Tag Archives: iPhone

Information may want to be free, but do we?

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There’s a bit of buzz going on right now about the release of Diaspora. If you’re not familiar with the name, it is essentially to Facebook what Linux is to Windows. That’s right, the collectivists are rising up again. Just as numerous articles about iTunes, Facebook, Apps, and other ‘walled gardens’ have begun circulating through the media, the holdouts of a “free Web” are working hard to disrupt the corporate machine with a free offering.

The question is, this time, will the ‘free web’ collectivists prevail. History is in their favor. However, we live in a very different time. The capitalists have made significant inroads and far more is at stake now that the Internet is recognized by money holders as an important revenue source and potential profit center.

So, do we want information to be free? Or would we prefer to pay for the convenience of walled gardens? Facebook has been reluctant to charge for membership even though 5¢ per user per month would have major impact on revenue. Yet nominal fees for Flip cameras and ‘good enough’ technologies like MP3 have subverted higher quality by delivering more convenience. We’re all time crunched and often times good enough is truly good enough.

Different devices same dynamics.
For power users of the Internet,  ’free’ is almost an expectation. Yet increasingly people outside this small subset are becoming more comfortable with forking over a nominal fee for a small application or bit of content. Sure you could find that article online somewhere, but for a few bucks its just easier to get an online subscription.

When we do this, however, we make a choice. Just as AT&T holds iPhone users captive and Blu Ray and HDVD fought it out for format dominance, so we become held fast to iTunes or Amazon. You might argue that one can always jump ship and abandon a standard by abandoning a device but often times you have to give up previous acquisitions based on proprietary formats. That can represent a significant investment.

By the same token, sticking steadfastly to open standards and avoiding the walled gardens omits us from the popular places and often leaves us chasing multiple formats and inter-device compatibility. Tech-headed hardcore collectivists will put in the time to smooth this out, but most of us won’t bother.

These are not new problems. They are the problems phone companies thrust upon their long-distance account holders 15 years ago and home video player owners pushed on people 25 years ago. Interestingly, in both cases a disruptive technology made the point moot as VOIP killed charge-for-distace telephony and is now eroding the need for a disc-playing video device in the home.

Today Hulu and YouTube and AppleTV and Netflix are all fighting to dominate the video-via-Internet market. This is the same battle as long distance telephone and home video players, just a different base technology.

There is another important difference too. We live in a mature post-mass-media world now. This would indicate that a single dominant player is less likely to emerge as market dynamics favor niche audiences and niche products most of the time.

Generation gap.
In my mind the single greatest ideological collision of our time is that of the open-source, everything-free collectivists who pioneered the web and the capitalists who have funded its explosive growth and much of its innovation. Squarely a Gen Xer, I grew up with a free internet and have that expectation. Millennials and the generation following them (now in grade school) are growing up with $2 apps and pay-for-content models. Where I am offended by the affront of having to pay for content, younger web users think nothing of this.

Sure, there will always be holdouts. You will always be able to get content for free from someone, somewhere. Even today anyone with bit torrent savvy can skip right by Netflix and Apple TV and download full length movies for free. This will always be a thorn in the capitalist’s side but now that so many others are comfortable using the Internet there’s plenty of available market share to profit on. Were I to put my money down now, I would say the capitalists have a growing advantage. Time and the aging of the Net Generation is on their side. The growing size of the non-power userbase who favor paying for convenience is also on their side. My suspicion is, just like Ning, Disapora will only see a little traction. Where Apache, MySQL and Linux are tools for the very collectivists who use them, social network software like Diaspora is meant for the non-poweruser who frankly wants to hang out with friends. Those friends have already chosen Facebook.

But…
It is worth sounding a not of caution to the capitalists though. If you build a walled garden, it needs to be Eden. AOL learned this the hard way. They built easy and convenient but blocked out too much. As more and more people began to hear that there was ‘more’ outside the garden they got curious and began to climb over the wall. Facebook works very hard to keep up with people’s needs. Adding Places to FB immediately kicked Foursquare and Gowalla down a notch. Why? Because 500MM people use FB. If the non-poweruser wants to be where everyone is, Facebook has the advantage right now.

The second challenge is privacy. While people are increasingly willing to participate in capitalism online, they are sensitive about their information. One significant slip there could have a heavy cost as trust online is hard to earn. Even more interestingly, the 140-character nature of our reading habits fuels this fire. We see the headlines of bank hacks and privacy violations and often don’t read the articles. The net effect is things can feel less secure than they really are. There’s also a strong collectivist set within the mainstream locations like Facebook. These are the people who post Facebook’s quiet privacy policy changes for the world to see. Inherently leery of the capitalists, they are self-appointed agents of the masses and work hard to subvert the efforts of capitalists from within their own walled gardens.

The third challenge is innovation outside the capitalist model. Disruptive technologies have tended to come from those who do not buy into the capitalist philosophy. Apache and Linux were swipes against what power users saw an inferior technologies that were overpriced. So these developers banded together and turned the marketplace upside down. Now the “LAMP stack” is the favored, open format for the web. Perhaps something similar is being worked on now that will shatter the proprietary iTunes and Amazon formats.

I’m watching Apple begin to behave a little less like the underdog and a little more like Microsoft used to be accused of. You know, monopolistic. Google is doing the same. My guess is, in some cellar somewhere someone with no greater agenda than sticking it to the Man is developing something that will eventually chip away at the capitalists again. If enough people get wind of this – and that is increasingly easy in our interconnected age – it might make a difference.

The future favors the capitalists and the trend right now is to choose convenience over freedom, but it is a far more fragile advantage than in the past and trends online shift quickly.

The Hipstamatic Effect

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Recently I started fiddling with the iPhone’s Hipstamatic app. I’ll say it; it is cool. Popular too, it seems many of my iPhone-toting friends have begun running their images through Hipstamatic’s filters. The most astonishing thing about Hipstamatic is how it can transform everyday images into faux-retro works of art.

Through Hipstamatic and tools like it the same people who used to utter such classic phrases as, “I can’t draw a straight line” and “I’m not creative” are beginning to experience the joys of being ‘creative’ in that classic, artful sense of the term. This is wonderful. Everyone should enjoy that experience at some point.

Apple has built an empire on this very premise – that all people should be given the chance to be creative. From its numerous templates for iWork, iPhoto, iMovie and Garage Band novice noodlers can create sophisticated looking pieces from photo albums to home movies to business letters, resumes and reports. Pick a template, drag and drop your images and surprise yourself at how polished it all looks!

Do McPictures beget McThinking?
With Hipstamatic I can take any mundane subject, like my thumb (featured above) and turn it into a fairly interesting image. I can do the same with pictures of my car, my kids, a bottle of wine or a cup of coffee. Interesting images can be found everywhere and made from everything. By and large that is a good thing, I think.

But (there’s always a ‘but’)…

Is all this instant artiness one more example of how technology is training our minds to skim rather than dive deep?

In the traditional sense, art – in music, lyrics, poetry, pictures, video – was meant to offer insight, perspective and commentary. Beneath the surface of many art pieces was deeper thought. Even Duchamp’s inverted urinal and Warhol’s Brillo boxes – everyday consumer items elevated to art – held commentary and thoughtfulness. The objects themselves were the distillation of a lot of thought and intention.

With a Hipstamatic picture, something mundane like my thumb is given unnecessary layers of polish which attribute to it no real depth of meaning. It’s still just my thumb.

If we do this again and again, with music, photos, blog posts, etc. are we training ourselves to be superficial, to subvert the seeking of meaning and depth for the less strenuous world of canned effects applied to shallow topics for a shallow visual or aural thrill? Are we creating the fast food of art – tastes good going down but offers no real nutritive value? Worse are we training ourselves to think this way? If so, how will it impact everything else we do – our careers, relationships, purchase decisions, political views, and on and on?

I am guessing many will agree with me that culturally over the past few decades we’ve placed a significant emphasis on transient instances of ‘cool’, media soundbytes (often out of context) and tabloid journalism, shock-value fashion, music and movies and other examples of quick-fix stimulation over insightful thinking or meaningful commentary. In my mind these are related to the ‘one click’ pleasures of Hipstamatic type tools that make it very easy to settle for – and focus purely on – the cosmetically cool even if it is conceptually vacant.

Lest you think I’m some art elitest I am not. I admit it, I like Hipstamatic. I like Garageband and iMovie too. They’re fun to use and as noted before, I think everyone should enjoy the feeling of creating music and imagery and art. I think everyone should recognize that they are creative in some way. However, every new technology or tool brings with it benefits and consequences and if I were to criticize our society it would be that we are myopic, focusing more on rights and benefits than on responsibilities and consequences.

For all the marvels today’s digital tools offer, I can’t quiet this nagging sense that being the shortcuts they are – these tools are in some ways distracting us from an important aspect of the process of creativity, the hard work of innovation rather than the comparatively easier pursuit of decoration.

Misalignment at the core of Adobe/Apple feud.

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As a lifelong Apple fan I find it ironic that the company that positioned itself as the anti-establishment, anti-monopoly, anti-Microsoft is now behaving a lot like Microsoft. Funny what happens when you start leading in a market category or two isn’t it?

While Jon Stewart may rightly refer to Apple’s tactics around the Gizmodo iPhone leak as “appholish” behavior possibly more interesting still is the sparring between longtime pals Apple and Adobe. As many a geek is now aware, Steve Job’s essentially dismissed Flash – a core Adobe technology – as yesterday’s Web. Apple’s fancy new tablet will follow in the iPhone’s footsteps and not support Flash.

Adobe, understandably, feels like a slighted lover. After all these blissful years the two companies have been tag teaming the creative world. Now Adobe gets dumped. So what’s a spurned lover to do? Start dating others? Talking mushmouth about the company that dumped them? Wallow in sorrow and self-pity?

‘Ah,’ say the strategy people, ‘Let’s tug at the heartstrings of our customers. Let’s stand for freedom. Let’s be the underdog just trying to do right.’

Like some cheesy country-western song, Adobe’s new ad campaign is all about being the victim of love and it’s going to fail.

It’s going to fail because Adobe cannot possibly take the positioning its trying to take. It is, in short, misaligned. Here’s why:

History Lesson: Adobe Exploits Quark’s Quirks.
Back in the early 90′s the preeminent layout package was Quark Xpress. Designers had a love/hate relationship with the product. It was the best offering by far, but it had its bugs. Worse, as new versions came out, Quark got into the habit of hitting designers for a full license. That meant coughing up several hundreds of dollars to keep current not just once in a while, but at every update. This did not go over well both to individual designers and agencies buying 50 packages at a time.

Around this time Adobe, then best known for its Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat products released InDesign. It was a brave move. A huge proportion of the design community was using Quark. Changing to a new platform would be a hard sale for financial reasons, entrenchment reasons (printers were using Quark) and for proficiency reasons (How long will it take to get fluent in the new interface?). Adobe was smart though. They kept a lot of consistencies between Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign which kept the learning curve reasonable. They made sure Quark could be imported into InDesign thus keeping legacy files relevant. They bundled InDesign into a Creative Suite (CS) of products which included Illustrator, Photoshop and Acrobat. This last move made changing layout programs easier and gave the sense of a 3-for-1 upgrade when buying Adobe Creative Suite 1. By bundling InDesign they did for layout software what Microsoft did with browsers by including Explorer in Windows. Maybe in hindsight this latter move should’ve served as a hint.

It took time, but eventually Adobe unseated Quark, the latter company foolishly sticking to its draconian pricing and releasing lackluster updates. For a number of years designers had both packages on their machines (usually Macs its worth noting). Printers too. Eventually though, companies stopped re-upping Quark and InDesign began to win out. After all, going to CS2 and CS3 upgraded your other Adobe products as well.

I would argue that Adobe’s success came from understanding and aligning with their target audience – creative people. They knew creative people are not tech people and would want a familiar interface if they were to make a mid-career switch. They knew layout was not enough and it made sense to bundle illustration and photo handling software (and eventually a visual web editor, which was the early GoLive product Adobe acquired.) They also knew designers were not keen on being exploited by the market leader (Quark) in having to pay full price for upgrades because Quark was the only real game in town (your basic monopoly move).

To big to wail: You can’t be the leader and the underdog.
Fast forward 15years, Adobe is trying to do it again. Casting Apple as the big, bad, monopolist, Adobe is playing the tragic lover. “Oh Apple, we still love you even though you treat us so bad!”

The problem is, this underdog position isn’t ringing true anymore. To begin with, Adobe is the new Quark. It’s the only game in town and the acknowledged market leader. Like Quark before it, Adobe has picked up the habit of producing very expensive new releases. Moving from CS3 to CS4 meant a full license and a nearly four-figure upgrade. Ouch.

Some designers swallowed the hit and jumped in. Now, with CS5 Adobe is asking for a full license again. That’s another four-figure hit for each seat. For old blokes like me, this stinks of Quark circa 1998. Does Adobe really expect its customers to believe they’re the victim of Apple’s monopolistic, totalitarian evil when they’re behaving like jerks too?

Therein is the essence of the misalignment. In this day and age we expect market leaders in a capitalist culture to behave aggressively to secure their competitive advantage. We may not like the tactics, we may choose the alternative (as Mac users did over PC’s and Firefox fans did over Internet Explorer), but its not surprising when big companies act the way they do.

It is, however, insulting to read headlines like ‘We love Apple’ and all the lovey-dovey, let-freedom-ring body copy that follows when it comes from Adobe. If you love someone Adobe, love your customers and stop screwing them for a thousand dollars with each new upgrade. Don’t talk about freedom as you use market leadership as a means of fleecing customers.

Right now there’s a company operating out of a garage or rundown loft that sees opportunity. They see Adobe as the new Quark and a chance to credibly take the underdog position and exploit it just the way Adobe did two decades ago. Were I Adobe, I’d be watching out more for the little companies seeking to nip 5% of my market than I would trying to paint Apple as the bad guy.

Besides, Apple is starting to do a good job of that on its own.

iDoubt: iPad will not have the impact of iPod

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Ed Note: 01/27/10 I updated the name from iTablet to iPad to match today’s announcement re: the product name.

Now that the news of Apple’s tablet device has percolated up from the likes of Mashable to the Wall Street Journal it’s interesting to see how the story evolves. Mashable and other geekerati sites are rumor mills about features. WSJ’s article is about industry and use.

While initial hype and limited sales may come from the feature-obsessed technophile fringe, marketplace success (other than good PR for Apple just by putting it out there) will lie largely on the uptake by non-geeks. Ultimately this will come down to usefulness. It’s tempting to compare the revolution created by the iPod to what could happen with the iPad (or whatever it will be called). I don’t think it will be the same and here’s why:

Music vs. Magazines & TV
The popularity of music has never waned. Everyone listens to music. Many people, especially young people, have parts of their own identity wrapped up in it. In this way the content was never the problem for consumers, the distribution (and cost) were. MP3 compression solved these problems by making music portable, small (in terms of file size and physical size) and cheap (or free). The iPod became the defacto distribution system for MP3 files. Apple’s brilliance was in seeing the future of music in MP3 before anyone else did. They got the first mover advantage and combined with an elegant user experience iPod dominated while others have been playing catch-up. Today the eBook is solving a similar problem – portability and cost improvement. Fewer people read books than listen to music and so that revolution will be smaller.

Magazines and newspapers (one of the target content types for iPad) have a different problem. Yes, physical magazines and newspapers are more cumbersome than digital versions and would benefit in the way eBooks do from digital delivery but that’s not why newspapers and magazines are failing. If it were, moving them online and making the content free (the same tactic that revolutionized the music business) would’ve begun solving the problem. It hasn’t. Website magazines and newpapers have not stanched the bleeding and the publishers have not been able to restructure their businesses to live in the lower-revenue environment they now finds themselves in. (Neither has music entirely, but its made some progress by managing bands differently.)

Let’s start with news. News travels at Twitter-speed now, undermining the new industry’s role in ‘breaking news.’ What’s they’re left with is depth and commentary, two things they can do more professionally than amateurs with Twitter accounts. Newsweek and others have moved to an editorial/commentary format. The jury is still out on whether its interesting enough for people to keep paying for.

Beyond news there’s gossip, celebratory voyeurism, and niche interests. Perez Hilton is doing gossip and celebrity voyeurism better than People magazine. Niche interests also struggle with specialty websites. Even commentary is a tougher market as bloggers wedge their way onto the shortlist of respectable commentators.

So will making InTouch, People, Newsweek, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and other publications available on the iPad make their content more relevant to people than it is today? I’m not so sure. The reality is, increasingly people with limited time are choosing different types of content. They’re less reliant on traditional magazine and newspaper publishers not because of the distribution system, but because there are more content options available. Publishers are destined to get a smaller piece of the pie. By my observing, people can get traditional publications online and free today and they’re still choosing alternatives anyhow. Secondly, to get the same content I can get free on my laptop or iPhone now on a tablet I need to drop $1000 and potentially purchase a subscription. Why would I do that?

Television is the other traditional medium that the Journal points to as being a target for the iPad. The problem again is more likely a matter of content. Watching TV has not gotten harder or more cumbersome. In fact the TV experience has been improved and made more accessible by home theatre, flat screen television, and Hulu-like web-based services etc. Yet viewership declines on programs across the board. That tells me the channel isn’t really the problem, the relevance of the content is. With only 24 hours in a day people choose what interests them, and now they can find anything they want. An increasing percentage of that content is coming from alternative providers like video game creators and pro-am content creators. Hollywood has fewer ‘hits’ in a year because people are finding interesting things elsewhere. Sure, there will always be a market for TV, but I don’t think making people pay to view it on an iPad will increase these programs ratings or share of market.

The last issue is pure practicality. If I’m already watching a downloaded movie on my iPod Touch will a 12″ screen experience on the commuter train be worth the extra $1K and the bulk in my bag (which is already heavy with a laptop)? The tablet is less portable and more expensive and delivers the same material on a larger screen. One more device in my backpack for something I can already get on devices I have? No, thanks. Short of some remarkable new functionality I can’t see how the device becomes indispensible the way my laptop and phone are.

I’m sure there will be endless hype about the iPad. Having impacted music and telephony so significantly in recent years the expectations are high and Apple has something of a Hand-Of-God reputation. But they miss like anyone else and 5 years from now, my guess is, this will be recorded as a ‘miss’ in terms of a revolutionary, game-changing device. It’s destined to be a fringe toy like the Air netbook, the original Apple Cube computer and even Apple TV. All were interesting and innovative products but they just didn’t fit in with most people’s lives.