Category Archives: Apps market

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…

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.

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.

BlackBerry: a smouldering platform

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Not quite burning yet. But emitting smoke. Sobering assessment of what RIM’s latest results tell us. Excerpt:

When reporting its fourth quarter in March, RIM had forecast revenues in the range of $5.2-$5.6bn and profits of between $770-812m.

Instead, they both came in lower. Now, you might look at that and say that revenues are up, and shipments are up – so what’s the worry?

First, it’s in the gap between those two – which led to the fall in profits. Basically, you can see clearly from those numbers that RIM must be getting less money per phone. Quite substantially less, if you take into account the average cost of a PlayBook (which is going to be a lot more than a BlackBerry).

We would have been able to tell you exactly how much it was getting per handset – but following its results last time, RIM said it would stop giving out both average selling prices (ASPs) for handsets and the total number of BlackBerry subscribers, which it had been doing since the beginning of 2002. And another financial point: the company is to buy back 5% of the outstanding shares. I won’t go into the mechanics of why share buybacks are bad (two quick reasons: the company should have better things to spend its cash on, such as R&D, and buybacks featherbed executive share options). But when a company circles the wagons by reducing the amount of data it gives out and does a buyback, something is wrong.

Here’s what’s wrong: RIM’s platform is burning. Except that this isn’t the fully-fledged conflagration that Stephen Elop perceived at Nokia. It’s more of a smouldering. But it’s happening nonetheless, and it’s been happening for a long time: RIM hasn’t released a major new phone since August 2010. (Yes, that’s nearly as long as Apple.) It sort-of showed off a new version of the Torch in May; that will actually be released in September. (Way to kill the sales, people.)

RIM’s management knows it has a problem, but doesn’t seem to be able to make the shift – the very difficult shift, it should be noted – from the old BlackBerry OS to the new QNX platform that is going to power forthcoming BlackBerrys (and already powers the PlayBook).

QNX-based phones have been much promised; RIM hasn’t however delivered.

That figures. I’ve noticed how almost all my corporate contacts — the people who once had BlackBerrys to a man or woman — now have iPhones.

So will Google’s Chromebook transform how we think about computers?

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My Observer piece about the forthcoming Google netbook.

On 15 June, Google will officially take the next step on its road to global domination. From that day onwards, online shoppers will be able to buy the Google Chromebook, a device that the search giant hopes will change the way we think about computers – and in the process rain on the parades of Apple and Microsoft.

On the face of it, the Chromebook seems an unlikely game-changer. Its first two manifestations – from electronics giants Samsung and Acer – look like any old netbook: thin (0.79in) clamshell design, 12.1in screen, standard-sized keyboard, trackpad. At 3.2lb, it’s not particularly light. The claimed battery life (8.5 hours for the Samsung version) is pretty good, but otherwise the Google machine looks rather conventional.

The surprises start when you hit the on button…

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.”

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 ultimate dumbing-down tool: the unlinkable App

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Steven Johnson has adapted his speech to the Web 2.0 Summit and turned it into an OpEd piece on FT.com. It’s basically a follow-on from his excellent Hearst Lecture, which is also about the dangers of the unlinkable App. Sample:

Of course, the overwhelming majority of apps do not contain much information that would benefit from being linked to other things on the internet. If we do not figure out a way to link directly to one level of the Angry Birds game, we will probably survive as a culture. But the danger lies in a region of the digital information landscape barely mentioned by Mr Anderson: books. Where links abound, a rich ecosystem of commentary, archiving, social sharing and scholarship usually develops because links make it far easier to build on and connect ideas from around the web. But right now, books exist outside this universe. There is no standardised way to link to a page of a digital book.

Books contain the most carefully crafted and edited text that we have – truly the richest source of information in the world – and yet all that information remains unlinkable. Google works as well as it does because people find interesting information on the web and link to it; Google then prioritises pages that attract a disproportionate number of inbound links. But if you find a fascinating passage in a novel or a book of history, there is no standardised way to link to it, which means that the rest of the web cannot benefit from your discovery.

Fortunately, a solution to this problem exists, one that merely involves a commitment to use technology that already exists. Call it the mirror web. If you create digital information in any form, make a parallel version of that information that lives on the web. A magazine publisher creating an iPad app should ensure that each article has clear links to a mirror version of each article on the web. Then, if anyone wants to cite, tweet, blog or e-mail a reference to that article, it is always one tap away. The web version can be behind a pay wall or some other kind of barrier if the publisher chooses; what matters is that there is an address you can point to.

What much of the discussion about Chris Anderson’s “death of the Web” meme overlooks is the long term implication of a publishing ecosystem dominated by unlinkable apps — namely the dumbing down of our culture. The wonderful thing about the open, hyperlinked Web is that it enables it to be greater than the sum of its parts. The unrestricted sharing of information and ideas endows it with an invaluable emergent property: that of collective intelligence. (And yes I know about Jaron Lanier’s stuff about the dangers of “hive mind”, “digital Maoism”, etc.) But the fact is that the reason humankind has become as accomplished as it has is because we found ways of sharing good ideas. The irony about the Apps-mania now gripping the publishing world is that, in an era when we were presented (courtesy of Tim Berners-Lee) with the most efficient method yet developed for sharing ideas, they want to cut off — or at least regulate — the rate at which ideas flow.

Apps are wonderful in their way; but they can be tools for dumbing us down.

UPDATE: To which Bill Thompson (whom God Preserve) adds a comment:

“Steven (and you) both make good points, and it is indeed the case that ‘in an era when we were presented (courtesy of Tim Berners-Lee) with the most efficient method yet developed for sharing ideas, [publishers] want to cut off — or at least regulate — the rate at which ideas flow’ – but why are we surprised? Publishers were the bottleneck in the flow of ideas for 300 years – the abundance of the digital age has removed their control, and they want it back. The App and the ebook are the digital equivalent of a licence to operate a printing press.”

What’s a ‘book’ then?

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This morning’s Observer column.

These two developments – the Economist’s app and Eagleman’s ‘book’ – ought to serve as a wake-up call for the print publishing industry. The success of Amazon’s Kindle has, I think, lulled print publishers into a false sense of security. After all, they’re thinking, the stuff that goes on the Kindle is just text. It may not be created by squeezing dyes on to processed wood-pulp, but it’s still text. And that’s something we’re good at. So no need to panic. Amazon may be a pain to deal with, but the Kindle and its ilk will see us through.

If that’s really what publishers are thinking, then they’re in for some nasty surprises. The concept of a ‘book’ will change under the pressure of iPad-type devices, just as concepts of what constitutes a magazine or a newspaper are already changing…