-light, a babysitter. It democratized entertainment and news distribution in the safety of your own home. But the parade has passed. Video is omnipresent, but it needn’t be always on, and always new. So the traditional networks need to go full circle. Call it the “HBO Principle”: Go big on movies and quality reality shows, and sprinkle in spectacular original programming. Do exactly what lower ad revenue would require you to do, but do it on your own terms.

CableSat companies can act as handmaidens to their network partners for only so long. They quibble and quarrel on retransmission fees, but their interests have traditionally been aligned. Tech, and a greater number of choices, are changing the dynamic. We’ve already seen cracks in the old allegiances with the rollout by all the major cable companies of tablet and smartphone apps that not only drive a bigger wedge between viewers and networks but also call into question the relevance of the TV set itself.

Dish, with its ad hopper, is only doing what’s good for business by siding with customers. But this occurs at a time when television’s monopoly as a ubiquitous, free medium is a laughable, fading memory. The Living Room War, described by New Yorker TV critic Michael Arlen 30 years ago, was about intramural fighting for control of a medium that had a lock on the living room. Now the living room war is about everything that competes with TV for our attention. That includes TV-like alternatives such as YouTube, on-demand services from Apple and Amazon, and gaming systems.

Neil Postman observed in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) that the invention of the telegraph made it necessary to use the telegraph, all the time, and that this unfortunate compulsion had infected TV as well. This wasn’t good for culture, he argued, only for business. So the best thing – for us – is to let nature take its course on the networks. We aren’t a captive audience anymore. If technology empowers us to avoid the vegetables that are ads, and that means less of the dessert that is Hollywood programming, let’s just see if that isn’t a great thing. Go ahead, Mr. Britt. We’re calling your bluff.

Photo: ’Old TV Sets,’ by Marcin Wichary/flickr. Used with gratitude via a Creative Commons license.

We are witnessing a fascinating changing-of-the-guard moment in tech. The old Internet, represented this week by once-mighty Yahoo, is fumbling with another leadership crisis it must solve before it can even think about restoring some semblance of relevance. The new Internet, Facebook, is ruled by a young man in a hoodie who is on the verge of creating a massive public company that, as was the nascent Yahoo back in the early ’90s, will be an Internet darling longer on potential than track record, but running hard on an open field.

The common thread might seem to be the “If it’s big, it’s gotta be BIG” illusion that got us all in trouble at the turn of the millennium, when Internet investment hysteria equated today’s eyeballs with tomorrow’s profits. But it’s always about the profits, and the people who promise them. This time that person is Mark Zuckerberg, who as the books on the Facebook IPO closed Tuesday, well in advance of Friday’s first trade, seems to have convinced Wall Street that his seven-year-old company could be worth more than $100 billion — the richest-ever launch in Silicon Valley.

When you value your company at 100 times revenues, investors are banking on the belief that Zuckerberg has perfected the unstable compound that is social abandon and advertiser hunger.

Search remains pretty much the top use of the Web (as opposed to the Internet) – the gateway to everything else. The other big use is now social, which was invented on the Web but whose chops will be tested in the app schoolyard that is the mobile Internet.

But thus far, advertising works better on search than social. Google makes about $40 billion a year, almost 100 percent on ads. Facebook is reporting last year’s revenues at just north of $1 billion $3.7 billion. Google has a market cap of roughly $200 billion – so it’s twice as big as Facebook’s IPO valution and makes 40 times the money more than 10 times the money.

While Facebook is very successful, the question is: at what? It’s great at creating a community of time-wasting freeloaders, but it needs to be good as an advertising medium to be worth anything to the institutions falling all over themselves to get in on the ground floor of its stock.

To compare the new and the old way of tech, let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that there are two kinds of Internet companies – Googles and Facebooks.

Google’s business model is based entirely on search, and its ability – strengthened by a streamlined privacy policy this year – to compile an ever-improving catalog of intentions. By interpreting choices, Google can serve up relatively relevant and non-intrusive ads. It’s easy to ignore what Google is doing and just go about your business.

Facebook’s model is decidedly different. It requires immersion. Facebook wants you to live in a glass house and to always be on display. With that pact comes scale, it has enlisted the support of countless other sites to enable and expedite sharing, first with Facebook Connect and now with passive updates to your social biography through frictionless sharing.

Facebook speaks of the goodness of always sharing with your friends, but it’s really about sharing with people who aren’t your friends, so that marketers can build profiles and buy targeted ads. They’re not bashful about it – it’s in their roadshow video.

In both search and social, revealing yourself is key. But Google’s and Facebook’s approaches to exposure are very different. It’s one thing to live on a stage, the footlights illuminating for a vast audience every move you make, and another to let someone read over your shoulder. Both are invasions of privacy, but they are in different leagues of intrusion.

Facebook wowed with its roadshow, but it has a tough sell that it can make an efficient market in ad sales in a way Google does. Add to this that its members are migrating to mobile in droves and that advertising on smartphones also hardly has a proven track record (even when you control … everything), and you can begin to see some fundamental challenges. (From the Department of Worst Possible Timing, GM said it would stop advertising on Facebook, though it would continue to use product pages to market directly – and for free).

We tolerate ads – we don’t love them. We might like some ads (and Don Draper), but ads are what we wade through to get what we want. Like the sermon at a soup kitchen, or the nag that precedes a night out with the boys, ads are the noise around the signal.

On television, ads get in the way, but they also give us an opportunity to step away (physically or metaphorically). The more intrusive the ad, the more we rebel. Even “perfectly” curated TV ads are a nuisance if not served up properly.

Smartphones and tablets have boundaries, much like TV, that are much different from the Web. It’s a matter of real estate – since there is so little, any intrusion is magnified – and the burden of immersion (too much and we drift away).

There has never been anything like Facebook, and there is no serious competition on the horizon. Apart from people losing interest in the whole social networking thing, it is difficult to imagine a startup becoming a threat. The barrier to entry is enormous. Given the scale of pre-IPO interest, many savvy professionals see Facebook as not only the only game in town but also a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Investors are shrugging off the question of long-term viability: On Wednesday Facebook boosted its IPO by almost 25 percent, increasing the float to about 421 million shares. According to a Tuesday filing Facebook raised the target price range to $34-$38 per share, valuing the company at up to $104 billion.

But Facebook, dependent on oversharing ennui, doesn’t have Google’s advantage. Google gets its advertising hints through the searches you do without much thought. Facebook requires proactivity and a perpetual acceptance by Facebook members that their lives should be an open book. Google’s relationship with you is passive. Facebook’s is passive-aggressive.

Facebook’s problem is in the little things – the updates, the likes, the ads. Investors are making as big a future bet as we’ve seen this side of the dot-com bust. It seems as if it’s built on little more than the kindness of strangers.

We’ve all had a little time to breathe after the disclosure last week that Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson embellished his resume. Despite saying he received an undergraduate computer science degree, he in fact did not. And while rising through several positions of increasing responsibility for years, he allowed those vetting his suitability to believe otherwise.

So far Yahoo has said Thompson was guilty of an “inadvertent error” and that it was reviewing the matter. Third Point, the activist shareholder who revealed what had apparently been hiding in plain sight and is trying to grab spots on Yahoo’s board, is now demanding that Yahoo fire Thompson.

Is this what’s best for Yahoo? I doubt it. Is Scott Thompson what’s best for Yahoo? I don’t know. It’s too early to say. And that’s the point.

The company is on its third CEO in as many years, and he’s been on the job one day short of four months. You don’t get from here to there overnight, no matter who’s in charge, and you don’t get from here to there at all if you are constantly taking detours.

Yahoo can afford to have a guy at the helm who didn’t get a CS degree but said he did, but it can’t afford to aimlessly cast about, as it has now for nearly a decade. Unlike some CEOs, Thompson isn’t accused of sexual harassment or running a secret hedge fund within the company. There is something to be said for a bit of calm and a period of continuity.

Thompson was hired for whatever talents and abilities he’s displayed since college, not for ostensibly logging computer lab time in his teens. Sure, lying on your resume is not a good thing, and it shouldn’t be rewarded. But in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t rate.

The strongest argument I’ve seen for dumping Thompson is some variation of “he no longer has the credibility to lead.” Well, let’s wait and see. It’ll be clear soon enough if he’s being dissed, ignored or undermined. That’s for his direct reports to sort out, and for the board to react to. CEOs don’t tend to be let go because workers won’t play nice with them. CEOs are canned by boards impatient for results or by internal rivals.

Not every offense is a firing offense, and injured parties are actually entitled to try to reconcile. A serious rift can actually lead to stronger ties – Thompson could be just one really heart-on-his-sleeve Town Hall away from firmly establishing his cred. (On Monday he wrote to all Yahoo employees to say, “I want you to know how deeply I regret how this issue has affected the company and all of you.”)

Yahoo, despite all the drama, remains a worthwhile enterprise. It’s Comscore’s number three Web property (after Google and Microsoft).

Thomson might still fail, by whatever metric the Yahoo board thinks matters: an inability to increase shareholder value, a failure to convert hundreds of millions of Yahoo users into a community, a reluctance to establish Yahoo as a player in mobile, whatever. But not because he doesn’t have a computer science degree.

We can only guess what Yahoo has done to bring on the high-tech equivalent of the Curse of the Bambino. Yahoo blew a chance to buy Google, it did almost everything wrong competing with the search giant, and its flirtation with Hollywood-style content creation under Terry Semel was an unmitigated disaster.

But after zigging and zagging for the past few years, Yahoo can actually break the curse by forging a bit of destiny and dancing with the one they brung in.

So here it is, Yahoo board: Your own moment of truth. Hang together, or you will surely hang separately.

PHOTO: Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson/Courtesy of Yahoo.

Just how long can Apple run the table in the post-Jobs era? It was simply a matter of time before those whispers turned into a question asked out loud. George Colony, the CEO of Forrester, a research and advisory firm that has followed the company as closely as anyone, is taking a particularly dim view of Apple’s future. In a blog post that was guaranteed to spark a conversation, Colony says Apple’s days as a market leader are numbered; its “momentum will carry it for 24-48 months” and then, absent a “charismatic leader” in the Jobs mold, it will devolve from “being a great company to being a good company.”

Colony doesn’t get too specific about what this means, but we know. It’s not just about market cap, or stock price or any other shareholder metric. Colony is talking about that combination of imagination and execution pixie dust that has made Apple the most significant high-tech company of the moment, and one of the most important ever.

It’s a pretty big statement, especially since Apple is on fire: $6 billion earned on $40 billion in revenues in the most recent quarter, the iPhone selling as briskly in the rest of the world now as it did in the United States for years, 65 million iPads sold in two years, more cash than it knows what to do with, and at least one analyst speculating that it’ll be a $1,000 stock before long.

It’s also not the toughest bet to make, since high-tech companies, in particular, almost always glow hot for only so long, with rare exceptions – especially after the charismatic founder leaves or is kicked out. We’ve seen it at Sony, Polaroid, Disney and even Apple, Colony argues, when Jobs was kicked out in 1985.

But it’s a sucker’s bet. Here’s the easy counter: There is virtually no chance Apple doesn’t have tricks up its sleeve that were developed in the Jobs era. And it’s those tricks, of course, that got them this far. They have something everyone can see: a management team in CEO Tim Cook and designer Jony Ive, handpicked by Jobs more than a decade ago. Indeed, Cult of Mac editor Leander Kahney says Ive is all the proof you need to know that Colony has it wrong:

Apple’s design chief Sir Jonathan Ive – the man Steve Jobs once called his “spiritual partner” and the genius behind Apple’s iconic aesthetic and design language – is still working at Apple. More importantly, as Jobs bragged to his biographer, Jony Ive has just as much operational power at Apple as Tim Cook himself. Cook is only nominally Ive’s boss: In reality, thanks to Steve, they’re equals.

Apple’s demise will come not from a lack of inventiveness, but – if it comes as swiftly as Colony postulates at all – because someone else comes up with a game-changing something that nobody else, Apple very much included, saw coming. That’s the way giants are toppled: Personal desktop computers kill the mainframe, laptops marginalize desktops, tablets steal the PC’s thunder.

The real danger for Apple is that no company has a monopoly on the gift of thinking different. What’s more likely is that missteps for which Apple has been forgiven will be seen as failures rather than as forgivable works in progress by a mad genius. What would the tech press have made of the Apple TV hobby in the hands of anyone but Jobs? Without Jobs, how much leash would they have given Apple during the tortuous cloud timeline that began with .mac and sucked through three incarnations, until last year’s iCloud?

In fairness, this can be argued either way. This is the sort of bet that people easily take sides on, but for which there is insufficient empirical data to really know the outcome. Like two big-city mayors betting on their NFL teams in the Super Bowl, there is a rooting interest and a delightful salon game component.

And, yes, Apple will – someday – be a shadow of its former self. IBM is the classic high-tech survivor, but the number of times it has reinvented itself is head-spinning. Palm, which owned the personal assistant market until it was slow to see the futility of unconnected PIMs, is at the other end of that spectrum.

Colony’s mistake (if I may be so bold) is not in the fear factor, but in the time frame. I’d be shocked if Apple doesn’t have a five-year plan and sufficient institutional knowledge to plough that field – the absence of the serendipitous Mr. Jobs notwithstanding. The real danger begins in the following five years, as founders we haven’t heard of, working right now, come out with something different. Something Jobsian. What will Cook and Ive, who might have grown weary of Apple or each other by then, do in response?

But that’s years off. Until then, the over/under seems a pretty safe bet to me.

PHOTO: Carmen Shippy (L), the first person in line to buy the newly released Apple iPhone 4S at an Apple Store in Clarendon, Virginia, high-fives staff as she leaves the store, October 14, 2011. REUTERS/Jason Reed

A Kickstarter project for a device you wear on your wrist, but that needs a smartphone to do anything really interesting, has raised more than $5.3 million in eight days. This is this far and away the most anyone has ever raised on Kickstarter, and it’s happening – with a gadget in a category that has a pretty dismal track record – at a sales pace that would make even Apple sit up and take notice.

Mind you, Pebble, “The E-Paper Watch” looks very snazzy. At $115 (only 200 were available for $99, and it will retail for $150 when it goes on proper sale) it’s not terribly expensive. And there is a bit of the Kickstarter effect for things that get lots of favorable press: It’s great to get an insider deal and to get in on the ground floor on something cool. And to risk nothing: If the entrepreneur’s funding requirement isn’t met, you don’t get charged a penny.

Within two hours the people behind Pebble got what they asked for: a measly $100,000. By the time the funding round closes on May 19, they’re on pace to have more than $30 million in orders.

All this for a product that doesn’t exist and – see above – requires a smartphone to do anything interesting.

But therein lies the secret of Pebble’s apparent success. We don’t need something for our wrists that does anything really amazing, because we do have our phones. But we may want something that makes that smartphone we already have a little more convenient to use. The Pebble allows you to see text messages and information at the flip of a wrist, without reaching for your phone. Do not underestimate the power of incremental convenience: How many of us constantly reach for our phone, or always have it in hand, just to keep up with the data overload, most of which doesn’t require our immediate attention?

There have been a handful of attempts to put computers on our wrists. The dream began, perhaps, in comic books, when Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist radio transformed a mortal policeman into a sort of superhero.

Microsoft got nowhere with its SPOT watch in 2002, and Sony has something out now that seems suspiciously like the Pebble (it, too, requires a connected device to do anything interesting). And then there are monstrosities like this. And don’t get me started about the LG-GD910 video phone watch.

That’s the opportunity for Pebble. The dream of Dick Tracy’s watch resonated only because we couldn’t imagine something better and unpredictable: the smartphone. And what the world has been waiting for was the correct interpretation of the smartwatch. Remember, we yawned at all the tablets that came before (and, frankly, after) the iPad.

Pebble seems to smooth out all the edges and anticipate usability issues we can’t even really articulate in advance. As noted, all the interesting things it does actually come from an iPhone or Android phone via Bluetooth – calendar and weather alerts, Caller ID, email, Twitter and Facebook messages. With Android phones, it will show you incoming texts (this info isn’t accessible to developers on the iPhone).

It will be your bicycle computer, iPod remote, running mate – and, best of all, who-knows-what-still-to-be-thought-up-next.

Pebble has pre-sold tens of thousands of watches, which has convinced developers that this is a viable platform for apps. No chicken-and-egg problem here: The “Hacker Special” funding level, giving developers early access to the information necessary to design those little pieces of software that will even further distinguish this device, is already sold out.

The most astonishing thing about the Pebble phenomenon is that it presumably is targeted at a demographic that is not in the habit of wearing a wristwatch (yes, it does display the time). Does anyone under 30 own a watch? We all have an atomic clock on our phones.

And, yes, those who buy one might just toss it in a drawer. One of the reasons smartwatches haven’t taken off is because of the style paradox. If you want to buy something that tells time and that you can wear on your wrist, you have thousands of choices. If you want an Internet device that you can wear on your wrist, you have almost no choice. This means that anyone who dares make a smartwatch is going to exclude a sizable number of prospective customers who may like the tech, but not the look.

Pebble also seems to have either solved that problem, or overcome it.

Whatever Pebble has done, it’s working: It got $60,000 more in backing and orders since I started writing this. I only started looking into Pebble this morning … and I backed the project. Call that full disclosure (or participatory observation).

None of us will be getting our new toys until September, which is a bit of a risk, since there is plenty of time for someone to try to reverse-engineer the idea, undercut Pebble and come to market sooner (stranger things have happened).

I can wait. And at least my Pebble will arrive sooner than those wearable computers Google has promised us.

The Department of Justice, as anticipated, filed suit Wednesday against Apple and five of the Big Six publishers over alleged price-fixing. Three of those publishers have entered into a proposed settlement with the DOJ, but Apple is still on the hook.

We won’t know until we know whether Apple will win, lose or settle (and now there are 16 states piling on the charges, too), but in a way it’s a sort of hapless victim. If the DOJ theory is correct, Apple did participate in a sort of conspiracy, but one driven (again, according to the allegations) by publishers that were determined to keep controlling e-book prices. In the beginning of the e-book industry it was the publishers, not Apple, that had the upper hand.

It’s important to remember the climate in which this alleged conspiracy unfolded. Amazon, against publishers’ wishes, was going rogue with $10 e-books. The mammoth online retailer – which got its start in print books but essentially created the e-book business – was widely thought to be making nothing, or next to zero, on its proprietarily encoded e-books, the better to boost demand for the Kindle.

It was classic razor-and-blades: You want to make money on the razor, so you almost give away the blades, except only your razor can hold the free blades. But in e-books it’s an even better deal. Amazon doesn’t make e-books, and they are virtual goods, requiring no inventory and little overhead in the traditional sense.

But the publishing industry was displeased with Amazon’s new $10 regime. While it was beating on Amazon to change its ways, Macmillan – whose titles at the time included the best sellers Wolf Hall and The Gathering Storm – and Apple were negotiating terms for the iPad maker’s new offering: iBooks. Apple, unlike Amazon, was willing to play by Macmillan’s – and thus the publishers’ – rules.

In Apple’s agreeing to terms from publishers that Amazon had resisted for as long as it could, a number of things occurred. It was high-stakes poker, with most of the cards still face down:

• Apple, always fearsome in prospect if not in practice (can you say iAds?), got all the deals it needed to be a credible e-book player with its new platform.
• The publishers got a new, and potentially fearsome, retailing partner that agreed to see things their way.
• That new dynamic had the immediate effect of making Amazon’s market power less fearsome.

I wouldn’t call Apple’s strategy sandbagging, because Apple almost always has a winning hand (and even when it doesn’t, still bets big – can you say Apple TV?). But I would say that, however it happened, Apple won and is winning: It got a deal that then launched iBooks, and it will benefit from varied pricing. (Relatedly, as my Wired colleague Tim Carmody makes clear, Amazon is still sitting pretty.) The genesis of Apple’s victory is the height of irony: Apple’s initial agreement weakened all retailers, as the balance of pricing power returned to publishers. Prices did go up – Amazon stopped trying to sell e-books for $10, and $13 to $15 became the norm for new e-titles everywhere. But that shift to higher prices gave the appearance of collusion, which got the attention of the Obama Justice Department.

Fast-forward to today: Apple is still in the DOJ’s sights (as far as anyone knows), but even if Justice manages to completely dismantle the price controls all five publishers had imposed (again, coincidentally, they all assert), Apple will finally get flexibility in pricing that it was denied by the agreements it had originally agreed to. At the time the negotiations were taking place, Apple, which had no place in the e-book hierarchy, was in no position to insist on a pricing prerogative in straight-up talks with the publishers (though there was some reporting at the time that it had tried). Now it will simply enjoy the terms of the settlement, because it constrains publishers – no matter if the DOJ suit goes forward, it wins or loses such a trial, or if some other settlement is hammered out.

That’s what I call drawing four cards to make a straight flush.

Permit me to not act my age.

I was all grown up already when the Internet became a big deal, scarcely two decades ago. I was like a kid in a candy store. Still, I’ve only had a couple of heart-stopping moments in those 20 years in which everything has changed.

My heart skipped a beat (along with probably only thousands of others) when I downloaded Mosaic, the first Web browser, on the first day it was released. It consistently froze up. But that small, terribly flawed piece of software was really a time portal, showing me the future, and I could barely breathe.

Two years ago I got my hands on the first iPad on the first day it went on sale. My unboxing was unceremonious because I had to rush and show it off during a couple of TV interviews. But when I got home late on that Saturday in April and finally had a chance to put it through its paces, it took my breath away. I was a kid again: full of wonder and utterly immune to negativity.

Call me childish, but I had the same primal reaction to the video, and the reporting of my Wired colleague Steven Levy, on Google’s Project Glass. As Levy writes, Project Glass is “an augmented reality system that will give users the full range of activities performed with a smartphone – without the smartphone. Instead, you wear some sort of geeky prosthetic (one of those pictured is reminiscent of the visor that Geordi La Forge wore on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but Google has also been experimenting with a version that piggybacks on regular spectacles).”

The augmented reality features in Glass aren’t new. Bionic Eye brought AR to the iPhone in 2009: You held up the phone at eye level and nearby points of interest floated through the camera’s lens. Sekai Camera, an augmented reality smartphone app, not only provides a heads-up display of information but also adds a social element. Yelp tossed in Monocle, another augmented reality feature, as an Easter egg in its app. Heck, in December 2009 Wired highlighted the seven best augmented reality apps for iPhone and Android.

Some people who actually pay close attention to these things say we are maybe a generation away from commercial, indispensable AR glasses. Project Glass isn’t even in beta, and there is no word when that might occur.

But here is what I saw when I peered into Project Glass: a glimpse into a post-smartphone future. I have no idea if the project, from Google’s pure research Google (x) division, will make it out of the lab. Or if someone else will beat them to it in a big commercial way. Or if people will take to wearing these glasses with any more fervor than they have those home 3D specs. Or if pesky legislators will ban them after someone gets hit by a bus while looking at a pop-up display instead of oncoming traffic.

But the key to innovation is the identification of friction – the stupid things that slow you down, like extra clicks, deep menus and rotary dialers – and the acceleration of convenience: dissolving real pain barriers, even as those barriers recede into barely perceptible speed bumps. This is not only why smartphones and tablets took off but also why Apple’s devices in particular do so well. Ease of use, intuitive transitions, “obvious” functionality: Victory goes to he who paves the smoothest path to the task at hand.

None of this will happen tomorrow. But something tells me we are witnessing a new paradigm. I went out on a limb a couple of years ago and argued that tablets could be the smartphone killer. So far this bold prediction hasn’t come true. But I can see how easy it would be to slip on some transitions glasses – clear glass or prescription – and have that be our connection with the outside world instead of a mini-computer in our pockets.

PHOTO: Wearing a Google Glass visor. Google/handout.

“You can look, but you can’t touch” – great advice in most museums, and every strip club. But it makes no sense when it comes to our computers. We are getting very touchy-feely with our smartphones and tablets, and this is how it should be. Even BlackBerry and Amazon’s Kindle, which launched with hardware keyboards to differentiate it from the competition, have abandoned them.

It’s no accident. We touch instinctively. We are born touching everything, and only learn where the boundaries are later in life. Our handheld devices are reconnecting us with the primary technique we used to learn about the world we had just entered. The metaphor extends. Now it’s the mobile computers that we use to learn about the world around us, and we control them with our fingers, by touching a screen. How do you place a price on that?

Many are trying, thanks to software patents. Patents have become a bane to the very essence of innovation. They are arsenals, ostensibly meant to defend but more often used to offend. Yahoo’s lawsuit against Facebook over 10 patents further proves that weaponizing software patents is the last gasp of a dying business.

Which brings me to the news that Twitter is trying to patent one of the most instinctive gestures on the iPhone, what they call User Interface Mechanics. Anyone who has used a Twitter client on their phone knows to refresh the page: You “pull” it down and release. Others use this as well, like Google’s Gmail mobile site.

But as Techcrunch noticed, this functionality isn’t built into every core app on the iPhone (like the Mail app), and the reason is probably because it’s potential lawsuit bait.

It’s not a sure thing that Twitter’s application will be approved, or that Twitter would enforce it. The most important computer interface device – the mouse – was patented by visionary Douglas Engelbart in 1970, and everything worked out all right.

But the point is that once you have the right to control the use of something, you have the power.

The goal of IP protection is to encourage innovation by creating incentives for an inventor to come up with something new and useful. But when used to circle the wagons around the obvious, it has the exact opposite effect. Where is the dividing line? I’d say ’round about something that would have been invented anyway. The wheel, as opposed to a Segway.

Pretty soon, we’ll be using eye-movement detection and Siri-like voice commands as much or even more than touch. Specific approaches to a method are certainly proprietary, but surely not the method itself. Google’s search algorithms are properly that company’s property, but search isn’t.

This stuff is a big deal, even though it doesn’t (forgive me) touch us every day. But ideas that are simple, easily repeated, and in retrospect no-brainers cause a revolution, unless they are not permitted to do so.

Steve Jobs didn’t invent the graphical user interface, the granddaddy idea of personal computing. He got a peek at a prototype at Xerox PARC. But that didn’t prevent the audacious Jobs from accusing Bill Gates of ripping him off, with Windows. In an encounter allegedly witness by Andy Hertzfeld, Gates cooly replied:

“Well, Steve, I think there’s more than one way of looking at it. I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it.”

Or, as Ratso Rizzo said at that party when caught stuffing his pockets with buffet fare: “Well, if it’s free, then I ain’t stealin’.”

It would be insane if windows (small “w”), icons, drag-and-drop and the like were private property. The line is somewhere between stealing and free. Wherever it is, it isn’t where we are now.

Twitter hasn’t made it a habit to throw its weight around – though some developers might say that buying Tweetie was a blow to the innovation it had encouraged. Now, Twitter has a chance to make a grand gesture, by setting this gesture free.

PHOTO: An Apple employee is reflected in the screen of an iPad tablet computer at an Apple store in central London while demonstrating the device during its UK launch, May 28, 2010. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor

Sometimes it’s best to start with the obvious. The “new” iPad announced Wednesday will sell like mad when it goes on sale next Friday. So confident is Apple in what it isn’t calling the iPad 3 that it didn’t even bother to give it a special name. It’s just iPad, even though there is a first-generation iPad (a retronym, of course) and an iPad 2. When you’ve achieved one-name status — Bono, Cher, Liberace — you don’t give that up lightly.

The new iPad has a bunch of hardware and design upgrades that do make sense, even though the impetus for incorporating them may or may not have been to play catch-up with some Android tablets that nobody is buying.

It’s nice to see 4G make its first appearance on an Apple device — one wonders why this wasn’t possible on the iPhone 4S that came out not that terribly long ago. This exponentially better network standard isn’t widely available yet, but where it exists. it spoils you quickly.

Better camera, new iSight on the back, HD video, retina display, quad-core graphics acceleration, check, check and double-check.

But it all seems so … predictable. The immensely insightful Sharah Rottman Epps says of the new iPad: “A Gut Renovation Masquerades As Incremental Innovation,” and she’s not someone you disagree with lightly. Yet there’s no magic in this newness. Apple really is only shoring up a sure thing with features first introduced by considerably less successful competitors and Apple itself on other devices.

I was hoping, especially in the first big product rollout of the post-Jobs era, for One Last Thing from the Jobs era. Instead of surprising us with an unpredictable Bobby Fischer-like sequence of moves to win, this update feels like Apple is playing for a draw.

Why not, one might argue. Apple really doesn’t have anything to prove right now. The iPad already has the kind of market share in tablets that Google, which is virtually synonymous with search, has in search.

I was hoping for something entirely different from Tim Cook, whose black shirt was in keeping with the Jobs tradition, but whose preference for a collar — albeit not buttoned up — was perhaps a modest declaration of independence.

My chief lament: No Siri, the imperfect but powerful voice-controlled personal assistant introduced in the iPhone 4S. Porting Siri to the iPad and granting app developers access to it would have been insanely great.

But I’m biased, having been seduced by her charms. Even more than the iPhone, the iPad is becoming basic kit in every industry — the military, aviation, medicine, restaurants, retail. Reliable voice control is such a powerful force multiplier that Apple wouldn’t even have to hype it much to make the case that it’s the most important development in computing since the mouse — and infinitely more versatile.

Apple usually either produces something insanely great, or makes us believe — through that famous Jobsian reality distortion field — that it has. But the new iPad is handsome and respectable and admirable. It’s not a rebel.

That doesn’t mean Apple has got fat and lazy as it rolls around in piles of cash and watches its stock price reliably test historical levels day after day. But the iPad event was sobering instead of intoxicating. “Sanely great” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

PHOTO: Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during an Apple event as an image of the old iPad is projected on the screen behind him, in San Francisco, California March 7, 2012.  REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

Yahoo is taking on Facebook — but it’s not vying for the hearts and minds of the Internet cool kids. It’s for licensing fees over some patents. This is not how it was supposed to be.

No, I’m not naive. But I am a bit of a romantic. Thing is, I remember when Yahoo was an upstart with two crazy awkward college kids who came up with something that the search giants of the time — Lycos and Alta Vista — could not withstand. Yahoo’s scrappiness was part of a long tradition of Silicon Valley startups that came before (and would come after). Like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the elder statesmen of Silicon Valley who began their iconic company in a now iconic garage, Jerry Yang and David Filo started with nothing but an idea in a dorm room and changed everything. Yahoo’s blazing success in search and (the now-quaint notion of) cataloging the Web begs comparison to two other crazy awkward college kids who started a search engine. That search engine, of course, killed Yahoo. It had an equally kooky name — Google.

Now Yahoo, as part of its effort remake itself after a decade of decline, is said to be wielding a new weapon: a patent trove. The stellar DealBook blog of the New York Times, which first reported this story, couldn’t get anyone to disclose the particulars, but it quotes “people briefed on the matter” as saying Yahoo is threatening lawsuits and is in the midst of negotiations with a pretty big fish. “Yahoo is seeking to force Facebook into licensing 10 to 20 patents over technologies that include advertising, the personalization of Web sites, social networking and messaging,” DealBook reports.

Oh, how the mighty have… matured, to be charitable. Yahoo was crazy disruptive before “disruptive” was even digerati shorthand for “cool.” It was so popular that Reuters — yes, this Reuters — took a sizable stake in the young company. The American executive who made this happen, Andy Nibley, delighted in telling the story of how the very British Reuters board received the news he was investing millions in a company named “Yahoo!”

For years the two companies closely partnered to create wicked revolutionary news services. I know this because I was the lead guy on the Reuters editorial side in those heady days, collaborating with some daring executives and talented engineers at Yahoo’s Mountain View mecca.

Hey, we all grow up. We get married, get car loans, take on a mortgage. We become, as my closest comrade from those days (still a dear friend) never tires of reminding me, “not the demographic they care about.”

But that doesn’t mean we still can’t be cool — disruptive.

Yahoo’s been through the wringer. It’s sad enough that the worst decision it has made in the past few years has been not to sell out to Microsoft, and that one of those crazy awkward kids, Jerry Yang, has completely severed his ties to the company he founded.

Who knows — Facebook may be getting away with murder.

But patent enforcement is becoming the subtext of Web 3.0, threatening to make the Internet the province and playground not of awkward dreamers but of lawyers and accountants. Look at what’s happening: Google buys Motorola Mobility, sure, to extend its brand and reach into the mobile payments arena but also as a defensive move to acquire a basket of patents. Same with Nortel, divvied up by Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Sony. Kodak, a brand that people of a certain generation identify with the perfect slideshow, goes Chapter 11 long after it ceased to be relevant because it could not generate enough income from its patent portfolio to stay afloat.

And then there is Paul Allen: the co-founder of Microsoft, one of the world’s wealthiest self-made people, legendary risk-taking investor, a person who could easy wear “cool.” What’s he been up to? Patent trolling. As as Wired‘s Ryan Singel reported it, Allen is suing the “entire web — except Microsoft.”

Again, I am not naive. I know the Lords of Usenet fruitlessly (and laughably) tried to quash the commercialization of that pre-Web, text-only communications network. I know today’s awkward dreamers only make it to the cover of Wired when moneyed risk-takers back them, and they succeed.

So Yahoo is in good, or bad company, as the case may be. The company is not on life support like Kodak, but it has lost its way. It traded a founder in over his head for a hothead it fired and now have a back-to-basics guy, Scott Thompson, occupying the CEO’s office.

Every penny counts, of course. But I, for one, am yearning for great things again from Yahoo. Collecting taxes probably isn’t what Vint Cerf had in mind.

It certainly doesn’t want to make you scream: “Yahoo!”

Photo: Yahoo’s Times Square neon sign, by freddie_benjamin/flickr. Used with gratitude via a Creative Commons license.