Category Archives: Apple

Amazon’s new Cloud Drive rains on everyone’s parade

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This morning’s Observer column.

“Impetuosity and audacity,” wrote Machiavelli, “often achieve what ordinary means fail to achieve.” If you doubt that, may I propose a visit to the upper echelons of Apple, Google and Sony, where steam might be observed venting from every orifice of senior executives? If you do undertake such a visit, do not under any circumstances mention the word “Amazon”.

The proximate cause of all this corporate spleen is the launch last week of Amazon’s Cloud Drive service. At first sight, it seems straightforward: it looks like a digital locker in which one may for a fee securely store one’s digital assets in the internet ‘cloud’. “Anything digital, securely stored,” runs the blurb, “available anywhere.” The first 5GB of storage is free, with more available at an annual cost of a dollar per gigabyte. Upload files to your "cloud drive", where they are stored online and from where they can be accessed by any device that you own.

So far, so innocuous. It’s not the online storage business that has Apple, Google & Co spitting feathers, but the Amazon CloudPlayer which goes along with the digital locker…

Why some Apps work — and some don’t

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Om Malik has a thoughful post about why some products work while others don’t — no matter how much VC money and industry plaudits they attract.

He picks up Gary Vaynerchuck’s idea of The Thank You Economy, in which the companies that provide the most value to their customers win. “It is a quaint notion”, writes Malik, “as old as the first bazaar, but somehow it got lost in postindustrial over-commercialization”.

When I use Marco Arment‘s Instapaper, I quietly thank him, pretty much every single time. Why? Because he solved a problem for me and made my life more manageable. As a result I gladly upgraded to the paid version of the app. And when I am not saving or reading articles using Instapaper, I am telling everyone I can tell: Try it. That is what the “thank you economy” really is — me doing marketing for a product I have only an emotional or utilitarian connection to.

I look at all these great tablets coming to market. They are feature-laden, power-packed, and have bundles of computing oomph. And yet, they will all struggle because the makers are all looking through the wrong end of the telescope. My friend Pip Coburn emailed me, pointing out that people with iPads are the ultimate commercial for the device. The more people have them, the more people want them. “People will trust other people who do not carry an agenda to build revenues and manipulate you,” Pip wrote. Bing!

Don’t believe me? Put all the things that are part of your daily routine into these two buckets — happiness and utility — and you will see it for yourself that in the end those two are the driving forces behind a successful app, service, device or media property.

That rings lots of bells round here. Instapaper has solved lots of problems for me, and I really value it. Same goes for Dropbox, in spades. I’m currently finishing off a new book, and I’ve used Dropbox from the outset: it’s been a revelation compared with the last time I wrote a book — when I was continually fretting about back-ups, the location of different versions, etc.

Another revelation is how useful the iPad has become — for me, anyway. When it first came out, I was quite critical of it. What has changed is the ecosystem of apps which have transformed it into a really powerful mobile workstation. It’s still hopeless for my kind of blogging (which really needs multitasking), but for writing non-academic articles, reading and commenting on PDFs, note-taking in seminars and conferences and email-on-the-move it’s terrific. And Dropbox is the glue that binds it to my other ‘proper’ computers.

Thanks to Quentin, I’ve also found that the iPad is a pretty good thinking and presentation tool. It does run Keynote, which is fine if you like that kind of PowerPoint-type thing. But more importantly, it has a mind-mapping App which (unlike some iPad1 Apps) can drive a projector, and I’ve found that audiences which are PowerPointed-out seem to like it. You just work out the map of what you want to say, and then talk through it, squeezing and pinching and swiping as you talk. And if they want a printed record, you can export the map as a jpeg and email it to them.

Gay? There’s an App for that, apparently

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Well, well. Interesting story in the Guardian.

Apple is under fire from gay rights activists after it approved an iPhone and iPad app targeting “homosexual strugglers”.

More than 80,000 people have signed a petition against the so-called “gay cure” app, which Apple deemed to have “no objectionable content”.

Exodus International, the pro-Christian group behind the app, promotes the “ex-gay” movement, encouraging people to change their sexuality. The app gives users “freedom from homosexuality through the power of Jesus”, according to the group.

Apple had not returned a request for comment at the time of publication.

Ben Summerskill, chief executive of gay rights group Stonewall, said: “At Stonewall, we’ve all been on this app since 8am and we can assure your readers it’s having absolutely no effect.”

That’s a nice witty response. But it looks to me like Apple blundered in passing this App for distribution. As a petition from Change.org puts it:

“Apple doesn’t allow racist or anti-Semitic apps in its app store, yet it gives the green light to an app targeting vulnerable LGBT youth with the message that their sexual orientation is a ‘sin that will make your heart sick’ and a ‘counterfeit’.

“This is a double standard that has the potential for devastating consequences. Apple needs to be told, loud and clear, that this is unacceptable.”

Ode to Steve

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Warning for sensitive souls: contains rude words.

It prompted me to download the 8mm home movie app for the iPhone. Another lovely example of using sophisticated computing to produce primitive retro effects. No wonder normal people think that geeks are nuts!

Thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.

Obsessiveness rules OK

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This morning’s Observer column.

While all this was going on, Apple and Microsoft were squabbling about capital letters. A while back, Apple attempted to trademark the phrase “App Store” – the name of its online store of downloadable programs. Microsoft objected, arguing that the term was too “generic”. (This from the company whose main products are Windows, Word, Office and Excel.) On Monday last, Apple struck back. “Having itself faced a decades-long genericness [sic] challenge to its claimed Windows mark,” it sniffed in a court filing, “Microsoft should be well aware that the focus in evaluating genericness is on the mark as a whole and requires a fact-intensive assessment of the primary significance of the term to a substantial majority of the relevant public.

“Yet, Microsoft, missing the forest for the trees, does not base its motion on a comprehensive evaluation of how the relevant public understands the term App Store as a whole. What it offers instead are out-of-context and misleading snippets of material printed by its outside counsel from the internet and allegations regarding how the public allegedly interprets the constituent parts of the term App Store, ie, ‘app’ and ‘store’.”

The Church of Latter-Day Apple

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Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry's mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. “Very nice, Steve,” growled Tramiel. “I guess you’ll sell it in boutiques.”

That was a long time ago…

Thus begins my Observer ‘Comment is Free’ piece on Apple’s transformation into the behemoth it has become. Towards the end of the piece, I mentioned Umberto Eco’s famous essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven.

I’ve always thought that Eco’s essay was just a lovely literary conceit. But now, courtesy of Evegny Morozov, I find that there is even a scholarly literature on the subject. Or, at any rate, one learned article. It appeared in 2001 in the Oxford University Press journal Sociology of Religion: a quarterly review under the title “May the Force of the Operating System be with You: Macintosh Devotion as Implicit Religion” and the Abstract reads:

The purpose of this study is to consider the devotion of Macintosh computer enthusiasts as a case of implicit religion. Data was collected from two primary sources: twelve in-depth face-to-face interviews, and letters to the editor from MacAddict magazine. In addition, supplementary information was obtained from pro-Macintosh Web sites and magazines. Following Nesti (1997), Macintosh devotion was analyzed along four lines: (1) the search for meaning, (2) social forms, (3) the hidden message of the metaphor, and (4) the case of the voyage. I found that Mac devotees used the Macintosh as a “reflective medium” to discover meanings in the midst of changing computer technology. As an implicit religion, Macintosh devotion is based on the sacralization of the bond between people and computers. Its followers envision an utopian future in which humans and technology work together in harmony. Furthermore, the Mac enthusiasts adopted from both Eastern and Western religions a social form that emphasized personal spirituality as well as communal experience. The faith of Mac devotees is reflected and strengthened by their efforts in promoting their computer of choice.

The iPad is “a post-PC” device? Oh yeah?

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Paul Hontz nails it.

As I listened to Steve speak, one phrase kept gnawing at me. Steve said that the iPad was “a post-pc device”. As an iOS developer who makes his living building apps for iPads and iPhones, I disagree. You see iOS has this ball and chain attached to it called “iTunes” that runs on a typical PC. The first time you turn your iPad on you’re greeted with this screen on the right prompting you to plug your iPad into a computer so it can be setup. You can’t even turn your iPad on the first time without being tethered to iTunes.

Yep.

Freedom from the Cloud?

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This morning’s Observer column.

“The novelties of one generation,” said George Bernard Shaw, “are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.” An excellent illustration is provided by the computing industry, which – despite its high-tech exterior – is as prone to fashion swings as the next business. Witness the current excitement about the news that, on 2 March, Apple is due to announce details of the new iPad, the latest incarnation of what the Register disrespectfully calls an “uber-popular fondleslab”. Yves Saint Laurent would have killed for that kind of excitement about a forthcoming collection.

To put the hysteria into some kind of context, however, consider how we got into this mess…