Category Archives: Apple

Kindle Fire: the tablet that knows your next move

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This morning’s Observer column.

The prospect of the forthcoming battle between these two technology giants has led some excitable analysts to declare that, whichever company triumphs, “the consumer is going to be the winner”. Oh yeah? The reality is that both Apple and Amazon are aiming at the same thing: locking in the consumer to their system. Apple has done this via the iTunes and App Store, which ensures that nothing runs on an Apple iDevice that hasn’t been approved by the company. Amazon’s approach is only slightly more subtle. The Fire comes with only 8GB of memory, which means that most of the content that its users will access will come from Amazon’s Cloud storage. In that sense, the Fire is the ultimate network appliance.

But there’s an added twist. The Fire also comes with a pretty slick browser that loads pages faster than even browsers running on fast PCs. So 100 millisecond (ms) load times are reportedly reduced to 5ms. This is achieved by having the processing done not by the Fire but by remote virtual machines running in Amazon’s EC2 Cloud, and by clever caching and pre-emptive fetching of links. “This means,” writes Jason Calacanis, a well-known internet entrepreneur, “if you’re on the NYTimes.com they have, in their cloud and possibly already on your device, the next five pages you’re going to click on. They know this because the last five folks to hit the NYTimes.com’s homepage opened those pages. These kind of caching services have a ton of privacy implications”…

That’s putting it mildly.

LATER: Came on an interesting report of the thinking of a US market analyst. Horace Dediu. The nub of it is:

Amazon’s margins on the digital goods it will sell through the Kindle are razor-thin. That means it will take a large volume of sales to subsidize the Kindle’s sales cost, encouraging Amazon to wait a long time between updates to the underlying hardware. They’ll need to amortize that cost over several years to make the accounting balance out, rather than pushing customers to buy a new tablet every year or two.

As a result, the Kindle Fire is unlikely to advance rapidly in terms of its technology. Amazon is going to milk as many years as it can out of each generation of the tablet.

We’ll see.

Why the Web might be a transient

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As I observed the other day, one of the things that drove me to write From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg was exasperation at the number of people who thought the Web is the Internet. In lecturing about this I developed a provocative trope in which I said that, although the Web is huge, in 50 years time we may see it as just a blip in the evolution of the Net. This generally produced an incredulous reaction.

So it’s interesting to see Joe Hewitt arguing along parallel lines. Unlike me, he suggests a process by which the Web might be sidelined. “The arrogance of Web evangelists is staggering”, he writes.

They take for granted that the Web will always be popular regardless of whether it is technologically competitive with other platforms. They place ideology above relevance. Haven’t they noticed that the world of software is ablaze with new ideas and a growing number of those ideas are flat out impossible to build on the Web? I can easily see a world in which Web usage falls to insignificant levels compared to Android, iOS, and Windows, and becomes a footnote in history. That thing we used to use in the early days of the Internet.

My prediction is that, unless the leadership vacuum is filled, the Web is going to retreat back to its origins as a network of hyperlinked documents. The Web will be just another app that you use when you want to find some information, like Wikipedia, but it will no longer be your primary window. The Web will no longer be the place for social networks, games, forums, photo sharing, music players, video players, word processors, calendaring, or anything interactive. Newspapers and blogs will be replaced by Facebook and Twitter and you will access them only through native apps. HTTP will live on as the data backbone used by native applications, but it will no longer serve those applications through HTML. Freedom of information may be restricted to whatever our information overlords see fit to feature on their App Market Stores.

I hope he’s wrong and given that he’s a serious and successful Apps developer he has an axe to grind. But his blog makes one think…

FT’s HTML5 app more popular than app sold in Apple store

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Well, well. Isn’t this interesting.

(Reuters) – More than 700,000 people use the Financial Times’ Web-based mobile application to access news and other content, making it more popular than the version sold in Apple’s App Store.

The business newspaper, which is part of British publishing group Pearson Plc, made a gamble in June when it prepared to ditch the App Store with the introduction of its Web-based app.

The FT was one of the first major publishers to reduce its dependence on Apple Inc and go out with an HTML5-based mobile application that can be read by any browser, thus bypassing the App Store.

FT.com Managing Director Rob Grimshaw told Reuters that the new Web-based app was drawing more traffic than the version that was sold through the App Store.

“People who are using the app are spending much more time with the content,” he said. “They are consuming about three times as many pages through the app as they are through the desktop in an average visit.”

If you want to create jobs at home, don’t rely on startups

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This morning’s Observer column.

[Tom] Friedman is a significant figure because his pulpit on the NYT enables him subliminally to insert ideas into the collective unconscious of America’s ruling elite. Which is why something he wrote recently needs to be challenged. “If we want to bring down unemployment in a sustainable way”, he writes, “funding more road construction will do it. We need to create a big bushel of new companies – fast. We’ve got to get more Americans working again for their own dignity… Good-paying jobs don’t come from bailouts. They come from startups.”

When Samuel Johnson was asked how he would refute Bishop Berkeley’s philosophical proposition about the non-existence of matter, he famously kicked a stone and said: “I refute it thus!” Not having a convenient stone, I pick up the nearest object that lies to hand. It’s an iPhone. “Designed by Apple in California”, it says on the back. “Assembled in China”.

Now of course it’s a long time since Apple was a startup, but the iPhone still refutes Friedman’s hypothesis…

Has the revolt begun against Apple’s iPad app fees?

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This morning’s Observer column.

How things change. It seems only a few months ago that magazine and newspaper publishers, maddened by the fact that the Big Bad Web enabled readers to access their content for free (and sceptical about the effectiveness of paywalls), decided that Apple’s iPad was just the ticket. Henceforth, they would publish their stuff not as web pages but as iPad apps. Not only did this offer them a shiny device that would display their wares in glorious living colour, but it would also force cheapskates and freeloaders to pay real money for the privilege of accessing them. This was possible because nothing happens on the iPad without going through Apple’s iTunes store, and Steve Jobs knows your credit card details. Thus the “free riding” that was commonplace on the web would become a thing of the past.

Accordingly, publishers fell like ravening wolves on the iPad, investing large amounts of money and effort in developing apps to run on the device…

Steve Jobs and Napoleon: an exchange

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My Observer piece about Steve Job’s place in history prompted some interesting responses, in particular an email from my friend, Gerard de Vries, who is an eminent philosopher of science. “With all the articles about the genius of Apple’s Jobs around”, he wrote

Tolstoy’s War and Peace came to my mind. This is how historians used to write about Napoleon: as the genius, the inspirer, the man who saw everything coming far ahead and who designed sophisticated strategies to win his battles.

That image was destroyed by Tolstoy.

Was Napoleon in command? Well, he may have given commands but – as Tolstoy’s novel stresses – a courier had to deliver them and maybe the courier got lost in the fog, or got shot halfway and even if he arrived at the right spot and succeeded to find the officers of the regiment, the command to attack may have been completely irrelevant because just a half hour before the courier arrived, the enemy had decided to launch a full attack and all Napoleon’s troops can now do is pray and hide, or flee. Tolstoy’s point is that Napoleon’s power is projected onto him – first by his admiring staff and troops and later by historians. Napoleon plays that he is “Napoleon” – that he is in command, that he knows what he is doing. But in fact he too was a little cog in a big machine. When the machine got stuck, the genius of Napoleon disappeared. But in our historical narratives, we tend to mix up cause and effect. So the story is that the machine got stuck because Napoleon’s genius ran out.

Isn’t this also the case with Jobs? He played his role as the genius CEO and was lucky. Is there really more to say?

The best advice to generals, Tolstoy remarked somewhere, is to publish your strategy after the battle. That’s the only way to ensure that your strategy relates to what has happened.

I was intrigued by this ingenious, left-field approach. It reminded me of something that Gerard had said to me when we first worked together way back in 1978 – that War and Peace was quite a good text for students embarking on the history and philosophy of science, where one of the most important obligations is to resist the Whig interpretation of history — which is particularly seductive in the case of science.

I replied,

I don’t think Tolstoy’s analysis fits the Jobs case exactly, for two reasons: we have corroborated accounts by eyewitnesses/subordinates of Jobs’s decision-making at crucial junctures of the story (when the likely outcomes were not at all certain); and there’s the fact that Jobs’s strategy was consistent in an interesting way, namely that his determination to keep the Mac a closed system was a short-term disaster (because it left the field wide open for Microsoft and Wintel) but a long-term masterstroke (because it’s now what enables Apple to produce such impressively functional mobile devices).

To which Gerard responded:

I’m less convinced by the eye-witness reports: Napoleon’s staff also thought well about his judgements and determination (until the French were defeated and had to retreat from Russia, of course). What IS however a good point is that Job’s name appears on a large number of patent-applications (there was an interesting report about that in IHT/NYT last week which also pointed out that this could not only be motivated by the wish to boost Job’s (internal and external) company stature, as patent offices are keen to check whether the people who appear on patent applications have really contributed to the innovation.) Jobs seems to have been active not only on the level of “strategy” but also on the level of detailed engineering and design work in Apple (and that would be a difference with Napoleon: I don’t think Napoleon ever did some shooting himself. As I remember, he kept a safe distance from the actual fighting).

The more one thinks about this stuff, the more one realises how important it is to try and see technological stories in a wider context. For example, I vividly remember how Jobs was castigated in the 1980s for his determination to maintain absolute control over both hardware and software — in contrast to Microsoft, which prospered because anyone could make DOS and Windows boxes. Now the cycle has come full circle with Google realising that it will have to buy a handset manufacturer if it is to be able to guarantee “outstanding user experiences” (i.e. iPhone-like performance) for Android phones.

And that, in turn, brings to mind Umberto Eco’s lovely essay explaining why the Mac is a Catholic system and the PC is a Protestant one.

Later, another friend, Jon Crowcroft commented:

“Well Jobs is a Buddhist and Gates is agnostic – that certainly tells you something. People I know that talked to Jobs on various projects support the idea he had a major hand in project successes. I think his early failure was a common one of being too early to market; once he got re-calibrated after Apple bought NeXT to get him back, then he had it all sussed.”

Still later: Comparison between Apple and Microsoft is also interesting, as David Nicholls pointed out in an email. In terms of market cap, Apple is now worth considerably more, but:

While it is true that Apple is doing amazingly well at the moment, and ‘gaining ground’ over Microsoft, when it comes to the total amount of money made over the years, Microsoft is still well ahead.

I did a quick bit of digging and found that Apple’s total Net Income from 2001 to 2010 (the only figures I could find) is around $35.5 billion. In the same period Microsoft’s equivalent is $119 billion. These figures aren’t corrected for inflation but that obviously won’t affect the relative amounts.

Microsoft’s figures are available back to 1991, and the 1991-2010 total is around $151 billion.

Steve Jobs’s place in history

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I’ve written a long piece about Steve Jobs for today’s Observer. Extract:

When the time comes to sum up Jobs’s achievements, most will portray him as a seminal figure in the computing industry. But Jobs is bigger than that.

To understand why, you have to look at the major communications industries of the 20th century – the telephone, radio and movies. As Tim Wu chronicles it in his remarkable book, The Master Switch, each of these industries started out as an open, irrationally exuberant, chaotic muddle of incompatible standards, crummy technology and chancers. The pivotal moment in the evolution of each industry came when a charismatic entrepreneur arrived to offer consumers better quality, higher production values and greater ease of use.

With the telephone it was Theodore Vail of AT&T, offering a unified nationwide network and a guarantee that when you picked up the phone you always got a dial tone. With radio it was David Sarnoff, who founded RCA. With movies it was Adolph Zukor, who created the Hollywood studio system.

Jobs is from the same mould. He believes that using a computer should be delightful, not painful; that it should be easy to seamlessly transfer music from a CD on to a hard drive and thence to an elegant portable player; that mobile phones should be powerful handheld computers that happen to make voice calls; and that a tablet computer is the device that is ushering us into a post-PC world. He has offered consumers a better proposition than the rest of the industry could – and they jumped at it. That’s how he built Apple into the world’s most valuable company. And it’s why he is really the last of the media moguls.

David Pogue had an insightful piece about Jobs in the New York Times. This passage caught my eye:

In Silicon Valley, success begets success. And at this point, few companies have as high a concentration of geniuses — in technology, design and marketing — as Apple. Leaders like the design god Jonathan Ive and the operations mastermind Tim Cook won’t let the company go astray.

So it’s pretty clear that for the next few years, at least, Apple will still be Apple without Mr. Jobs as involved as he’s been for years.

But despite these positive signs, there’s one heck of a huge elephant in the room — one unavoidable reason why it’s hard to imagine Apple without Mr. Jobs steering the ship: personality.

His personality made Apple Apple. That’s why no other company has ever been able to duplicate Apple’s success. Even when Microsoft or Google or Hewlett-Packard tried to mimic Apple’s every move, run its designs through the corporate copying machine, they never succeeded. And that’s because they never had such a single, razor-focused, deeply opinionated, micromanaging, uncompromising, charismatic, persuasive, mind-blowingly visionary leader.

By maintaining so much control over even the smallest design decisions, by anticipating what we all wanted even before we did, by spotting the promise in new technologies when they were still prototypes, Steve Jobs ran Apple with the nimbleness of a start-up company, even as he built it into one of the world’s biggest enterprises.

“I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it,” Mr. Jobs wrote in his resignation letter.

That’s a wonderful endorsement. But really? Can he really mean that Apple’s days will be brighter and more innovative without him in the driver’s seat?

And Charles Arthur argues that Jobs’s greatest legacy lies in being the man who persuaded the world to pay for online content:

Jobs pried open many content companies’ thinking, because his focus was always on getting something great to the customer with as few obstacles as possible. In that sense, he was like a corporate embodiment of the internet; except he thought people should pay for what they got. He always, always insisted you should pay for value, and that extended to content too. The App and Music Store remains one of the biggest generators of purely digital revenue in the world, and certainly the most diverse; while Google’s Android might be the fastest-selling smartphone mobile OS, its Market generates pitiful revenues, and I haven’t heard of anyone proclaiming their successes from selling music, films or books through Google’s offerings.

Jobs’s resignation might look like the end of an era, and for certain parts of the technology industry it is. For the content industries, it’s also a loss: Jobs was a champion of getting customers who would pay you for your stuff. The fact that magazine apps like The Daily haven’t set the world alight (yet?) isn’t a failure of the iPad (which is selling 9m a quarter while still only 15 months old; at the same point in the iPod’s life, just 219,000 were sold in the financial quarter, compared with the 22m – 100 times more – of its peak). It’s more like a reflection of our times.

So if you’re wondering how Jobs’s departure affects the media world, consider that it’s the loss of one of the biggest boosters of paid-for content the business ever had. Who’s going to replace that?

Zittrain and contingent generativity

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When I was working on Chapter 8 of my new book, two of the works I found most useful were Jonathan Zittrain’s The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It and Tim Wu’s The Master Switch. A key idea in determining whether the Internet will remain open is Zittrain’s concept of a ‘generative system’ and the threat that tethered, tightly-controlled information appliances like the iPhone pose for that generativity. But it’s now three years since the book came out, so it was interesting to find from John Battelle’s interview with him on how his thinking has changed. Here’s the relevant extract from the interview.

At the time of the book’s drafting, the alternatives seemed stark: the “sterile” iPhone that ran only Apple’s software on the one hand, and the chaotic PC that ran anything ending in .exe on the other. The iPhone’s openness to outside code beginning in ’08 changed all that. It became what I call “contingently generative” — it runs outside code after approval (and then until it doesn’t). The upside is that the vast creativity of outside coders has led to a software renaissance on mobile devices, including iPhones, from the sublime to the ridiculous. And Apple’s gatekeeping has seemed to be with a light touch; apps not allowed in the store pale in comparison to the torrents of stuff let through. But that masks entire categories of applications that aren’t allowed — namely anything disruptive to Apple’s business model or that of its partners or regulators. No p2p, no alternate email clients, browsers with limited functionality.

More important, the ability to limit code is what makes for the ability to control content. More and more we see content, whether a book, or a magazine subscription, represented in and through an app. It’s sheer genius for a platform maker to demand a cut of in-app purchases. Can you imagine if, back in the day, the only browser allowed on Windows was IE, and further, all commerce conducted through that browser — say, buying a book through Amazon — constituted an ‘in-app purchase’ for which Microsoft was due 30%?

A natural question is why competition isn’t the answer here — or at least reason to not worry about the question. If people thought the iPhone made for a bad deal, why would they want one? The reason they want one is the same thing that made the Mac so appealing when it first came on the scene: it was elegant and intuitive and it just worked. No blue screen of death. Consistency across apps. And, as viruses and worms naturally were designed for the most common platform, Windows, those 5% with Macs weren’t worth the trouble of corrupting.

We’ve seen a new generation of Mac malware as its numbers grow, and in the meantime a first defense is that of curation: the app store provides a rough filter for bad code, and accountability against its makers if something goes wrong even after it’s been approved. So that’s why the market likes these architectures.

In the Apple economy, only Apple gets really rich

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This morning’s Observer column.

Microsoft is a huge and important company. But guess what? It’s in danger of being dwarfed by an outfit that it once regarded as a joke. In terms of market capitalisation, Apple passed Microsoft ages ago. When I last checked, Apple was valued at $364bn, compared with Microsoft’s $230.5bn. And at the moment, there is only one other corporation in the world – Exxon Mobil – that is bigger than Apple.

Last week, Apple unveiled results that suggest even Exxon may not be safe from the relentless growth of Steve Jobs’s empire. Apple made a net profit of $7.31bn on revenues of $28.57bn for the quarter ending in June. That's the best three months it’s ever had, with revenues up 82% and profits up 125%. The company also revealed that it’s sitting on a $76bn cash mountain. Just to put that in context, Apple could currently buy both Tesco and BT and still have some loose change. The news sparked an 8% rise in the share price, with the stock breaking the $400 barrier for the first time.

So is Apple the new Microsoft? Answer: no – and the quarterly results explain why…

LATER: Even stranger is the revelation that Apple has more cash in hand than the US Federal government.

HP’s tablet dilemma: how to be runner-up.

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Andrew Orlowski has an interesting piece in The Register about HP’s new tablet. It opens with this striking para.

After just one year, the iPad is making more revenue than Apple’s 30-year-old personal computer division. It’s almost bringing in as much as Dell brings in from PCs. This is a huge business, already. And nobody can quite say what their iPad is good for. If ever a computer was a means to an end, then the iPad is it – rather than doing anything uniquely iPad-ish, it takes lots of “ends” a laptop (or Kindle, or smartphone) gets you to, and just gets you there slightly more conveniently. PCs are going to be around a long time; the iPad will be right there alongside them.