This bums me out hugely - the Talk Show was a weekly personal highlight. Something I relished every week.

And upon listening to Dan Benjamin's sad take on the affair, I'm left feeling like a ten year old kid whose parents just got a sudden divorce.

Feeling quite sad.

Plus the first episode of the new Talk Show without Dan Benjamin is car crash bad.

Sucks.

• Microsoft has been muddled about its direction for ten years, the nastier side effects of which have been mostly mitigated, or at least deferred, by the fact its Windows / Office cash cow is so large.
• Nokia used to be the worlds largest mobile phone manufacturer, now it's betting its future on the Windows Phone OS hoping that Microsoft can save it from oblivion.
• Six years ago RIM was redefining what we expected from smartphones with BlackBerry. Now it's redefining the meaning of the word implosion.
• HP had the corporate equivalent of a nervous breakdown last summer and has just decided (again) to start manufacturing Tablet PCs. This time running Windows 8 RT. If HP had a face, you'd slap it.
• Sony looks increasingly fragile.
• Dell is in need of a second act; the mail order PC business isn't exactly ground breaking.
• And today Yahoo staggered through yet another leadership crisis and is about to get it's fourth CEO in four years.

And only Apple and Google seem capable of recognising that no matter how earth shatteringly awesome your one great product idea was, it most likely isn't enough. You need to be BATSHIT CRAZY PARANOID - as Steve Jobs evidently was - that your treasured Golden Goose is either going to die or get stolen from under your feet.

Yahoo is a great example of a business that got big quickly with one simple idea back in 1994, but which has been spraying the cash proceeds from that same idea against the wall ever since Google showed and spooked them almost fifteen years ago. They're demonstrating brilliantly that you can't build a sustainable long term business if you fail to engineer the right conditions to make lightning strike twice. And, actually, maybe you can't make it strike twice.

And so I think what we're seeing now is a kind of Newtonian reckoning where the inescapable laws of physics ultimately draw back down to earth anything that lacks the propulsion required to stay aloft.

This stuff really is business school 101. You'd have thunk.

Particularly when you're going about your business and up pop supposedly targeted Google ads from competitors. And all because genius marketeers inside competitors make Google ad assumptions which conclude that people who visit websites of their competitors are likely to be thinking about buying new accounting software for example, so let's be ultra targeted and serve them ads for our alternative.

And so, because I visit xero.com as a user and an employee, the cookie tracking cruft that builds up in my browser cache tells ad servers that I ought to see adverts for competitors of Xero.

Even if I'm watching something entirely contextually inappropriate.

Some data insights from Apple's last quarter financial results courtesy of The Critical Path podcast.

• As a standalone business, the iPhone now makes more profit than the whole of Microsoft. The iPhone business didn't exist five years ago.
• For bonus points, Apple's total quarterly profit was $1Bn more than Google's total revenue for the quarter. That's Google's revenue, not profit. 
• In the minutes immediately following the publication of Apple's results last Wednesday, Apple's stock price lifted by $50+ a share, adding more than $40Bn to Apple's market capitalization.
• Using just that instant lift in market cap, Apple could have bought the entire mobile phone industry, (Nokia $14Bn, RIM $7Bn, HTC $12Bn, Motorola $12Bn) and would still have had chump change left over.

We've never seen numbers like these.

(Update - someone just pointed out these don't add up to $40Bn - I just transcribed the numbers off the podcast as they were spoken. And I guess the point Horace Dedui is making is that in general terms, for a brief period Apple's market cap lift (the point being it's just the lift) was as large or larger than the estimated the market caps of all the other mobile phone businesses put together. What's $5Bn between friends.)

These are my rambling reflections.

For a while there's existed a loose expectation that some kind of market consolidation or shakeout would descend upon the nascent web apps space, mostly because that's what usually happens. Start-ups cease to be start-ups, lose the wide-eyed impetus that got them going in the first place and some then struggle to respond to competitive, growth or strategic challenges. And progressively some begin to give up, cash in their chips or, worse, banks begin to withdraw lines of credit. A few succeed in guessing the right moves and they prosper.

While some standard degree consolidation will occur, I think it will be different.

My general shake-out theory is this.

The same economics of internet distribution that made it very easy for a larger number of vendors to come to market over the last ten years, compared with the prior, pre-web generation when software shipped in cardboard boxes, will blunt the sharper edges of a regular market shakeout.

Some cloud vendors will give up/go under/get acquired (delete as appropriate) but this will be as much to do with internal mismanagement (fiduciary as well as strategic) as it will natural competitive forces.

However, good enough cloud vendors now have a third, relatively comfortable option that sits right between the previously binary commercial outcomes of market obliviion and market domination.

Become a Lifestyle Vendor.

Although the term sounds new, it's really a 2012 update on the old Lifestyle VAR (Value Added Reseller) tag.

Lifestlye VARs were generally competent, well run intermediaries that were responsible for physically purchasing business apps from old world software vendors and then reselling them, deploying them and offering services to the end customer businesses who ultimately used them.

The Lifestyle modifier came from the fact that the owners of Lifestyle VAR businesses were generally content to be masters of their own destinies rather than smaller cogs in a corporate entitiy, had nice cars, nice homes, modest offices and two expensive overseas vacations a year. Perfectly serviceable if plodding businesses with balance sheet cloth cut according to the rate of attrition of their annual software and hardware maintenance contracts.

However, Lifestyle VARs were generally regarded by software vendors with disdain because the inherent lack of ambition found in a classic Lifestyle VAR ultimately held back the vendor. After all, the VAR was often the sole route to market and if, as a vendor, your once vibrant VAR channel matured over time into a plump, greying and generally content bunch then the metabolic rate of your software business slowed with them.     

Fast forward back to today when we now know that the web disintermediates, spawning the current generation of online business software, no longer reliant on the classic VAR model.

However, because it doesn't cost very much to run a online software business today and because online software businesses - certainly online accounting software businesses are harder to sell* than classic software businesses, while I think we'll see some online vendors go on to build huge, successful businesses, we'll also see a good few smaller vendors revert to being Lifestyle Vendors instead of disappearing.

Lifestyle Vendors will have enough operational ability to do a excellent job of supporting hundreds or even a few thousand customers, will drive nice cars, work out of modest offices with great coffee, own nice houses and take a couple of overseas vacations every year.

While I'm evidently clever enough to predict the arrival of the Lifestyle Vendor, I not clever enough to calculate whether or at which point being a Lifestyle Vendor might ultimately become untenable. It's relatively easy today to throw together a good enough service, but that might change radically in the next ten years.

* Online software businesses are more difficult to sell than classic software companies because of the lack of security in recurring revenues. Classic software licensing and annual maintenance contracts tend to be much more stable assets to sell on because it's hard for all the customers to just stop paying upon change ownership at the software company. And because there's the theoretical risk that every customer in an online business could just cancel their monthly subscriptions should they not take kindly to the new regime, it's much more difficult to reach agreement on price when online software businesses are up for sale - the seller seeks a classic valuation, the buyer discounts because of the increased risk. This also supports an outcome where we'll see more Lifestyle Vendors.  

RELATED : Benevolent Dictatorships, The Disintermediation Of Ability

For a long time telephone calls were also the only method of distance communication in realtime (I'm ignoring the telegraph) and compared with writing and mailing a letter, phonecalls were by far the most efficient method of communication. Today however, talking with someone by phone is actually much less efficient than email, text messaging or any one of a multitude of electronic communications methods. So much so that the phone part of smartphone already feels anachronistic in much the same way as referring to, as one did around the turn of 1900, the first automobiles as a horse-less carriages.

I'm not sure, but I think my iPhone's ringtone has been set to silent for about three years. I couldn't even tell you what sound its configured to make when it does ring out loud. This started as a courtesy to others when in meetings it would chirp annoyingly upon receipt of every email. And over time this practical courtesy has combined with the fact that alternative electronic communication methods now negate the need for most phonecalls.

The foreshortening shelf-life of the phonecall is not helped by my perception that many of the calls I do get are from people trying to sell me something. So, the phonecall feels increasingly like an intrusion that sits outside my shell of personal intimacy where, accordingly, the people who are really important to me get my polychronous, silent attention every waking hour.

I'm such a genius that I built one in five minutes and I called it Presenter Pitboard. It's open source, runs on any platform and I'm gifting it to the world.

I designed the UI so that an idiot could use it. Just load up this PDF into your tablet or smartphone device, select the message you'd like to discreetly convey to your errant presenter, hold it aloft and, BAM! - presentation zen is yours.

When I first saw a computer program running as a kid, what blew me away was the magical simplicity of what I saw. The ability to do something remarkable that had never been done before, and all you had to do was type RUN and hit the Enter key and just marvel at it.

Then after a while, flip-chart toting management consultants discovered the software industry and cunningly conceived of a dozen ways to extract the maximum amount of money from software users and basically fucked everything up with maintenance contracts modelled on underworld protection rackets - "keep paying us money, and Brian here won't smash the place up" - and long term implementation projects.  

I used to secretly suspect that I was simpleton because my eyes glazed over whenever I saw software that wasn't instantly gratifying and needed a team of consultants and three hours to explain its many virtues to me. Now I realise the problem didn't lie with me. It's just that I missed software.

In fact I imagine in the future, that the period between 1985 and 2010 will be looked upon as some kind of Dark Ages for software, when its early wings were clipped and it was promptly enslaved by the last shift of 20th century industrial complex.

But now software just software once again; born again on the shoulders of clinically disintermediating app stores and the web. Recapturing the power and magical simplicity it always had.

Long live software.

Coming up on seven years ago we upgraded from a seven year old, 32 inch CRT television to new 40 inch LCD which at the time if felt like a huge upgrade and I couldn't imagine needing or wanting a bigger TV. Back in 2005 they pretty much didn't make them any bigger than 40". However these days 40" is probably the entry level size for a living room TV.

I tricked my wife into needing my iPhone 3GS when I upgraded to the iPhone 4 in 2010. Again, I remember the shift to the new high resolution display was stunning for a few days, then gradually you get used to it. It's only whenever I'm messing with the old 3GS - usually trying to fix some FUBAR'd up iCloud contact sync issue - that I'm reminded of how bad the 3GS display looks. Back in 2009 it looked fine, today it just looks like shit.

What's also interesting, sitting at a macro level above all this, is how used we've become to this phenomena, how we simply expect things to be replaced or fall redundant after a relatively short space of time - at least relative to the pace of change ten or more years ago. In a sense it's like we're living in a modern renaissance where we expect nothing short of revolutionary improvements in either service, material integrity or capability every few months. Our collective expectations have become re-normalized. 

And if product lifecycles continue to be compressed in this way, I wonder if we'll eventually lose our upgrade sensitivity, whether we'll cease to be bothered about the next ground breaking improvement. And if this will then bring our new renaissance to a close, to be followed by a long dark wilderness of homogenized banality where, ironically, we'll be living the equivalent of a latter-day 1974 all over again, only this time without all the sci-fi ambition that led us to this present era.

Um....

At this precise moment it's still considered a bit odd for an ordinary, regular business to have a Facebook Fan page. Just it was considered a bit odd back in 1994 for an ordinary, regular business to have it's own website.

On Tuesday, after falling out with BT on account them demonstrating to me just how good a job they can do when it comes to delivering bad customer service, I asked Twitter to recommend an alternative. The @BTCare account noticed and offered to help, but I declined, calculating that it was a hollow gesture and I'd wasted enough time trying to count the ways they had failed me to four individual BT representatives to no avail.

Then yesterday my mobile rang and it was a very apologetic woman from BT, informing me that they'd reviewed my case, were gobsmacked at how they'd messed me around, apologised profusely and totally resolved my complaint. So, now I'm not cancelling my account.

At first I thought, possibly naively, that my expressions of profound displeasure over four phone calls had somehow meant my case had been flagged for review. Then I concluded that the @BTCare account might have escalated it after spotting my tweet.

Besides being pleased with my final if belated resolution, my instinctive initial response was that it was sad that it's only the people who complain on Twitter who bounce organisations into fixing things out of fear of public shame.

Then I changed my mind.

Large organisational hierarchies and the people in them passively conspire against taking and correctly processing negative feedback. They don't mean to ignore your protests, in many cases the individuals are mostly helpless and even if you do have the time and motivation to sit down and write a letter of complaint - which, frankly, most people don't - the point is often moot by the time acknowledgement of liability arrives. It's easier just to cancel your account and walk away in disgust.

But real time complaints on Twitter provide these organisations with a final chance at saving the day and overcoming their organisational dysfunctions. In that sense it's not actually the case that they are being publicly or pathetically shamed into finally doing something they should have done sooner.

Twitter customer care isn't about moving quickly to silence noisy complainers to protect the brand (however desirable a parallel by-product that may be), it's actually a critical, last chance to finally save an organisation from itself.