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I am getting tired of all the crying over the court decision that said the FCC doesn’t have the authority to enforce net neutrality. Gee golly, I didn’t see this coming a mile away.

Heck think about this for one second. Congress couldn’t pass net neutrality through so the FCC figures what the hell let’s give it a shot. Does anyone see the fact that this was designed to circumvent actual elected officials and disenfranchise the citizens of the US (regardless if it is a good idea or not). The fact that what they did was unconstitutional should not come as a surprise. The FCC does not have legislative powers. They cannot create laws cause they feel like it. Nor can they enforce rules that they themselves come up with. The authority they have comes from what Congress gives them not from what they decide to give themselves. I am sure in hindsight people will breathe a sigh of relief.

I am also tired of hearing people say this is a setback. This whole thing was never a step forward for net neutrality so its failure is not a step back. If you want net neutrality petition Congress. Until that time however do what is your right to do, SUE! This isn’t a case of McDonalds making hot coffee and oops I dropped it on my lap cause I have the muscular control of an addled toddler (probably from eating too much fast food in the first place). No, instead it is the precise reason why litigation was created.

If your ISP is throttling your connection, or banning you from use either do what Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. did and boycott or instead file a class action lawsuit. We have ways for punishing moronic companies already in place. Both require you to act.

Now if you would rather sit around and cry about how some big bad company is screwing you over, by all means do so. If you do not wish to act and use the thousands of laws already in place to empower you over businesses, then by all means do so. But don’t expect me to listen or care.

I have a deep respect for Apple products in that their ease of use and design is exceptional. When I look at the iPad I see an idea, not yet fully formed, but it is that idea that will become a game changing device for business. The most exciting software programs these days are mainly cloud applications, hosted applications, remote applications, etc. in short, vendors are pushing mobile.

The other day  I talked about how mobile devices have not forced a change in business culture. This I think is where the iPad comes in. I saw this change happen a long time ago with CD-Roms and a game called Myst. CD-Roms required a vehicle to become accepted by the computer using crowd and they found it in games like Myst and 7th Guest. What’s funny to me is that it not the iPad per se that is catalyst.

Like the bubonic plague that ravaged Europe centuries ago, the problem was not the rats. The rats were merely the carriers of the fleas. What makes the iPad viral (see what I did there… yeah ok it was a bad segue) is not the iPad, but the fact that it carries the Apps Store. It is the Apps Store that will show mobile PC users exactly what they can do with their devices. For instance, PocketCloud. The ability for a person to access their computer from their iPad (or iPhone, if you have masochistic tendencies as far as operating a huge virtual desktop using a tiny little monitor) is incredible.

When you factor in some of the changes iPhone OS 4 will bring to the table, the impact iPad will have on the market will increase. Now I don’t think iPad will create a market as vast and powerful as the iPhone or the iPod have. I do however strongly believe that the iPad will showcase why we have mobile computers and what sort of applications were meant to run on them. And this is why iPad is a game changer. Not because of its feature list (or depending on who you talk to the lack thereof), but on its ability to define a market, which will only get more and more pronounced as the weeks go by.

I realize that there is a growing trend for mobilizing the work force, but no one has told me why this has become an all encompassing necessity for business. We have PDAs, smartphones, cellphones, UMPCs, Tablet PCs, laptops, netbooks, portable media players, PNDs, readers, and I imagine the iPad will open a new category of hybrids, looking at Microsoft’s Courier, this is already coming to pass. We have a huge amount of devices to service how much of the workforce? Where are the killer business apps that are mobile only? Which employees really need to be mobile?

First let’s get rid of the obvious, if your job means you are away from any sort of office type location (be it a corporate building or your own home office), then mobile of course is right for you. However, of those types of jobs that do require travel, how much travel has been reduced by things such as video conferencing, online collaboration software, and the like? Those who do face to face sales, how many require instant access to real time inventory data at the moment of sale as opposed to going into the meeting already knowing the information you need?

Customer support? No, customer support is best served at ground zero. No need for mobile tech there (unless of course you do onsite support). Engineers, technicians, mechanics? Maybe, but most engineers I’ve known will write out ideas on anything they can get their hands on or use the audio message recorder most cells have. Techs and mechanics, like customer support, do a better job with all their tools in front of them and the device that needs to be worked on is physically at hand.

I have been reading statistics on why every business needs to go mobile and the bulk of them center on the premise that the mobile market is huge, selling hundreds of thousands of units each month, which means your competitors are buying. And if they are buying you need  to buy too or get left behind! Oh really? I have some six or seven mobile devices I use (what can I say I love technology), but for day-to-day use I use only one of them. In fact, for the most part, even with all the travel I do, the amount of use I get out of the mobile devices is probably about 20 work days per year. This is of course where I absolutely need them and can’t use my desktop computer or my office computer. Now if I didn’t travel a lot, if I didn’t need to go to conferences and the like I wouldn’t need any mobile device to do my job. Sure, they are nice I could go outside and write if I liked (which I do on occasion), but I don’t need to go mobile.

The one area where I can see mobile devices consistently increasing productivity is by replacing the clipboard. In fact, any instance that requires a clipboard (inventory tallies for instance… which I seriously hope people are not still using paper for this but I know that hope is in vain) could do better with a mobile device.

A few weeks ago when I was making changes to this blog, I had to use my cell phone to do it. I did everything I would normally do from my desktop using my cell. It took a while since I can’t just type at super speed on the phone, but I was thankful for the device. That is when it hit me. Businesses like mobile cause it means they can make their salaried employees work during their off time. A while back, when you left the office, that was it, work was done. Even if you took some work home with you, you can work on it at a leisurely pace. Now with all the devices we have, we pretty much take the full offices with us. I was having lunch with a friend of mine and he got a call saying the servers are down, fix it. Although he was not working, he immediately used his cell to check the server and reboot it. Heck who needs to hire more employees when you can have all your current staff on call 24 hours a day 7 days a week? Just pay them an annual salary and you have an offices of slaves at your beck and call.

Will this stop me from buying mobile devices? Course not. But let’s be real here, the uses for mobile devices is far less than the hype. In order for a device to truly change the workplace two things must happen: 1) that device must have something nothing else has, it must have a killer app 2) that device must be able to force change on business culture. Mobile devices do neither of these.