Over on GigaOm, Tom Krazit spins an old argument as a new one by characterising as silly the many recent blog posts on how little money Google makes on Android, in fact much lesser than what it makes on iOS (I have made such posts myself). Look beyond the dollars, he says, as if that’s a fresh and non-obvious point:
Not all investments are made with the expectation that a big payoff is around the corner. Google’s decision to bankroll the development of Android was just such an investment, which makes the past week’s back and forth over just how much money Google has garnered from that investment quite silly. [...] The mistake is assuming that Google views this as a big problem, as if Android has been a waste of money because Google makes more money from its competitor. Would Google like to make more revenue from Android? Sure. Money is nice. But Android was a defensive move on Google’s part, and one that wasn’t primarily motivated by desire for revenue or profit.
Not all investments are made with the expectation that a big payoff is around the corner. Google’s decision to bankroll the development of Android was just such an investment, which makes the past week’s back and forth over just how much money Google has garnered from that investment quite silly.
[...]
The mistake is assuming that Google views this as a big problem, as if Android has been a waste of money because Google makes more money from its competitor. Would Google like to make more revenue from Android? Sure. Money is nice. But Android was a defensive move on Google’s part, and one that wasn’t primarily motivated by desire for revenue or profit.
The mistake in Krazit’s own thesis is that he sees discussion of Google’s revenue as an independent and sole criticism of what Google is doing with Android. That is not the case. The fact that Google does not derive profit from Android but gives it away for free to handset makers and telcos (not users, less than 2% of whom can upgrade to the latest version of Android released many months ago) is part of a larger argument or analysis of the nature of Android vs iOS. Since Krazit wants to rehash these points as if new, I will repeat my criticism which is a bit different from that of famous iOS defenders like John Gruber. Read the rest of this entry »
There was a time when Google and Apple were sitting on the forbidden tree… or something like that. Google CEO Eric Schmidt appeared on stage at Apple events and sat behind the scene on Apple’s board. Together they drove Microsoft out of our lives. Then Google decided to enter the mobile OS market out of fear of losing access to mobile phone users. And what better way to challenge Apple’s iPhone and its alliance with AT&T than to offer up the Google mobile OS Android for free to Verizon (and other telcos including AT&T)? This Google defined as “open”. Predictably Android provoked the ire of Steve Jobs who took to the company town hall to decry the terrible evil that had been done. The relationship turned sour and today the two giants are slinging lawyers at each other through intermediaries and proxies (heck, Google went out and bought an entire company, Motorola — a small step for Google but a giant leap for the science of lawyering up — while Apple coupled up with friends like Microsoft to buy patents from the defunct Nortel and others).
Building the Google-telco-user relationship around the free Android OS has led to a high level of fragmentation, lack of access to new features/updates for users (less than 2% of Android devices run the latest version of Android) and strangest of all: Microsoft makes more money than Google on Android (thanks to patents) and Google makes more money on iOS than it does on Android (thanks to Apple’s use of Google services).
There was another way this could have played out. As John Gruber writes today, “Google made a mistake by deciding to oppose rather than ally with Apple on mobile”. This is all the more the case given their complementary strengths and weaknesses. Google’s good at big data and infrastructure and poor at user experience. Apple’s infrastructure capabilities are only now being tested (iCloud) but they continue to write the book on user experience. Google it appears is unwilling to yield the user to others, lest it be cut out of the loop at a later date. It is not an illegitimate concern from a business perspective. From a user perspective, however, the rivalry is a net loss. Oh well.
Yesterday, Steve Jobs announced his resignation from Apple. This has prompted an outpouring of touchingly sentimental stories from those who have interacted with the man. John Gruber has been collecting a bunch of them at his blog, from which I have reproduced a few links:
Alongside these personal anecdotes have emerged the usual superlative-laden hagiographies that, however well-intentioned, force Jobs into the standard mould – visionary, innovator, tireless leader, so on. In my opinion this is all wrong, and dangerously wrong. Jobs is interesting because his style flies against these impressive but ill-defined terms. He is unabashedly common-sensical and bullshit-free.
Consider this conversation reported by Rob Walker writing in the New York Times in 2003:
After half an hour of this, my inquiries really did start to fall apart, so I didn’t expect much when I resorted to asking, in so many words, whether he thinks consciously about innovation. “No,” he said, peevishly. “We consciously think about making great products. We don’t think, ‘Let’s be innovative!’” He waved his hands for effect. “Let’s take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation, let’s put them up all over the company!”
After half an hour of this, my inquiries really did start to fall apart, so I didn’t expect much when I resorted to asking, in so many words, whether he thinks consciously about innovation.
“No,” he said, peevishly. “We consciously think about making great products. We don’t think, ‘Let’s be innovative!’” He waved his hands for effect. “Let’s take a class! Here are the five rules of innovation, let’s put them up all over the company!”
The emperor has no clothes. That is his great value. Resist the urge to gussy him up!
And while we are at it, let’s try to stop writing about him in the past tense.
Via MacApper:
“In Fortune’s story, Lashinsky says Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company’s on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s reputation.” He told the members of the team they “should hate each other for having let each other down”, and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team. A few excerpts from the article. “Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the f*** doesn’t it do that?”
“In Fortune’s story, Lashinsky says Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company’s on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s reputation.” He told the members of the team they “should hate each other for having let each other down”, and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team. A few excerpts from the article.
“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the f*** doesn’t it do that?”
The question that follows naturally: after replacing MobileMe executives in retaliation for launch time SNAFUs, did Jobs find that the service attracted more customers or net greater love from existing users? I do not have the data, but I suspect not. If I am correct, this might be a rare case where Apple and Steve Jobs serve as a negative example: it’s easy to play the tough guy (ask Steve Ballmer) than try to identify the root causes of failure.
Apple has a couple of great pages (1, 2) for switchers. What they fail to tell you about are the great non-Apple apps that make the Mac experience a worthwhile switch. So, here they are (at least some of them):
All of them are free. One or two are ad-supported.
Three year olds are clever people. Take the example of my son who vehemently resisted our pleadings to ingest more food: “My stomach is full. There is just no place left for any more food”. But his resistance turned to enthusiasm when, just a few moments later, some ice cream made an appearance. Upon being reminded that by his own admission his stomach was out of room, he scoffed dismissively: “That’s my stomach for food. Ice cream goes into a different tummy“.
It is less humorous and hardly clever when a corporation adopts this line of defence. Nevertheless, time and again, this is the very approach employed by corporations both vending products and selecting them. Like most subterfuges the effect is achieved through wordplay, in this instance the [mostly] false dichotomy created using the words ‘consumer’ and ‘enterprise’. Read the rest of this entry »
The fanboys have moved on. As they always do.
Just this last 2005 you bought one of the most expensive laptops in the world, a MacBook. For a year or two it was glorious. You read all the top Apple blogs, Daring Fireball, TUAW… you were part of the in crowd and with them you basked in the luxury of gorgeous hand-crafted Mac apps (like Delicious Library and Cha-Ching). It didn’t matter that you had already spent dirty dollars on grungy old Windows tools. Microsoft Office, Norton thingummy, all that icky stuff. Apple was worth it.
Then 2007 came and the iPhone happened. The fanboys moved on. The desktop became so 2006. Mobile was the future and you were the past. Lack of multi-window multi-tasking or a real screen with enough space for application content or toolbars — these were features. Revolutionary new features. Magical. Darwinian logic stepped in: app developers either adapted by sacrificing their Mac app on the $99 Developer license App Store electric chair (see: Tweetie for Mac)… or they died.
In a freakishly serendipitous development in late 2007, your trusty Blackberry device had lost all of its sexiness… as if you had gone to sleep watching A Streetcar Named Desire and woken up to Godfather. That brutish hard keyboard! That barbarous user interface! It was time, you were certain, to move on; and time as we know is money, and money… it was time to spend it on an iPhone. Promising your left kidney to AT&T you followed the fanboys to the new paradise. Oh was it joy to spin the wheel on Where To? to find a place to destress with your hipster friends. Or stay informed on worldly matters framed in consumable bits within the sweet Tweetie for iPhone (the same one you had been jilted by, on the now dreary old MacBook). And guiding you on this giddy ride was the reassuring arm of the golden fanboys.
You weathered the turbulence of the 3GS when video and HD left you motionless. You lived through the rumours of the iPhone 4. But there is but one God and that God spoke decisively in April 2010. The iPad had arrived and the followers did what they do best. They followed. “What?”, they scoffed smiling sweetly, as only an Apple fanboy can, “NetNewsWire? Tweetie? What are these primitive things you speak of so endearingly?”. A world where beings trod the ground unaware of the splendour of Flipboard on an iPad was one they found quaint and charmingly implausible. The fanboys, you see, had moved. Are you coming?
This, at length, is the new normal. The new Kierkegaardian rotation method, sans the need to rotate your pleasures. One, Infinite Loop, delivers a new pleasure every three years. The app universe and blogosphere shifts in lockstep. And all you need to keep up is a deep pocket and a quick leap of faith.
TechCrunch thinks the privacy settings in Apple’s fledgling social networking service, Ping, is brilliant:
I haven’t used Ping enough to tell if it will actually be useful. Given that this is Apple’s first real foray into social, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise. But they’ve won the first battle: simple privacy settings. Facebook could learn a thing or two from this.
I beg to differ. Here is what the Follow preference page on Ping says (image from TC):
Take a closer look into those parentheses… that bit about “including purchases” — that’s the fatal flaw in these settings, in my view. To understand why, read the New York Times article titled “Never Listen to Céline? Radio Meter Begs to Differ“, from which I quote below:
American men have a naughty little secret. Sometimes, they like to relax with a little Céline Dion. Professed classical music fans have one, too: as it turns out, they don’t tune into classical radio nearly as much as they claim.
Do I want even my closest friends to be aware of the fact that I have recently purchased songs by Nelly Furtado and Hall & Oates? You bet I don’t. And no amount of “Liking” Miles Davis and Beethoven is going to make up for the ignominy (and ridicule) that awaits me.
// Link: The iTunes Ping Social Question: Follow, Friend, Or Lurk?
P.S: about that Nelly Furtado thing… my wife made me buy it. I swear! (which is another problem with this Apple scheme). I have no excuse for the Hall & Oates. I confess I like them.
Below is Apple explaining an important feature — FaceTime — of the new iPhone 4:
These, they are saying, are the many ways in which this feature might be useful to the public. Straightforward, if a bit cloying.
And below are Google/Verizon/Motorola informing us of their mobile phone called the Droid:
In case the bizarre imagery and geek-fi sounds do not make it clear (how could they not?), leaving you wondering what exactly they are talking about, the voice over makes it clear: “It’s a robot”. Ah, yes, a robot, of course.
There are other Droid ads that are worse, and others that are better. But generally speaking, what is depressing on average is the unwritten marketing mantra that the user (“consumer” if you prefer that label) has to be treated as if she were an idiot. That is indeed a requisite if you are trying to sell her something she does not need, like gasoline or “high-definition” television sets. But so ingrained is this instinct that even when given a decent product (such as an Android phone) the mentality remains.
In his translation of Apple PR speak to human language, John Gruber offers an interpretation, of Apple’s placing blame on the bars calculation formula, that I too have strongly suspected to be the case.
Apple writes:
Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong. Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength. For example, we sometimes display 4 bars when we should be displaying as few as 2 bars.
Gruber interprets (and I agree):
We decided from the outset to set the formula for our bars-of-signal strength indicator to make the iPhone look good — to make it look as it “gets more bars”. That decision has now bit us on our ass.
I think this and a few other recent events point to a state of above-the-law hubris on the part of Steve Jobs’s Apple. A distinctly unpleasant turn.
// From Daring Fireball: Translation From Apple’s Unique Dialect of PR-Speak to English of the ‘Letter From Apple Regarding iPhone 4’
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