I suggest to publishers and the software vendors serving them that they take 25 PCs for every tablet they want to ingest because that will be the ratio of PCs in use around the world for each tablet (by December/2012).

All Things Digital today recharged the iPad hype engine with its article “Tablet of Choice for Android Users: The iPad.”

It’s designed to be a startling headline, and it only makes sense. (more…)

The Wall Street Journal broke the story today, starting off with “The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed ‘Perfect Citizen’ to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program.”

Perfect Citizen! Don’t you just love it. “I wanna be a perfect citizen.” A perfect cyber citizen.

Johnny, if you don’t clean up your cyber citizen behavior you’re grounded.

That aside, what intrigues me about the report is that last week’s The Economist had a compelling briefing on the threat of cyberwar (the story is not yet behind its cyber firewall). Because I’d read the Economist editorial and article before today’s announcement, I’m not alarmed by the “big brother” angle that predictably has so many fulminating (already over 500 Google links to “cyber ‘perfect citizen’ ‘big brother’”). So was The Economist put up to the story? Or did U.S. government officials realize that after The Economist has already sold the threat to 90% of key U.S. (and international) decision-makers, it would be an opportune moment to leak the story?

A blog entry on Richard Curtis’ very good E-Reads site struck a strong chord with me today.

Curtis writes:

Until now, most folks returning from the annual (O’Reilly’s) Tools of Change conference have come away inspired and energized as the flint of old thinking met the steel of innovation. But this time publishing industry blogger Don Linn reported symptoms of future weariness. “We are in the midst of a bucketload of ‘Future of Publishing’ conferences and there is an element of conference fatigue setting in,” he writes. “There’s not much new under the sun: In the 2- 1/2 days I was there, I didn’t see or hear anything startling or revolutionary that hasn’t been discussed in other conferences or even at previous TOC’s.”

I did not attend TOC, so of course cannot offer any comments on the event, but I am beginning to suffer a serious case of future fatigue. The media continues its feeding frenzy on every trivial piece of tech news that it can uncover, largely, I believe because it has always perceived publishing in all its forms as the most important subject known to mankind. Earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. Yeah, ok, a few headlines, but what about this: “Google Reaches Books Deal With Italy.” I’ll confess: didn’t even glance at it.

The media appears to subscribe to the lyrics of a song (that I can’t seem to locate on Google). The two key lines go:

“The only thing more interesting than me…
Is me.”

My foolish dream is that the big fat tech companies, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Intel et al., would jointly declare a 12 month moritorium on heavy-duty R&D and marketing expenditures and offer a portion of their billions to tech workers around the world, who would receive, for example, $40k plus cost-of-living expenses, and would commit to working in third-world countries helping to improve infrastructure, sanitation, education, health care, and a long list of other crucial problems. The money would be paid monthly to the workers; if you quit early, that’s the end of it. If you work the full year and if your supervisor rates your efforts at a minimum of 7.5/10, you receive a $8k bonus.

Oh well, enough of my fantasy. Back to reading the endless blogs, Publishers Weekly and The Economist, and thinking about how most publishing technology is only barely managing to improve this world we inhabit.

The latest issue of The Seybold Report features an interview with me by Heidi Tolliver-Nigro about my Adobe-Omniture acquisition report, Adobe’s Designs on Web Analytics: The Omniture Acquisition. (The link to the report allows you to download the entire issue, courtesy of Seybold. A ”left-click, save as” may well be your best bet. You’ll get a good sense of the diverse value that the Report continues to feature.)

While I do offer a fairly generous excerpt on my site, this interview will give you a lot more detail of the content and thinking behind the report.

What I feel is most salient about Adobe’s move is what a great shift it signals away from the company’s print roots. As I remarked: ”Now, when Adobe talks about print, it’s funny because it’s almost in a peripheral way—like whispering about Granny who lives upstairs and we have to sometimes take her out for a walk.” I’ve commented several times before that Adobe has over the last decade or more gone cold then warm then cold, etc. on the issue of print. I think it’s now 100% certain that Adobe management (and Adobe is not alone, and I’m not being critical; just stating the facts) sees print as a modest part of it overall software portfolio, with a diminishing future. The Omniture acquisition has essentially 0% to do with print and 99.9% to do with the Web.

I do however think that Adobe might find some fascinating ways to link Omniture-type technology to variable print-on-demand…it’s a fascinating opportunity that I hope Adobe explores.

In the meantime I weigh in largely favorably on the whole deal. The ROI may be slow in arriving, but I can see now that with the acquistionof Omniture, Adobe has clearly made a bold and brave move.

I’m getting excited because tomorrow Adobe is webcasting its 4th quarter and year-end results (it’s all public and you can register here), and, as expected, because the Omniture acquisition closed in the fourth quarter, we should get some initial insights into how the acquisition is progressing. There’s no question that these are VERY early days, so we can’t expect to hear a lot of in-depth detail (no fault to Adobe) but every nugget of info should be closely-examined, because at $1.8 billion, this was Adobe’s second largest acquisition after Macromedia. As readers of this blog well-know, I published a report in October on the purchase (check my home page for the link), so I am now a very keen observer of the outcome. I remain both naturally optimistic and tremendously curious.

Oddly today Adobe issued a fairly tepid success story from Omniture. The numbers sounds great: 188% of this and 351% of that, but the Omniture customer profiled is a 200-person firm. Is this the message that Adobe wishes to convey? We should know more tomorrow.

Your insights and observations will be much appreciated after the results and commentary are announced.