Tying up loose ends

EVEN EXECUTIVES AT huge companies want some downtime during the holidays. Steve Ballmer can't think about work 365 days a year, after all, and surely Steve Jobs and Scott McNealy have homes and families. The top brass doesn't want calls from the office interrupting their scant time off.

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But they also don't want to come back in January to find that some speck of an issue turned into The Blob while they were away. Big-organization execs need to nip some of these seemingly trivial problems in the bud so they can relax. Here are a few of the loose ends I'd like to see tied up.

I'm nuts about the new (open) Apple, but experience leaves me watchful for signs that the old (proprietary) Apple is waiting to spring on us. Apple ships several of its desktop and notebook systems with DVD burners it calls Superdrives. Write-once DVD-Rs work great and burn right from the OS X desktop. But pop in a DVD-RW disc and OS X spits it out.

Readers tell me Roxio's Toast Titanium makes DVD-RW work with Apple's tech; my copy's on the way and I'll report back. I have found that relocating the Superdrive to a Windows XP PC solves the problem, too.

Meanwhile, the online service that's the soul of the AOL empire is having some trouble, and execs sound baffled in interviews. Users got sick of being pelted with pop-up ads from a service they pay for, but those annoying ads were paying many of AOL's bills. The solution, AOL thinks, is to make more of the media conglomerate's content unavailable to non-AOL users, and to raise prices for those accessing AOL from high-speed connections.

AOL should take a lesson from thriving competitors AT&T Worldnet and SBC/Yahoo: Don't lock down, open up. Worldnet is leagues ahead of AOL in value and quality, and telco SBC scored a worthwhile dial-up/broadband content mix in its Yahoo partnership. Both boost revenues by offering alluring add-on services. That's a workable model.

AT&T is also making another run at nationwide high-speed wireless. You may recall that AT&T's previous effort to deliver direct-to-customer fixed wireless service failed, and a similar effort by Sprint ran aground. This time, with financial backing from Intel and back-end smarts from IBM Global Services, AT&T is going with standards and avoiding end-user provisioning, billing, support, and service hassles. Cometa Networks' 802.11 service will be sold only to wholesale customers -- ISPs, telcos, and cell and cable operators -- in 50 metro areas starting in 2003.

It looks like Cometa plans to paint city streets with signals beamed from cooperating schools and commercial buildings. That bypasses telco circuits and usurious tower fees, but omnidirectional 802.11 still has problems with range, security, and interference. Cell carriers are invested in 3G, cable operators and telcos love their copper and fiber, and few regional ISPs remain. Did AT&T jump into Cometa before figuring out if any wholesale customers would buy it?