If I may, I would like to take a moment to voice my frustration. Not with anything particularly important. But frustration nonetheless.

Usually, I’m a big fan of competition between business. It usually leads to lower prices and better products and I’m all about that. (Come on wireless providers, someone take the plunge into affordable wireless PC connections!). But sometimes, companies that compliment each other well and together offer something great, do something stupid. Like trying to deliver the whole package themselves.

See, like people, companies are often good at one thing, while being weaker at something else. Hence wonderfully symbiotic business relationships. But, when those companies decide they want to compete with each other, rather than work together, I, the customer, lose!

Who else could I be talking about besides Apple Computers and Google.

I’m a huge fan of both of these companies. Apple does the whole personal computers and handheld devices really, really well. And Google does pretty much everything internet really, really well. Maps, docs, calendars, wave, voice? Hello! It’s freakin’ amazing. Google’s integration on the iPhone couldn’t be any more convenient. Google is even Safari’s default search engine. Of course, because that’s the search engine we all use and love.

But now, Google has gone and done something stupid. They decided they wanted to make their own browser (Chrome, which is pretty great), and their own OS (also Chrome, which is kind of a joke), their own mobile OS (Android, which the jury is still out on) and now their own branded handset which goes head to head with the iPhone (the Nexus One). By the way, did you know that Google doesn’t have call centers ready to answer people’s questions about their products? Yeah, even the $500 Nexus One handset. And of course, now customer service satisfaction is at a dismal low. Probably because it doesn’t exist.

(Interestingly enough, you know who does have call centers and one of the highest customer service rankings anywhere? Apple Computers.)

Of course, Google couldn’t just stick with what it was actually good at. Instead, they had to move into this whole new realm of physical devices and thereby forcing Apple to make other plans. (Possibly even with Microsoft!)

Now, Apple has bought a maps related company. Presumably in anticipation of edging Google Maps off their devices in the future. And, there’s even talk of replacing Google as the default search with Bing. Bing! Are you freaking kidding me? I know, it sounds crazy, but that’s what the rumor sites are saying. That steaming pile of crap they call a search engine is not what I want to use. I want to use GOOGLE!

And seriously, Apple, are you going to send thousands of camera equipped vans all over the world to give us street views for your maps application? No! Of course not! You’re product isn’t widely adopted enough!

Ugh!

So, Apple—please don’t be afraid of Google. Continue to embrace what they do well and give us what we want. Integration with Google and it’s horde of amazing products.

Google—Your web stuff is awesome. But your whole cloud computing, netbook, ChromeOS thing isn’t going to work out unless you also plan to give everyone dedicated, 100% internet. I spend too much time away from a wifi hotspot. ChromOS, useless. Stick to what you do well and don’t run my mobile computing experience into the ground by making other great companies choose lesser solutions.

Microsoft—Just start over completely.

In Conclusion

Competition isn’t always good.

This rant has been brought to you by my frustrations with the unfolding situation between Apple and Google. Now that it’s out of my system, hopefully it won’t come up again any time soon.

A video blog by me, of me, about five things I love. Can you pick out which of those statements wasn’t true? I’ll bet you can.

(Can’t see the video? Watch it on YouTube!)

Hey, I’m not an idea machine here! Enjoy anyway.

(Can’t see the video? Watch it on YouTube)

I am one who enjoys a healthy debate. I like a good, sometimes heated, discussion about serious matters. Okay, even some not-so-serious matters. On more than one occasion I have seen substantial shifts in my opinion come from a good debate. And, I’ve known plenty of others who share that experience.

But, with the internet nosing its way into virtually every part of our lives, more and more often those healthy discussions take up residence on the net. And from there, they suffer from a kind of environmental infection rendering them almost completely useless. In fact, I’d even venture to say harmful.

Yeah, you read that correctly. Internet debate, I think, almost always leads nowhere good.

I think it has a lot to do with the impersonal nature of the internet. We’re all covered in what we feel is a shroud of privacy when we converse on the net. In real life we tend to avoid conflict. But on the net most people come out guns-a-blazin’. In less mature circles, online debate spirals into a flame war.

But in more mature circles, I think it manifests in far more subtle ways.

For example. In real life, conversations and debates usually progress nugget by nugget and our answers are not usually rehearsed. They coming off the cuff. That means the conversation moves bit by bit. Rarely is one detail exhausted, but rather, many small details are swept over as the come up in conversation.

But, on the internet it’s just the opposite. I am able to state an opinion or an idea. Someone who disagrees is then able to respond to me. But, instead of responding to one portion of what I said and following the conversation from there like we would in real life, they are able to respond to every detail all at once. Researching on the net, revising their thoughts and looking for leaks in their argument. All before ever hitting submit. That might sound like a benefit. But I don’t think that it is.

See, from there, if the person who had the thought in the first place wishes to respond, it will have to be in length. Once again responding to each point. This, while our facts may be right, does more for our pride than anything else. And by the time the debate is over, you have a thread of conversation that would make a masters thesis blush.

And, as I mentioned before, I think it mostly comes back to the impersonal nature of the internet.

When you converse with someone in real life, by simply making your opinion known, or contending with someone else’s, you are exposing yourself to vulnerability. And, in order for debate to actually be healthy and have any positive impacts on us, we have to be vulnerable to a reasonable extent. It’s humility 101. Something almost no one exercises on the internet.

I submit that the invulnerability we feel on the internet goes a long way to nullifying our debates and making them essentially useless. So for me, I will try and keep my serious debate (at least with those I do not know well) in the real world… or at least video chat.

As I was taking a shower this morning it occurred to me what was spiraling down the drain. Water. Clean water. I could drink the water coming out of the shower faucet if I wanted to and I would be fine. More than fine—refreshed. And it dawned on me that it’s a privilege to have clean water as an abundant resource.

More than a billion people in the world have no access to clean drinking water. Most of their water comes from dried riverbeds and even puddles. And, oftentimes they have to walk several miles just to reach the tainted water. That’s crazy.

What’s even crazier though is that machines have actually been invented that purify water with surprisingly little energy needed, and fairly quickly. But there’s not very much money in providing clean water to developing countries. So, as of yet the technology project hasn’t picked up enough funding. Or course, I could be mistaken about all that. I saw it on the Discovery Channel, but can’t recall the name of the project.

So, for now, drilling wells is about as good as it gets. It costs about $5,000 to dig a well, which provides clean water to an entire village.

Reading over their website, I think that The Water Project may be the best place to donate money to provide clean water to folks overseas (although Water:Charity would be a cooler, though not necessarily better, option). TWP connects givers to various projects already, or soon to be, in progress. When filling out the donation, they give you the option to designate where your money is going. It even gives you the option to designate that all of your money be used for the actual building process. In other words, none of it turning around for various organization operating costs.

Being that water, just after air, is possibly the most taken-for-granted thing we have, and knowing that so many people don’t have it, I think TWP may be an really excellent way of giving some of our abundance to solve a really serious problem. I’m planning to give. You should think about it too.

Last Thursday my business participated with the national company Groupon to offer my services to customers at a massive discount. Like, over 90% in fact. Being that the offer is now complete, I thought I would share my initial reflections on the experience as a person and a businessman.

The images on the left are full size screen grabs of the offer and the comments section of the Groupon website.

It is too soon to really reflect much on my actual experience delivering such a bangin’ offer since I still have yet to actually go out and shoot any of these portrait sessions. But I have already interacted with many of my future portrait subjects who bought into the offer and I can say I’m very excited to see how this offer pans out for the future of my business.

For the offer, I worked with the Groupon representative/salesperson/somethingorother Emily. She was great. Always responding to emails and phone calls quickly. She even offered to answer questions on the comments page for me if I got too busy. I hope she got a healthy commission because she deserves it! (If you ever run a Groupon offer for your business, you should try and get her!)

Being fairly new in the world of business and marketing and having never leased much control over my customer relations to another company, I was anxious about how things would go. But Groupon made it easy and fun. Emily especially did a great job of making me feel comfortable with the whole ordeal. I’ve already recommended it to a number of business minded friends.

On the day of the offer I spent pretty much all day next to my computer answering questions via email, answering the phone and responding to comments on the Groupon website. It was busy, but exciting.

So far, the customers have been great. Four of the hundred and ninety-five portrait sessions have already been booked. One at Great Falls, two in Washington, DC and one hasn’t selected a location just yet. But I’m really excited to start shooting them. I’ve been working on building a (very) small team of photographers behind the scenes. I’m really looking foreword to using all these portrait sessions to deploy our collective talent.

The exposure, also, was invaluable. Thanks to Groupon’s model, I’ve already made a number of good contacts and potentially future wedding clients. And, my website spiked to nearly four thousand hits which has produced a pretty steady stream of phone calls from new and potential customers.

All-in-all, I highly recommend Groupon for businesses. So far, it’s a great experience. I have every intention of trying to run another offer next year. It’s also great for the customer. They get a great deal and an awesome opportunity to sample products and services that otherwise might cost them a lot of money.

Try it out!

I sometimes sit and think about how strange a time it is to be alive. In the world of technology, more has changed in the last 200 years than in all the time leading up to it. That’s pretty incredible. It means we have to be willing to look at everything with fresh eyes.

Even though there may be things that were true of the human experience for a very long time, they may very well not be true any more.

I was thinking especially about cameras. They’re less than 200 years old. In terms of an art medium, this is one that is extremely young. Even though we’d have difficulty imagining life without them. Which makes me wonder what kind of affect the advent of cameras has had on growing up.

It wasn’t until 1900 that the first camera was mass produced, and shortly after that it became something of a household staple. Regular families started having pictures of their kids. It wasn’t long before they started having pictures of their vacations, too.

What was it like for the parents seeing their children grow up with this crazy device that freezes a moment in time and saves it forever? It must have been fascinating.

The advent of personal video cameras, I’m sure, was a similar experience. When I was growing up, my family didn’t own a camcorder, but I was fascinated by them. I imagine that it would be a surreal experience for me to watch a preteen version of myself on screen. Yet millions of people now have that experience and don’t think twice about it. It just is the way it is.

Now it seems like something similar is happening again with the introduction of social media. Search YouTube and you will find millions of videos people’s children. There’s practically an entire generation of children that are growing up on YouTube. That’s bizarre.

It seems impossible to predict the effects of a rapidly mutating social and technological culture on Children. But part of me wishes I could start right now and experience it for myself.