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.
A few days ago Google announced a change to Search, awkwardly named (as is their wont) Google Plus your World, and the Google first responders have responded with suitable outrage (as is their wont). For a good rundown of all the noise read this TPM post. “Google just broke it’s search engine” – that’s Farhad Manjoo on Slate. The TPM guy, Carl Franzen, went with the more subtle “Google Search is Dead“.
The rub? Google has started displaying results from your social network as part of its search results. That’s the “your world” part of Google Plus Your World (henceforth G+YW). It’s the Plus part though that has tech bloggers in a huff. In particular, the fact that your social world that Google Search reports from happens to comprise of one social network: Google’s own Google Plus.
Hence the outrage: Google is disingenuously shutting Facebook and Twitter (among others) out of search results using this new “feature”.
But are they? It would help to separate the issues here.
Read the rest of this entry »
We already knew that Microsoft makes more from Android than it does from Windows Phone 7:
Microsoft gets $5 for every HTC phone running Android, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard, who released a big report on Microsoft this morning.
It also turns out that Google makes more off iOS than it does on Android:
As part of the Senate Judiciary hearings today, former FTC official (and new Google employee) Susan Creighton, testified under oath today that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! all bid to become the default search engine on iOS’s Mobile Safari Web Browser. [...] [A]s part of the testimony, Creighton said briefly (before she was cut off) that 2/3rds of mobile search comes from Apple iOS devices.
As part of the Senate Judiciary hearings today, former FTC official (and new Google employee) Susan Creighton, testified under oath today that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! all bid to become the default search engine on iOS’s Mobile Safari Web Browser. [...]
[A]s part of the testimony, Creighton said briefly (before she was cut off) that 2/3rds of mobile search comes from Apple iOS devices.
Such is the bizarro world of product development funded by legacy monopoly money (Windows) and advertising (Google).
Google has progressed since the days of 41 shades of blue. At least in the user interface of their products. I had no insight into whether this reflects a change in the underlying process. But now there is some news on that front. Yesterday Chris Wiggins (Creative Director at Google) made a post to the “Official Google Blog” to explain the “new and improved Google experience … founded on three key design principles”: Focus, Elasticity, Effortlessness. I think the man, and the company, are serious, and I sincerely applaud them for it and wish them well. Read the rest of this entry »
It is I think by now well known that Google’s IMAP interface was an afterthought that was awkwardly grafted onto their splendidly useful label paradigm, and as a result promises chronic annoyances for those actually using it full-time. You could follow Google’s prescriptions for client configuration — here I will be talking about the OS X Mail app — to the dot, but find scant alleviation of your woes. Read the rest of this entry »
Google has transitioned from a “growth company to a cash cow” — that’s the conclusion of Michael Copeland and Seth Weintraub, writing for Fortune:
Long-term projections for growth in the search business are more in the 15% to 17% range. Yet analysts estimate that 91% of Google’s revenue still comes from the AdWords and AdSense business model that Google built around Page and Brin’s breakthrough PageRank algorithm. Even more telling, an estimated 99% of its profit does too. This year’s projected earnings growth of 18% is a third of what Google averaged over the past five years. A lot of companies would kill for that growth, but for technology companies, and Google in particular, those numbers don’t impress. Google is rounding a corner that all the fruit smoothies at its Silicon Valley campus make it hard to pull back from. This year Google has joined the ranks of just about every great technology company before it, including IBM, eBay, Cisco, Microsoft, and Oracle. Google, against its will, and defying its massive cash hoard, is transitioning from a growth company to — and there is no kind way to put it — a cash cow.
And, they note, Marissa Mayer isn’t all too worried about Google’s inability to establish itself in the social networking space:
Marissa Mayer, head of search at Google, says the company doesn’t provide financial guidance, but contends that Google doesn’t need a huge second act, a collection of smaller businesses will suffice.
Mayer of course is one of the lead players in the infamous “41 shades of blue” episode that caused designer Doug Bowman to flee Google. I tend to mention that incident a lot because I think it points to one reason (among surely many) why Google fails frequently at engaging it’s user in a long-term relationship (see: Google Buzz).
Google is genuinely oblivious to the effect their user interfaces, spartan and devoid of styling, might have on non-technical users. Not only might an engineering-focused and engineering-driven company fall back to a comforting process where “data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision” (to quote Bowman), but alpha engineers with their hyper-dominant left brains (if you will forgive the pop science indulgence) might see the measure of aesthetics as nothing more than maximal utility. Speaking of utility, more from Fortune:
Critics question whether Google can make the leap. “They are just not that good at it,” says Tom Coates, until recently the head of product at Yahoo’s defunct Brickhouse lab. “Google is very good at building these utility-type products — search, e-mail, and messaging. They are sort of like the power company of the Internet. But what they lack is a sense of how people share and collaborate.”
In the end, Mayer’s nonchalance that search (with advertising) will remain the core and dominant part of Google’s empire might prove pragmatic and even wise. It’s not a business that’s going away and honing it and expanding on it might be a lot smarter than attempting to teach a middle-aged dog new tricks.
To repeat Coates’s thoughts, Google’s engineering strength makes it a perfect utility company. Though the prospect might be as unsexy as Google’s UIs, it might be time to embrace that strength and build on it. Amazon beat them to utility computing and storage with AWS and EC2, but Android demonstrates that Google is willing to consider a future in which their [invisible] engineering prowess underwrites the visible products of others. It’s a good sign.
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.
There are two unrelated success stories that I wish to tie together in this bit, and if I am successful and justified in doing so, then you too might worry as I do about the future of software.
First, I must clear the air: I am a staunch Free Software advocate. And specifically, I take the Richard Stallman position when it comes to Free vs Open Software. And towards the end of this post, I will try to reconcile that position with the worries raised below.
Now back to the story of the two successes. The first, MacHeist, is small, but only in comparison. MacHeist is an affair that occurs a few times a year where users solve puzzles on their way to a booty of fire sale priced Mac software. The operation is run by a few clever lads (and ladies?), sells software worth hundreds of dollars for as low as $50 in total, and nets a handsome profit (reputed to run into the hundreds of thousands) for the organisers.
When the MacHeist gets going (and I admit to having “participated” in one or two) one criticism that is often heard is that the developers of the software are not getting quite the fair shake, and that selling software at such unsustainably low rates devalues the effort that goes into their creation. I think both criticisms are legitimate.
The second success story is a big one: Google. A company that hires brilliant engineers to turn out complex software products, but then turns around and gives most of these away for free, preferring instead to make money by selling advertising. So much so that the reliable purveyors of quotable statements are wont to note that Google is not a search technology company, but an advertising one.
As a Free Software fanatic, you might think that all this would warm my heart, but it does not. To understand why, I will refer to the difference that Stallman draws between Free Software (“free as in free speech”), and Open Software which is “free as in beer”. Whereas Free Software, through the terms of the GNU Public License, fosters a culture of public ownership and ubiquitous contribution, Open Software in its paradoxical naive pragmatism (of gaining usage by adopting a more “liberal” license) undervalues the act of development making it no more than a form of cheap labour.
The claims in the previous paragraph are arguable, and argue about it we should. The point of this post however is to consider the impact of this cheap or free software on users.
Consider my recent experience with a remote file access application called Flow. Flow is a very useful application with an impressive set of features and a more than decent interface. Flow retails for $25, a fair price for the functionality it promises, but it was also recently given away as part of a MacHeist “nanobundle”, the popularity of which has led to a warning from the makers of Flow, ExtendMac, that they are swamped with feedback and that all users (including ones like me who did not acquire it through MacHeist) should exercise a bit of patience while we await a response.
Patience, we have been told, is the virtue of an ass, and my experience with contacting ExtendMac tends to justify the comparison (of me) with the maligned beast! More than two months ago I submitted a report of a problem with Flow that was making it close to unusable: the application would hang mid-way through a file transfer and provide me no means to recover from it. Not even an option to cancel the transfer. This is just one of many issues. Here’s another: the application hangs upon encountering a symbolic link on the remote host. I have since reported these problems two more times and promptly received a canned response. But ExtendMac has been reticent to communicate further on this matter.
If indeed the MacHeist fire sale and ensuing volume of users makes it impossible for ExtendMac to address the issues of its users, then there is a good bit of legitimacy to the criticism that such sales both shortchange the developer and ultimately harm the end user.
The other, larger point of the matter is learnt from the example of Google. Having separated the source of their income (advertising) and their source of value (software), they are now wedded to “web apps”, applications that often coerce (though to Google’s credit, not always) you to using Google supplied browser based interfaces (so that money-making advertising can be targeted at you) irrespective of how well suited they are to your needs (recently I wrote about Google Voice, where the lack of a desktop client severely hampers the usability of the product). Better, I think, a choice between: software as a public good as envisioned by Stallman; or software as a valuable product solving a user’s needs in the best possible way, and hence worthy of charging a fee, as seen by Apple.
Update: in the spirit of the philosopher Peter Singer, who follows up his meditations on ethical eating with practical recipes, a recommendation: for a powerful GPL licensed free alternative to Flow, take a look at CyberDuck.
Back at the height of the Soviet Union, the story goes, a biologist named Lysenko won the favour of über-dictator Stalin, in major part due to his notion (not original to him, see: Lamarckism) that acquired traits can be passed on genetically i.e., inherited. This scientifically unsubstantiated but emotionally appealing idea, which served the general philosophy of the Soviet Union and communism well, was declared unquestionable and academies were purged of dissenters, and so on. As most historical stories go, there are all sorts of simplifications and misrepresentations at play with this one, but nonetheless, the moral of the story is worth consideration: don’t let your ideological commitments unduly influence your research and development.
Which brings me to Google Voice, a telephony service that offers many attractive features (such as using a single number to ring at multiple locations), but one crippling weakness. The weakness is not a technical or design one, but an ideological one: Google’s commitment to the web (and web browser) as the primary, and often only, interface to its applications. The result (made worse by Apple’s self-serving rejection of Google Voice app for the iPhone) is that making a telephone call involves (in my usage pattern, YMMV):
Some of these steps can be eliminated, but I am fairly certain not enough of them can be, to get the workflow down to the simplicity of using Skype instead:
It would take less than a week for one of Google’s highly skilled developers to whip up a native Mac App, a cross-platform AIR application, or a Dashboard widget, that would provide the same simplicity as Skype’s application does. It is not technical ability, but, I suspect, Google’s commitment to replacing the desktop and desktop OS and application environment with the browser and browser based applications that lies behind the lack of such tools.
Which returns us to the Lysenkoism analogy. It is not that Lamarckism is provably wrong and therefore a wrong route to pursue even if dictated by one’s other commitments. Rather, it was not, at the time, [anywhere near] provably right and, for that reason, the wrong basket to put all of one’s eggs in. Recently, in response to a set of tweeted criticisms (of the failings of HTML/CSS for building serious user interfaces) from celebrity developer and blogger Joe Hewitt, Google countered that such criticisms were perhaps applicable two years ago, but not any longer. A few days later, Google added (and advertised with some gusto) a feature to one of their flagship products, Gmail: drag and drop file attachment to a message. A feature that has been available in desktop applications for more than a decade (two decades, arguably).
Once again, the moral: Lamarckism, or web applications (such as Gmail or Google Voice) are not destined to failure. It is quite possible that they (web apps) are destined to succeed, given the many advantages they offer (universal access, zero user software maintenance, so on). However, if one just added drag and drop to one’s mail interface, that future is distant enough to warrant a more pluralist approach. A failure to do so is in effect a punishment of one’s [academic] biology and biotech, in the case of the Soviet Union, or one’s users, in the case of Google.
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