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Forbes recently published an article by Jack Trout on something I call “feature creep”. There are many examples of products that are feature-packed but difficult to use.

Trout spends a good chunk of his article discussing smartphones, including the BlackBerry. Smartphones tend to excel in one area, while sacrificing performance in others. Without mentioning the term “key success factor”, Trout does point out that smartphones must be excellent, reliable mobile phones – otherwise, what’s the point of having a smartphone?

Of course, it is possible to cobble together a smartphone from existing hardware and software. The Bluetooth protocol was created for just that purpose, after all. There’s a growing number of web-based services that will add features to data-capable mobile phones, too.

I mentioned on 4 September and 6 July that Apple will explore business uses for the iPhone. It’s inevitable. Today, MacRumors, iPhone Alley and CNN.com, Apple and Salesforce.com are working on modified, CRM-capable iPhones. Mobile customer relationship management has become an important source of competitive advantage as companies face the rising expectations of their customers for fast, accurate, reliable assistance and support. Salesforce.com relies on BlackBerrys and Palm devices to meet these needs. Expanding their hardware support to the iPhone should help SalesForce.com retain existing enterprise customers.

As mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a new Sloan Consortium report suggests that the higher education distance learning market is growing at almost 10 percent per year, compared to an overall growth rate of 1.5 percent.

1 out of 5 college students are taking a distance education course

These figures are based on 5 years of survey results across 2500 US universities and colleges.

A free PDF of the entire report is available here. This is just another piece of evidence that distance education, including online courses, have become a key success factor for US universities. Distance education is also a very popular delivery method for corporate training – that’s one reason I recommend that college students take a few online courses. The ability to learn at a distance has also become a key success factor for college graduates.

According to The Register, Google and MySQL have agreed to share program code. Google has several hundred massive MySQL installations in its data centers. This announcement confirms what many have assumed – Google will be using MySQL databases for the next few years.

Peter Calveley (via Boing Boing) reported last week that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has finally struck down Amazon’s overly broad patent for one-click online shopping.

In an earlier post, Calveley described how Amazon had submitted 32 Wikipedia articles as supporting evidence for its patent claim. The discussion becomes hilarious as Calveley mocks the fungible nature of Wikiality, noting that the USPTO had removed Wikipedia from its list of acceptable references in 2006.