Category Archives: Observer

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.

Celebrating Michael Hart

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This morning’s Observer column.

Michael Hart is dead. Michael who? I guess most people have never heard of him and yet if you’ve ever read an ebook then your life has been touched by him. Why? Because way back in 1971 he had a great idea: that computers could make great literature freely available to anyone. He founded Project Gutenberg, the world’s greatest archive of free, public-domain ebooks, and he devoted his life and most of his energies to that one great project.

The idea came to him when he was a student at the University of Illinois in 1971. Computers were then huge, fabulously expensive mainframes and Michael had access to one of them. On Independence Day 1971, inspired by receiving a free printed copy of the Declaration of Independence, he typed the text of the declaration into a computer file and sent it to other users of the machine. He followed it up by typing the text of the Bill of Rights, and then, in 1973, the full text of the US constitution.

Most people would have stopped at this point, but not Hart. If computers could store and endlessly distribute great texts, he reasoned, why stop at the constitution? Why not create the digital equivalent of the lost Library of Alexandria? Why not every book in the world – or at least every significant text that was out of copyright and in the public domain? Thus was Project Gutenberg born…

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’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?

So why did Google pay $12.5 billion for Motorola?

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This morning’s Observer column.

Last month, there was much hullabaloo because Nortel, a bankrupt Canadian telecommunications manufacturer, put its hoard of 6,000 wireless patents and patent applications up for auction. The scent attracted a herd of corporate mastodons – Apple, Microsoft, RIM, EMC, Ericsson and Sony – which eventually won the auction with a $4.5bn joint bid.

This attracted much attention from the commentariat, which interpreted it as a slap in the eye for Google, perceived as a rogue participant because it had made a series of apparently fatuous bids for the patents. At one point, for example, Google bid $1,902,160,540. At another, its bid was $2,614,972,128. And when the herd’s bid reached $3bn, Google countered with $3.14159bn.

Commentators were baffled by these numbers until mathematicians came to the rescue. The bids were, in fact, celebrated constants in number theory. The first is Brun’s constant, the number towards which the sum of the reciprocals of twin primes converge. The second was the Meissel-Mertens constant (which also involves prime numbers). And the third, as every schoolboy knows, represented the first six digits of pi. At this point, the penny dropped. Perhaps the Google guys were playing silly buggers – but with a serious motive, namely to inflate the price that the herd would have to pay. And so it proved.

Then, last week, Google dropped a bombshell…

LATER: Steve Lohr has a good piece about the takeover in the NYT which starts from Nick Negroponte’s vision for the digital world as one where people will ship bits rather than atoms. Google has not real experience with retailing atoms, and its experiment with selling the Nexus One handset was a disaster — though the product itself was (and remains) nicer than most Android phones. One lesson of Android is that not having control over handset hardware can lead to disappointing (or even maddening) performance for users (as I found when trying to find an Android bar-code reader App that would work with the camera on my HTC handset). That’s the problem that Apple cracked by having tight control over both device software and hardware. So one question raised by Larry Page’s promise to “create amazing user experiences” is whether Google actually plans to replicate Apple’s seamless control with Motorola handsets? And, if so, what will other Android manufacturers make of that?

The power of images — and their fragility

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This morning’s Observer column.

Dear Photograph is a remarkable demonstration of the power of ordinary, humdrum photographs to evoke memories. Anyone who has ever found a shoebox of old prints in an attic will know this. They yield up images of ourselves when we were young, slender and innocent, of our parents with unlined, carefree expressions and unfurrowed, untroubled brows, of holidays once enjoyed, places once visited. Photographs freeze moments in time, reminding us of who we were – and, by implication, of who we have become.

But Dear Photograph is also a stark reminder of how threatened this power of photography has become. There is, for one thing, the brusque, matter-of-fact, upfront Terms and Conditions of the site. “When you submit your materials,” it reads, “you grant dearphotograph.com a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use the work to be used, copied, sub-licenced, adapted, transmitted, distributed, published, displayed or otherwise under our discretion in any and all media”. Or, to adapt the famous broken English internet meme, “all your memories are belong to us”.

CORRECTION: Broken link to dearphotograph.com now fixed. Thanks to Seb Schmoller for spotting it.

Death of a meme?

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This morning’s Observer column.

Perhaps it was the spurious precision of the headline that caught my eye. “Web 2.0 will end on October 1 2012”, it said. The idea of a meme – an infectious idea – having a definite termination point was peculiar enough; but a meme as nebulous as Web 2.0?

Of course the phrase had become ubiquitous in PR-speak over the past few years. It seemed that the press release for every self-respecting online product or service had to have it somewhere in the text. But to ask the authors of these documents to explain what they meant by Web 2.0 was to risk accusations of mental cruelty, for they generally knew not whereof they spoke. (In that respect, it was like asking News International executives about “ethics”.) Many seemed to regard it simply as a synonym for “cool” or “the latest thing”. In that respect, Web 2.0 resembles many other technical terms – think “laser”, “turbo” and the prefix “i” – which have been co-opted by the hucksters of their days.

The prediction of Web 2.0’s demise was made by Christopher Mims, a technology commentator who writes for the MIT journal Technology Review…

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.

Thanks, Marshall, I think we’ve finally got the message…

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This morning’s Observer column.

“A prophet is not without honour”, says the Bible, “save in his own country.” This was manifestly not true in the case of Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian cultural critic, who was born 100 years ago last Thursday, and was famous not only in his own country, but also abroad. In fact, he’s the only public intellectual I can think of who played himself in a Woody Allen movie.

Film buffs will recall the wonderful sequence in Annie Hall, where Woody and Diane Keaton are queuing for a movie when a guy behind them starts opining pompously about McLuhan’s description of television as a “high intensity or hot medium”. Allen expresses to camera a desire to have a large sock full of horse manure close to hand, whereupon the guy asserts his right to express his opinion on the grounds that he teaches a course at Columbia on “TV, media and culture”, a fact that – he asserts – gives his views on McLuhan a great deal of validity.

“That’s funny,” replies Woody, “because I happen to have Mr McLuhan right here.” He goes over to a flipchart and pulls out the great man himself from behind it. “I heard what you were saying, “says McLuhan to the Columbia man. “You know nothing of my work… how you ever got to teach a course in anything is totally amazing.” The scene closes with Woody saying to camera: “Boy, if life were only like this.”

As it happens, there have been many times in the past few years when it would have been useful to have had McLuhan to hand because, in a strange way, his insights into media seem more relevant now than they were in the 1960s when he sprang into prominence…

See also this post.

The smartphone challenge

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This morning’s Observer column.

My favourite line in the film A Fish Called Wanda comes when Otto (Kevin Kline), a psychopathically idiotic ex-CIA operative, objects to being called “stupid” by Wanda (Jamie Lee Curtis). To which Wanda replies: “To call you stupid would be an insult to stupid people! I’ve worn dresses with higher IQs.”

Until relatively recently, “dresses” could have been replaced by “mobile phones” in the script, and the line would still have raised a laugh. But that’s changing fast. Quite how fast was revealed last week in an extraordinary report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project. … The Pew report found that 35% of American adults now own a ‘smartphone’, that is to say a mobile phone with a significantly more powerful processor and much better internet connectivity than an old-style handset which could do voice and text and not much else…