So, it’s (nearly) official: the long-awaited iPhone is coming out Q1 2007. We know next to nothing about it, just that the same company that builds the iPod is right now busy churning out millions of the little buggers.

People seem to have a lot of hope for the iPhone; they foresee a revolution in cell phone technology on par with the iPod– or some just want a PDA that can actually sync with their damn Mac. But what features are people expecting, exactly?

The most seemingly obvious feature, music and iTunes syncing/sales isn’t a sure thing as the iPhone would surely cannibalize iPod sales. But, personally, I think we’ll certainly see a 4-Gig flash card in the little bugger, making it level with the Nano. I think Apple will skip video for the first generation, and maybe forever: make the iPod (with its giant hard drive) the default Apple video device.

What else? It’s already been rumored that the phone(s) will have slick Instant Messaging implementation, which would have it compete with the Sidekick and its ilk. Web browser, contact book w/ pics and all the standard PDA do-dads are to be expected. I’m not sure if Jobs would sign off on a mini QWERTY keyboard; he’s not one for compromise, and the thumb-cramping plastic keys are certainly a compromise. This then is one glaring area where Apple could make vast improvements: it would be very cool to see the iPhone ship with a functional built-in lasar keyboard projector, though not very likely.

People have been speculating on a built-in iSight camera for video chat; now that would be cool.

Adding in new technological wowers like video chat, iPod capabilities, and some Apple-chic design is probably enough to sell a whole mess of iPhones. But I wouldn’t necessarily be very happy with such a device. As stated before, I’d rather see Apple tackle and creatively solve common phone problems (like typing) than add on superfluous features for technology writers to gush about.

As a Blackberry user, one big smart phone problem I think Apple could hit a homerun with is web-browsing.

Using the web with a PDA is a chore at the best of times. It’s slow. Moving around sites is clunky. You have to turn images off to achieve sane loading times, making navigation on many sites near-impossible. Even on mobile-ready sites like CNN.com, I have to scroll through 4 or 5 screens of side navigation links (which, of course, don’t fit on the side of my tiny screen and so are listed vertically) to get to the story I wish to read.

The tactic of phone designers thus far seems to be: get web designers to design for mobile standards. But we’re a decade into the game now and I’m ready to state that’s never, never going to happen.

But, luckily for phone designers, a solution has fallen into their lap. We very rarely visit websites anymore: instead, via RSS, we bring the information on websites to us.

The fact that my Blackberry doesn’t ship with an RSS feed reader is appalling. It should be constantly retrieving the FULL TEXT of blogs I subscribe to and storing the stories on the device for a few days.

I think an iPhone could do one better: Widgets. Imagine if the iPhone is capable of running the now-vast library of user-created Apple Widgets? No more scrolling around websites on a tiny screen, no more clicking through links and waiting on load times. Instead, on your iPhone’s “Dashboard Screen,” simply click on your ESPN Scoreboard widget and have all of the scores display via beautiful graphics perfectly fitted to your little screen. Instead of going to different sites to gather information, the information is brought to a widget you download once and formatted perfectly. CNN headlines, Netflix rental queues, and on and on. I think Widgets for the iPhone could be its most revolutionary feature of all.

One last note. With the ascendancy of YouTube, an iPhone that could play internet Flash video would be the ultimate waiting-in-line time killer…

In the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, you can’t drive on the roads unless you have auto insurance. The Libertarian in me bristles at this notion. After all, who is the State to dictate how I should pay off the costs of a car accident I am involved in? Maybe I’m a safe driver and independently wealthy, and, being able to afford to pay for any unlikely accident/injury to myself or other parties, don’t want to waste hundreds of dollars per month insuring my 1960’s vintage Cadillac; if I crash, I’ll pay the price, but I don’t want to pay money every month just in case I crash. Who is the state to demand I pay that money to a private, for-profit business?

While the Libertarian fraction of this spaceman’s psyche doesn’t like the idea of the state demanding I insure myself while driving, the pragmatist in me recognizes that I don’t, in fact, have the money for a 1960’s vintage Cadillac, and neither do 95% of the knuckleheads on the road with me. If I cause a car crash and do some serious damage to another person, they simply won’t be able to extract the funds from poor-ol’ me to put their life back together, and thus auto insurance is a necessary state imposition.

It isn’t quite a straight line to mandatory health insurance, however. The best argument for a law insisting on auto insurance is that, on the road, you could hurt someone else. When you neglect your health by not buying health insurance, you’re really only hurting yourself. And, hurting one’s self is a right of a United States citizen. Or is it?

When a poor person hurts himself, goes to the ER, is treated, but cannot pay the bill, who pays for the services rendered? Other tax payers. This situation is at the crux of Massachusetts’ new bill that basically requires all Mass. citizens to obtain health insurance. The way the Mass. legislators see it, tax payers already pay the bill when someone below the poverty line visits the ER. Countless studies over the past few decades have proven that preventing someone from getting sick (regular checkups, available prescriptions, etc. all go a long way towards preventing someone from becoming ill) is exponentially cheaper than treating someone who gets sick. Thus, it only makes fiscal sense to require everyone have health insurance, and for the state to pay the insurance charges for those who can’t afford it. Everyone will be healthier, and, added bonus, it will probably be cheaper in the long run.

On Monday the first stage of Massachusetts’ Health Care For All plan went into effect. I support the plan, and I commend Republican Governor Mitt Romney for getting behind it. From now until Spring 2007, the plan will only effect Mass. citizens under the state’s defined poverty line of $9,800 a year. Anyone who makes less than this amount now has health insurance through one of four private insurance companies working with the state. The impoverished citizens pay no deductible, and their visits to the doctor cost as little as $3. But, in reality, these people already were getting a sort of free healthcare, as, since they couldn’t pay their medical bills, the tax payers were paying for their hospital visits anyway. The plan’s biggest effects will bee seen this Spring when the plan starts to work for the State’s lower middle class, those making between $10,000 and $40,000 a year, who make too much money to simply ignore medical bills like the poorest citizens do, but perhaps not enough money to justify the considerable expense of monthly medical insurance bills. These people often go without health insurance and pay out-of-pocket for their visits to the doctor’s when they get sick. Since these visits are so expensive, they often put off going in for medical treatment until they’re in really bad shape, which obviously lowers their quality of life the much of the time. The lower-middle class will now be forced to obtain health insurance, or else pay tax penalties. The good news is the new health insurance plans offered to them in conjunction with the state will be significantly lower than they used to be.

One las thing. I was never really a supporter of the idea of universal health care until I began to think about America’s entrepreneurs, arguably our greatest resource. Most middle class Americans get their health care through their employers. I see the lack of universal health care as a real impediment to entrepreneurship, because it keeps people with good ideas and skills from leaving their day jobs to start their own business. You may have a billion dollar idea with an 80% chance of success in the marketplace, but if you’re married with 3 kids, can you justify quitting your job and starting your own company, knowing you won’t be able to afford paying out of pocket for your family’s health insurance? Very likely you’ll simply stay with your job for the benefits, and thus your million-dollar idea fades away. I don’t think a system like that makes economic sense for our country.

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.

Yawn.  This was a thoroughly un-Google move for the innovative company, snatching up a service that offers virtually the same technology as their Google Video: user-uploaded Flash Video.  Google wasn’t buying up some new idea; they weren’t buying up a bunch of genius programmers.  No, they were, plain and simple, buying a user base.  Again, yawn…

Google, the ethos, isn’t supposed buy users.  Dammit, Google takes users.  Google builds web services that are better than the competition and, like magic, users doth follow.  Rewind back a couple of years, if you will: Google decides it wants to offer a mapping service.  At the time, the king of the hill was MapQuest, with Yahoo Maps and a smattering of others offering similar mapping programs.  MapQuest was, remember, truly something new under the sun:  you type in your address, type in where you want to go, and MapQuest spits out directions, turn by turn.  It was amazing; love that Interweb!  Sure, the site was slow, and the interface was clunky (want to scroll right on the map?  Click the map’s right arrow, the entire page (slowly) reloads, and you’ve “scrolled” Westward.  Want to scroll over more?  Reload that sucker again…), but hey, we all thought, it’s just a website; its shoddy interface is a limitation of HTML.  We accepted MapQuest, because we were so enthralled with the service.  We didn’t know something better was possible.

So the search hotshot Google decides it wants to offer up a mapping service of its own.  MapQuest must have had something like 80% of web mapping traffic at the time.  Imagine if Google did then what Google is doing now, and simply bought MapQuest?  Well, why not?  They’d be buying all those millions of MapQuest users, and they’d have MapQuest’s “great” mapping technology.  Except…  Oh yeah, MapQuest sucked, and we didn’t even know it!

It wasn’t until Google went and built a better mousetrap (mapping site) that we realized how much better web mapping (and web services in general) could be.  And then, boy, did we ever flock to Google Maps.  Again, that’s the way of doing business that has made Google the powerhouse it is today: they don’t buy customers, they woo them with superior offerings.  It’s worked well for them thus far: their search engine, Google Maps, Gmail.  Google video, in fact, is one of the few “big” services offered by Google that hasn’t caught on in a big way.  I had thought that meant Google must have had a team of crack programmers and designers working furiously on coming up with a better, more innovative web video product.  But no, instead, Google simply went and bought a website virtually identical to their own Google Video, simply because they had a larger user base.

As was the case with MapQuest, YouTube is an incredibly sloppy web offering, one that could be vastly improved upon.  Google has said its engineers will be working with YouTube’s designers to come up with new features.  But without the flame under Google’s ass (i.e., “YouTube has millions more users than us!  We need to come up with something GREAT to lure them over to our side”) I’m doubtful the new features will be all that innovative, or will arrive as quickly as they would have if Google was still in competition with YouTube.  Instead, Google is taking a page from ol’ Microsoft’s playbook and creating a kind of mini-web-video-monopoly.  There’s only one certainty when it comes to monopolies: consumers lose.

iTunes doesn’t work. There, I said. In this era of planned-obsolescence, iTunes is doing things your local refrigerator manufacturer can only dream of.

I have a handful of iTunes-bought music littering my mostly-illegal iTunes music library. About ten or so were downloaded via Pepsi’s free song promotions, and, it seems, I even downloaded a few $10 albums over the past 3-years. I’m aware of this not because I ever listen to the songs, oh no, but rather because I get an annoying error message every time I synch my iPod: “iTunes could not sync certain songs because they are not authorized to play on this computer.” Ah, yes, those damn iTunes-bought songs. Since I inevitably sync my iPod as I run out the door, these days more to grab the latest podcasts than to update my song collection, I simply cancel the message, pop out the podicle, and race to my car. And thus the cycle continues.

I couldn’t tell you what email address(es) the said iTunes songs were bought under. Since, I would guess, I bought and downloaded the songs shortly after iTunes began selling music, probably for sheer novelty factor, they’re most likely under my old college email address, an account I, of course, have no access to now that I’ve graduated. I’m sure iTunes has some kind of system set up whereas I can go in, answer “safety” questions, fill out a new account, put in a new credit card number (since I’ve switched banks, I’m sure they’ve got an old debit card on file as well), etc., etc., etc… Haven’t done that yet, pretty sure I won’t be doing it later, not when I could have the whole album downloaded illegally and without DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions in less time than it would take to reauthorize my songs for my new iPod and computer (heck, since I already paid for the songs, I won’t even feel guilty about it).

This post could go in many directions at this point: I could ponder the logic in using temporary-by-their-very-nature email addresses as user account names with something you supposedly “own” forever (10-years ago I had an AOL email address, for chrissake), or how the heck my grandmother is supposed to figure out how to re-authorize her latest Frank Sinatra tracks when she moves to a new iMac. But let’s just keep it simple: iTunes (more specifically, DRM) doesn’t work for the following reason: I’m not at all confident that 10-years from now, on whatever flying-spaceship computer I happen to be using, I’ll be able to play the iTunes songs I bought in 2006. I think the format will either be totally discontinued, or at some point over in the decade, I will have failed to have jumped through one of the maddening hoops Apple and the music labels erected, and I will have lost my chance to “update” the song status to play on my new computer(s). Because I’m not confident I’ll be able to use the songs I bought 10-years hence, I simply don’t buy them. To me, that means iTunes and DRM is broken.

Yahoo! is now trying to start its own music download service. The service will sell MP3’s without any restrictions, just like you used to be able to download on old illegal Napster. Since they have no restrictions, they’ll never expire or need to be re-authorized. They’ll be able to play on any portable music player that can play MP3’s (virtually all of them). They’ll just be the music you bought, nothing more. But, you guessed it, music co.’s aren’t too keen on giving consumers this much freedom. Fine. Keep putting up false walls, music industry, I’ll keep downloading music for free, and you won’t see a dime.

Go West and build a Web 2.0 company, young man! With the recent offer by Yahoo! to buy Facebook for a reported $900,000,000, the web has been in a tizzy (seems to be a lot of “tizzy’s” going around these days, eh?) over who will be the next to sell. Here’s my take on the Big 3:

Facebook

I’ve ranted about this company’s questionable practices before, but the truth is I love the Facebook, and personally consider it to be the most potentially valuable company of all I’ll list here today. In fact, I had fallen off a bit with my Facebook use (since I, you know, graduated) until they instituted the News Feed feature that got me so riled up. In my checking out how pervasive the feature was, I got dragged into the Facebook web all over again, and now find myself checking friend’s profiles, tagging pictures, and even setting up parties with the service. And yes, I’ll admit it, I even like using the News Feed to spy on others, now that Facebook has giving me the option to opt-out for myself (I’m a big hypocrite).

The exciting thing about the Yahoo! buy is that Yahoo! also owns Flickr, and the potential to tie the two services together is too obvious to miss. Adding Flickr’s photo services to Facebook’s social networking, and vice-versa, is going to be great, especially since Facebook has sub-par photo sharing technology, and Flickr has sub-par social networking technology in place. I love this buy; accept, Facebook, accept!

YouTube

YouTube brings nothing to the table. People think they love YouTube, when in fact they just love the Flash Video Format. You got to YouTube and, miracle of miracles, web based video just works. Never mind the fact that it looks like crap; it works every time.

Consistency is all the site has going for it. Back in November, 2 million people clicked a link provided by friends or blogs that led to an SNL musical parody. The clicker’s were half-expecting an error message when the video loaded, telling them they were in need of this or that plugin. Instead, they were amazed to find an admittedly cruddy looking video load quickly and without fail. The YouTube boom had begun, and it hasn’t stopped expanding since. But their method of automatically converting user-uploaded video of nearly any format into FLV for display on their site is not patentable and, indeed, not even based on their own technology.

YouTube should sell now, sell while the gettin’s good. They don’t present anything innovative, which means they’re in constant danger of losing their audience to a site that hosts user-submitted video just a little bit better. Just a little bit is all it takes, ask Friendster…

digg

I have a soft spot for digg.com, and for its founder, Kevin Rose, who I listen to every week on his podcast Diggnation. I applauded its move beyond tech news into sports, politics, celebrity gossip, etc. But, well, the fact is that the digg.com user base is still made up of tech geeks, and tech geeks posting about sports, politics, celebrity gossip, etc. turns out to be a bit narrow-sighted. Contrary to what we may have wanted to believe, digg is not going to replace the New York Times any time soon. In fact, as a news source, digg is a joke. It’s a bunch of geeks posting geeky stories that 90% of the public couldn’t care less about, no matter what news category the stories fall under.

For this reason, and I really hate to say this, I can actually see the new digg-ripoff Netscape.com, with its more diverse, less geek-prone user base, really being the site that changes the news biz. Oh well. Digg is still a great, daily read, but a serious news source it certainly is not…

Switching back to a Mac after a decade of Windows use changed a lot of things about my computing. Probably the biggest change was that I could once again “trust” my operating system to do things right. When I used Windows I would, as a rule, immediately disable any kind of “automated” task Windows, or a specific program, may try to impose on me. For instance, whenever you installed drivers for a new digital camera on Windows (err, don’t have to do that crap anymore now that I’m using a Mac) the camera maker would always bundle into that install some lame photo organizing software that would look like crap, be slow as crap, and work like crap. So, I’d always have to delve into the new program’s preferences and disable the newly set default (a default set without my knowledge, usually) which would otherwise launch that photo program whenever I hooked up my digital camera.

Another example is what would happen in Windows when you inserted a CD into your computer’s CD Drive. By default, Windows would automatically “Launch” the CD’s .exe file, which would, ideally, lead you to the CD’s instillation process. But this automatic launching, for whatever reason, only worked with about 75% of software CD’s I placed in the drive, and so, when I put in a CD belonging to the unlucky 25% bracket, I’d sit there for minutes waiting for an instillation dialog to pop up that was never coming. I’d just sit there waiting like a big jerk!

Because of these annoying inconsistencies, I would always turn off any kind of automatic procedure in Windows; they were simply too unreliable. If I did it manually, at least I would know it would work. I continued this behavior when I switched to a Mac, but slowly learned to I could trust the Mac’s auto-features. My Mac would always recognize my digi-cam, and launch iPhoto. I could double-click a new font I downloaded, and it was automatically be installed as a system font. Like that Mac twerp from the commercials says, “things just kind of work on a Mac.”

That was the biggest change that came with moving to a Mac; I started to trust the system again. The second biggest change was my rekindled love affair with independently developed shareware apps. I didn’t use much shareware on Windows. It was always clunky, ugly, slow, and 90% of the time it was riddled with spyware and viruses. But since spyware and viruses aren’t an issue on a Mac (yet…), and shareware is often the only solution to solve a task you wish to complete on a Mac, I dipped my toes into the shareware stream and downloaded a couple… WOW!

Probably because so many graphic artists use Mac’s, Mac Shareware apps are almost always frickin’ beautiful. They’re usually lightweight, single purpose, well-designed little drops of perfection. There are even sites devoted to the most beautiful Mac downloadable Mac apps…

That rather long and involved introduction finally leads us here, to the topic of today’s post. The same guy who created the most beautiful Mac downloadable apps list, an 18-year-old kid named Phil Ryu, has come up with a great idea for a contest: My Dream App.

It’s “the event where 24 finalists compete for a chance to have their dream app made into reality.” Anybody can submit a written idea for a new piece of Mac shareware software. A group of “A-list Mac Celebrities” (they’ve got Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak on board, and also digg.com founder Kevin Rose) will judge the top 24-finalists, and visitors of the site can cast their vote as well, and a thus a winner will be picked. The winning application idea will then be passed off to a group of (again) “A-list” software developers, graphic artists, etc., who will bring the winning app to life and offer it for download/sale. The person who submitted the winning idea will share in the software’s royalties, and the top 3 finalists will all receive cool prizes.

Not bad, eh? They’ve already got 20-or-so finalists listed on the site, and you can check out their software ideas. Couple of my fav’s:

1. Herald

Using carefully selected RSS feeds of world’s best newspapers, websites, comics and its own intelligence, it creates your very own newspaper. Interface similar to Pages and Stationery lets you create a newspaper just by dragging and dropping RSS feeds to right places on beautifully designed pages. And you can drop your own articles, PDFs and e-books too. Update instantly. Print it. Export for PDA or iPod. Move through issues like microfilms. It’s last news reader you’ll ever need.

My Take: I’ve been hoping for this type of thing for a while. I’d set it up with the NY Times’ editorial page, the LA Times local page, Variety for Hollywood news, back to the NY Times for world events, throw in a little Slashdot for technology… And it will all be set up to look like a standard newspaper; I miss that in this brave new web-news world…

2. Blossom

Choose a desktop plant to illustrate achievement of one’s goals. Create criteria that “feed it,” and criteria that “neglect it.” For example, to feed it: Actively use Excel over 20 minutes per hour. To Neglect it: Actively use of Firefox or Safari over 15 minutes per hour. If your plant is healthy and growing/flowering/etc, you know you’re meeting your goals. Consistently failing to meet one’s goals will slowly wilt the plant. Clicking on the plant can display stats of current health and graphs of app usage.

My Take: A decidedly “lite” program, that’s for sure, but a cool idea none-the-less. Let me know when I’m slackin’!

3. Whistler

Whistle while you work. Beat that Drum! App converts your tune to MIDI for use in GarageBand or any other audio application. With optional pitch correction for the out of tune. Records as much dynamics of the performance as possible. Also allows simple real-time playing with built in instruments and layering of recordings for quick fun compositions. Can also listen to your finger drumming. I often tap out drum beats with my fingers. Using objects on my desk that make 2 or 3 distinctive sounds. The hardware in a laptop can detect this in multiple ways. The microphone & the motion sensor. The user could define sounds the software could recognize and transmit any midi notes/velocity. (I have tried this with the earthquake detecting program, it can definitely see the strength)

My Take: Sweet deal! To heck with pounding keys on your synthesizer to figure out what notes you’ve got in your head. Just whistle ‘em and the notes go into GarageBand. You can then pick an instrument you want to play them, and mess around with all their attributes. A great way to get started on a song. Added bonus: this program should have online look-up capability, so you can whistle the tune to a popular song whose name you can’t remember, and it will fetch the song title and artist.

So that’s that. Some people on the tech sites have been complaining that people are stupid to submit their ideas to this contest, as they’ll only receive a fraction of any royalties their software will make if they win. These people are idiots. Ideas don’t mean anything in this world; it’s the execution of an idea, the finished product, that matters.

I’ve got high hopes for this contest. It’s an American Inventor for software. I’ll actually be really disappointed if one of the apps that doesn’t appeal to me gets picked. I better get voting!

Netflix has decided to sue Blockbuster Online for patent-infringement. They argue that Blockbuster has stolen their ideas of renting movies online which are then delivered via the mail, not charging late fees, and allowing users to create a list, or queue, of movies they wish to receive next. Blockbuster, in turn, is counter-suing Netflix under anti-trust statutes, claiming that the company is trying to set up a monopoly in the internet video rental sector.

I’ll admit to feeling a bit bewildered when it comes to patent law. There is an entire arm of the government set up to research the validity of and grant patents. Netflix was granted a patent for its service (for its way of doing business, really), and so, logically, it seems if they have the patent, they have the patent, and Blockbuster is out of luck.

But the system does not work this way, as Blockbuster can argue in court that Netflix never should have been granted such a patent in the first place, and the court can rule to strike the patent down. So a patent isn’t worth all that much after all.

Being that all of this is up in the air, we might as well take a look at what the case will argue.

1. Should Netflix have been granted a patent for delivering movies via the mail.

This one seems easy enough: hell no. Look, I know patents are getting a bit out of hand, but any logical person will have to admit that being granted a patent for the “idea” of sending a “certain item” through the mail is absurd. Moving on.

2. Not charging late fees.

OK, here we get a bit more innovative, but this still doesn’t past this spaceman’s test. To me, charging late fees was the original innovation. That was an idea. Not charging them is more of a return to normalcy.

3. The rental queue.

I’m willing to give this one to Netflix. The idea of a queue, or even an online queue, of course isn’t new. But here’s the thing: the less a Netflix user “turns around” their rentals (receives a DVD in the mail, watches it, sends it back in, and receives a new DVD in the mail), the more money Netflix makes. Netflix users pay a monthly fee, and the fee remains the same no matter how many movies they rent. The fewer movies a user “turns around” per month, the less money Netflix has to spend on postage, worker hours, etc. for that user. The fewer copies of DVD’s Netflix has to keep in stock. The less a user turns around their DVD’s, the better for Netflix.

For this reason, I conjecture that if a more ruthless company had created an online movie rental site (re: Blockbuster), they would not have instituted a queue which automatically sends out a new DVD as soon as the last DVD a user rented is returned. A more dominant company would almost certainly have made the user wait a couple of days for their DVD to return to the rental HQ in the mail, than go online and choose a new movie they would like to rent. All this would slow things down (users would forget to order a new one, users would have to return to the site and search for a new movie every time, etc.) making for fewer rentals per user on average; for the rental company, this means more profit.

But Netflix put the queue feature in. Because they were the little guy fighting to win customers against the goliath that was Blockbuster, they focused not on maximizing their profits, but instead on creating a better user experience than the big guy offered. The queue, in this regard, truly was an innovation and, I would argue, worthy of a patent. When Blockbuster entered the online rental arena a few years later, they found themselves in the unlikely position of little/new guy, and so they copied Netflix’s formula hoping to steal its users away.

The somewhat ironic thing about all this is that the most patentable feature of all is the idea of movie rentals, period. But this idea was thought up in less patent-happy times, and I think we can all agree we’re happy about that, otherwise Blockbuster may be the only fish in the movie rental sea.

The CEO of Ford Motor, Bill Ford Jr., stepped down yesterday and is to be replaced by Boeing exec Alan Mulally.

The long-expected resignation of Bill Ford, who has led the company for the past few disastrous years, sent Ford’s stock shooting up 2% in after-hours trading (the resignation was announced after the close of regular trading).

How do you suppose Bill Ford Jr. felt about this kick in the seat on his way out, this virtual party being thrown on Wall St. now that the king was dead? I wonder if this is just one more demoralizing sense of failure falling upon Bill Ford Jr., or if it is his first, perhaps, sense of accomplishment: for once, it seems, he has done something right. Stepping down from the helm of his family company was, according to Wall St., the best business decision Mr. Ford has made.