Off with their heads! Mobile Edge’s 2011 Turkey Awards

As we prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday this week, we look forward to gratefully celebrating the good we’ve experienced and the fortune we’ve had. We also anticipate the family gatherings, football games, holiday shopping, and of course centerpiece meal of a roasted turkey with all the trimmings. We tend to not dwell on how the turkey ended up on the plate; its fate is incidental to the festivities.

So it goes with mobile technology: There’ve been amazing developments this year — the iPad 2, the unification of Android, the triumph of employee-driven mobile adoption, iOS 5 and iCloud, and the intriguing but young Siri — that we both celebrate and have made part of our routines. But a few turkeys have lost their heads along the way in preparation for the technology cornucopia we enjoy. Some of these underachievers met their fate due to their own shortcomings — like the real turkeys that drown looking up at the rain, mouths wide open — while others were prepped and pampered in good faith for a long life, only to end up cut short and sold on the specials table.

Without further ado, here are the “winners” of this year’s Mobile Edge Turkey Awards.

WebOS. Two years ago, when the first Palm Pre WebOS devices came out, I was disappointed. WebOS had a lot going for it: It was innovative, often elegant to use, and advanced in several areas when compared to iOS. But it delivered only partway in many functions, as if Palm ran out of time or resources and shipped what it had. Meanwhile, Apple and then Google embarked on a more methodical strategy of strengthening their OSes — and Palm essentially ground to a halt for more than a year as the company looked for a way to survive, eventually bought by Hewlett-Packard.

HP announced grandiose plans for WebOS; it was to power not only a smartphone but also tablets and ultimately even PCs. Instead, it delivered the TouchPad tablet with mediocre hardware and a partially revamped version of WebOS that continued Palm’s previous mix of cool and incomplete. That flopped, as you would expect when the alternative is the iPad 2.

From the outside, it appears that whatever caused Palm to deliver an incomplete initial WebOS continued as it became a division of HP (it was essentially the same team). And HP proved it was clueless about developing its own platform, perhaps in retrospect an obvious deficiency, given that almost everything in a PC comes from Microsoft, Intel, or one of the Asian component makers. Management chaos at HP didn’t help, but it’s clear the failure went beyond the boardroom shenanigans that first brought in and then brought down Léo Apotheker. The result was a spectacular public repudiation of WebOS as HP killed its foray outside of the Wintel computing world.

What’s sad about the whole WebOS affair is that the operating system should have become Apple’s main challenger. Android is inferior in many ways, and it lacks the vision and innovation that the WebOS team tried to bring. Google’s bottomless budget and a gaggle of electronics makers happy to join the tablet party at little cost are why Android has succeeded. Imagine what would have happened if Palm had perfected WebOS early on and made it available for others — or if there had been a serious HP in its corner even a year ago. This turkey could have been a swan.

Research in Motion. It’s clear now that RIM is all but a doomed company, though it has one last chance with its 2012 BlackBerry reboot. For several years, the company ignored the changes in the mobile market wrought by the iPhone and its app- and user-centric approach to computing on the go. At first, RIM kept touting its superior security technology (a worthy claim, but few companies actually need), then started also pushing the idea the the BlackBerry was a great platform for gaming and even music. Talk about a mixed message!

Of course, the highly distinct hardware platforms comprising the BlackBerry product portfolio — with huge differences in screen sizes, text input, and touch support — made it impossible to develop satisfactory games and other apps across all these devices. Thus, a shrinking platform fragments, trying to compete with the huge iOS and Android markets, whose internal differences were nowhere as significant. The BlackBerry hardware was also underpowered for significant apps, and RIM limited the most recent OS update to just the new, more powerful models released in September, creating further fragmentation — a crazy strategy in a world where carrier contracts run two years and users can’t realistically replace hardware faster than that.

The truth is there is no unified BlackBerry platform as there is with iOS. Even the Android’s infamous fragmentation looks like minor variations when compared to BlackBerry divisions; there are a bunch of BlackBerrys with varying levels of compatibility. The forthcoming BlackBerry 10 OS is supposed to change all that for a new generation of BlackBerrys — it had better.

Then there was the fiasco of the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet. Underpowered like BlackBerry smartphones, the device also required the use of a BlackBerry smartphone to access email and instant messaging, as well as to gain the corporate security RIM kept pushing as its fundamental product advantage. As pundits like me warned a half year before the PlayBook’s release, the result was a tablet that could do little on its own and became essentially just a bigger screen for a BlackBerry when wirelessly tethered.

Change is hard, I know, but if you don’t change, you die. RIM has refused to change, though now it seems to be finally trying with its grand plans for a new BlackBerry 10 OS based on that QNX-derived version developed for the unsatisfying PlayBook. As a result, its market share continues to plummet and developers’ interest has evaporated. If BlackBerry 10 ends up being more of the same, I’m convinced RIM will have to be a seller of message-optimized Windows Phone devices for the BlackBerry to survive. 2012 is RIM’s chance to go from being a turkey to a phoenix.

The technology press. I’ve gone apoplectic several times this past year watching the parade of obviously false iPhone 5 and iPad 3 stories appear on practically every tech news site, as well as many general news outlets. It’s as if the journalism community decided to hell with truth and became Weekly World News wannabes in their quest for that Holy Grail of page views. I need page views too, but I don’t believe I have to fake stories or, worse, copy others’ fake stories to get them.

This abdication of professional practice — which may have started with untrained bloggers but quickly became adopted by mainstream journalists — ironically led to a big letdown in the same media when the iPhone 4S was announced. The reality of the upgraded product couldn’t match the fiction they built up over the course of a year. Perhaps trained to believe none of us any more, buyers snapped up the iPhone 4S in droves, causing supplies to run out quickly. Ironically, it was the stock market — that once-rationalizing economic force that has become an emotion-driven roller-coaster ride — that reacted in the most damaging way, pummeling Apple’s stocks when Apple said its iPhone sales had declined more than usual before a new release because the incessant rumors caused a higher proportion of buyers to wait.

Even sadder, I still see iPhone 5 and iPad 3 stories in the technology press, not just in fanboy blogs, even after this year’s embarrassing saga became clear. I hope readers have stopped paying attention to these turkey stories and their turkey publications. These turkeys will keep gobbling nonsense as long as they think you’re listening.

The mobile Linux community. I admire their stick-to-it nature, but at some point that trait becomes a liability. For years now there’s been one mobile Linux effort after another — Moblin, Maemo, MeeGo, and Tizen — often involving the same cast of characters (almost always Intel and/or Nokia) that keeps pretending to be working on a viable mobile Linux OS. It’s clear that these are just hobbyists who’ve found naive sugar daddy sponsors apparently with fantasies of a parallel universe in which their MoMaeMeeTi OS preempted iOS. There’s nothing wrong with hobbies — they can be quite healthy, in fact — but the level of self-delusion in these mobile Linux efforts is disturbing.

The most recent action in this parallel universe is from Canonical, which is working on its own mobile Ubuntu spec that it hopes will power mobile devices some day. Someone needs to ask why the world needs or will want mobile Linux, especially given Linux’s lack of success on the desktop. These wandering believers should console themselves that Android and iOS have roots in Linux and Unix, respectively, and call that a victory.

The security industry (much of it). McAfee, Symantec, and ISACA are the big names in the security-industrial complex trying to first freak everyone out about the dangers of mobile and then sell us software and services to protect us from ourselves. I get pitches like this all the time from companies large and small whose sole goal is to panic you into buying their stuff. It’s crazy and unnecessary. The fact is that mobile devices and OSes, with the exception of Google Android, are safer than the desktop OSes that we rely on much more and that access the bulk of sensitive information allegedly under threat. But in their world, anything new has to be a threat so that they can enter that market and work overtime coming up with scary scenarios.

As regular Mobile Edge readers know, I was particularly incensed this year by Symantec claiming employees working during vacation was a big security threat and by ISACA claiming this month that holiday shopping on smartphones and tablets should scare your company. And I decried products from both Symantec and McAfee that sold “protection” for mobile devices that users already got for free. These are just the worst examples of what I see every week.

Security is important, but a company that trusts these self-interested vendors’ claims will find themselves going broke and disrupting their everyday functions in the corporate equivalent of fighting the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Security concerns need to be carefully vetted not only for risk but impact; often the risks are minor and the prevention far costlier than the occasional breach. The good news is that mobile computing is on average safer than desktop computing, so don’t let your Windows experience overly color your view of iOS, Windows Phone, and even Android. The bad news is that many security vendors specialize in making businesses act like turkeys — which are then sent to the butcher to dress up for the platter. I suggest you go with those that don’t resort to fearmongering as a marketing technique.

AT&T and T-Mobile. It’s impossible to love any carrier, as they are masters of exploiting and extorting customers such as through iPad data plans that autorenew without notice to you, justifying early termination fees as a way to recoup the smartphone subsidy through a monthly hidden charge that never ends, and claiming unlimited data plans that are quite clearly limited by capacity, speed, or both. Unfortunately, these are perennial misdeeds in the industry. But this year, AT&T and T-Mobile deserve extra attention as Turkey Award inductees for their deceptive claims that they offer 4G cellular data service — they don’t. What they offer is a 3G network (technically, HSPA+) augmented (allegedly) through a faster backbone pipe. Faster than what? Who knows.

The International Telecommunications a year ago called out such 4G claims as false, but as it is a carrier-dominated club, the organization quickly backed down and said 4G means whatever the carriers want it to mean. Let’s be clear: To be 4G by the most charitable (former) official definition, it has to run on an LTE or WiMax network. Verizon Wireless has been rolling out 4G via LTE for a year now, with years more to go, and Sprint has offered WiMax for a few years in some markets and is now embarking on its own decade-long LTE rollout. Late this year, AT&T rolled out LTE in a handful of cities, so technically it offers real 4G, but what it advertises as 4G is still mainly its backbone-boosted 3G network. T-Mobile has no LTE deployments at all.

When the U.S. carriers got Congress to exempt themselves from state regulation, deceptive practices became the norm, as both the FCC and FTC are disinclined to watch out for consumer interests, especially given Congress’s heightened aversion to consumer protection in the last two decades. As a result, carriers get away with lying about their 4G (and unlimited) offerings. These turkeys are rotten to the core.

The Mobile Edge Giblets Dishonorable Mentions Award Not all ill-advised behavior warrants a turkey award, of course. That’s what the Mobile Edge Giblets Dishonorable Mentions are for: those not-so-smart incidents that make you start looking for the whole turkey. Apple gains a dishonorable mention this year.

A couple weeks ago, Apple chucked security researcher Charles Miller out of its iOS developers program. His sin: Creating and submitting an app (that Apple accepted) that demonstrated a flaw allowing unapproved code into an app later on.

Miller is a “white hat” hacker who loves to find weaknesses in technology systems, to the great annoyance of vendors like Apple. He’s exposed iOS flaws before, but this time he intentionally put one into the App Store, which seemed to be a bridge too far for Apple. OK, so it was a stunt to prove Apple wouldn’t catch such issues and thus revealing the threat to be more than theoretical. He did expose his actions quickly, so his stunt had limited damage beyond the PR problems it caused, and Apple patched the flaw a week later. Apple should apologize to Miller, then work out a way he can help iOS security through such efforts so that Apple won’t feel bitch-slapped. It’s to both of their benefits to work together to keep iOS secure.

Enough of the chopping blade — as I said at the beginning of this post, we have very much to be thankful for in mobile technology this year. And after we leave the turkey carcass behind, we’ll still have all the good that the year has brought. Be sure to enjoy that reality.

This article, “Off with their heads! Mobile Edge’s 2011 Turkey Awards,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.