The Apple-Intel-Samsung Ménage à Trois

May 13, 2012 – 10:29 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

Fascinating doesn’t do justice to the spectacle, nor to the stakes. Taken in pairs, these giants exchange fluids – products and billion$ – while fiercely fighting with their other half. Each company is the World’s Number One in their domain: Intel in microprocessors, Samsung in electronics, Apple in failure to fail as ordained by the sages.

The ARM-based chips in iDevices come from a foundry owned by Samsung, Apple’s mortal smartphone enemy. Intel supplies x86 chips to Apple and its PC competitors, Samsung included, and would like nothing more than to raid Samsung’s ARM business and make a triumphant Intel Inside claim for Post-PC devices. And Apple would love to get rid of Samsung, its enemy supplier, but not at the cost of losing the four advantages it derives from using the ARM architecture: cost, power consumption, customization and ownership of the design.

At its annual investor day last week, Intel CEO Paul Otellini sounded a bit like a spurned suitor as he made yet another bid for Apple’s iDevices business [emphasis mine]:

“Our job is to insure our silicon is so compelling, in terms off running the Mac better or being a better iPad device, that […] they can’t ignore us.”

This is a bit odd. Intel is Apple’s only supplier of x86 microprocessors; AMD, Intel’s main competitor, isn’t in the picture. How could Apple ‘‘ignore’’ Intel? Au contraire, many, yours truly included, have wondered: Why has Intel ignored Apple’s huge iDevices business?

Perhaps Intel simply didn’t see the wave coming. Steeped in its domination of the PC business — and perhaps listening too much to the dismissive comments of Messrs. Ballmer and Shaw — Intel got stuck knitting one x86 generation after another. The formula wasn’t broken.

Another, and perhaps more believable, explanation is the business model problem. These new ARM chips are great, but where’s the money? They’re too inexpensive, they bring less than a third, sometimes even just a fifth of the price, of a tried and true x86 PC microprocessor. This might explain why Intel sold their ARM business, XScale chips, to Marvell in 2006.

Then there’s the power consumption factor: x86 chips use more watts than an ARM chip. Regardless of price, this is why ARM chips have proliferated in battery-limited mobile devices. Year after year, Intel has promised, and failed, to nullify ARM’s power consumption advantage through their technical and manufacturing might.

2012 might be different. Intel claims ‘‘the x86 power myth is finally busted.” Android phones powered by the latest x86 iteration have been demonstrated. One such device will be made and sold in India, in partnership with a company called Lava International. Orange, the France-based international carrier, also intends to sell an Intel-based smartphone.

With all this, what stops Apple from doing what worked so well for their Macintosh line: Drop ARM (and thus Samsung), join the Intel camp yet again, and be happy forever after in a relationship with fewer participants?

There appear to be a number of reasons to do so.

First, there would be no border war. Unlike Samsung, Intel doesn’t make smartphones and tablets. Intel sells to manufacturers and Apple sells to humans.

Second, the patent front is equally quiet. The two companies have suitable Intellectual Property arrangements and, of late, Intel is helping Apple in its patent fights with Samsung.

Third, if the newer generation of x86 chips are as sober as claimed, the power consumption obstacle will be gone. (But let’s be cautious, here. Not only have we heard these claims before, nothing says that ARM foundries won’t also make progress.)

Finally, Otellini’s ‘‘they can’t ignore us’’ could be decoded as ‘‘they won’t be able to ignore our prices’’. Once concerned about what ARM-like prices would do to its business model, Intel appears to have seen the Post-PC light: Traditional PCs will continue to make technical progress, but the go-go days of ever-increasing volumes are gone. It now sounds like Intel has decided to cannibalize parts of its PC business in order to gain a seat at the smartphone and tablet table.

Just like Apple must have gotten a very friendly agreement when switching the Mac to Intel, one can easily see a (still very hypothetical) sweet deal for low-power x86 chips for iDevices. Winning the iDevices account would put Intel “on the Post-PC map.” That should be worth a suitable price concession.

Is this enough for Apple to ditch Samsung?

Not so fast, there’s one big obstacle left.

Let’s not forget who Samsung is and how they operate. This is a family-controlled chaebol, a gang of extremely determined people whose daring tactics make Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Apple itself blush. Chairman Lee Kun-hee has been embroiled in various “misunderstandings.” He was convicted (and then pardoned) in a slush fund scandal. The company was caught in cartel arrangements and paid a fine of more than $200M in one case. As part of the multi-lawsuit fight with Apple, the company has been accused of willfully withholding and destroying evidence — and this isn’t their first offense. Samsung look like a determined repeat obstructor of justice. My own observations of Samsung in previous industry posts are not inconsistent with the above. Samsung plays hardball and then some.

This doesn’t diminish Samsung’s achievements. The Korean conglomerate’s success on so many fronts is a testament to the vision, skill, and energy of its leaders and workers. But there has been so much bad blood between Samsung and Apple that one has a hard time seeing even an armed peace between the two companies.

And this doesn’t mean Apple will abandon ARM processors. The company keeps investing in silicon design teams, it has plenty of money, some of which could go into financing parts or the entirety of a foundry for one of Samsung’s competitors in Taiwan (TSMC) or elsewhere in the US, Europe, or Israel. If it’s a strategic move and not just an empty boast on PowerPoint slides, $10B for a foundry is within Apple’s budget.

To its adopters, ARM’s big advantage is customization. Once you have an ARM license, you’ve entered an ecosystem of CAD software and module libraries. You alter the processor design as you wish, remove the parts you don’t need, and add components licensed from third parties. The finished product is a SOC (System On a Chip) that is uniquely yours and more suited to your needs than an off-the-shelf processor from a vendor such as Intel. Customization, licensing chip designs to customers — such moves are not in the Intel playbook, they’re not part of the culture.

I don’t see Apple losing its appetite for customization and ownership, for making its products more competitive by incorporating new functions, such as voice processing and advanced graphics on their SOCs. For this reason alone, I don’t see Apple joining the x86 camp for iDevices. (Nor do I see competitive smartphone makers dropping their SOCs in favor of an Intel chip or chipset.)

Intel isn’t completely out of the game, but to truly play they would need to join the ARM camp, either as a full licensee designing SOCs or as a founder for SOCs engineered by Apple and its competitors.

These are risky times: A false move by any one vertex of the love triangle and tens of billions of dollars will flow in the wrong direction.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Francois Hollande’s Start-down Nation

May 6, 2012 – 10:09 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

A forgettable election campaign just wrapped up: François Hollande is now the President of the French Republic. Time spent on foreign issues during last week’s one-on-one television debate mirrored the rest of the campaign: less than fifteen minutes in a 2hrs 50 minutes bout, one that left most viewers yawning. This campaign was petty, gallic-centered, oozing with demagoguery and completely devoid of great projects or ambitions for the country.

Mr. Hollande himself epitomizes this political flabbiness. He’s the default candidate. Last year, after Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s sexual implosion, Hollande kept running his tiny electoral diesel engine in low gear, bereft of grand ideas, unable to get into overdrive. He didn’t win because of his track record — he has no such thing. He was both a mediocre party leader and the weak manager of the poorest French department, which he left heavily indebted. Mr. Hollande didn’t win because he embodies any kind of grand aspirations either; other than getting into the Élysée palace, he has none. Instead, he portrays himself as a “normal guy” after — it’s also fair to mention — the hyper-kinetic, agitated, communication-obsessed, Nicolas Sarkozy.

Sure thing: with François Hollande, the country will rest; it will settle into gentle indolence as the rest of the world evolves and interacts. Most likely, the Euro zone crisis will heat up with a worsening situation in Spain where a quarter of the population — and half of the youngest citizens — are unemployed. Most likely also, ratings agencies will further downgrade French debt — since 1973, the country never had a balanced budget. Meanwhile, Mr. Hollande will fulfill his electoral promise of hiring 60,000 additional teachers; this while the country needs less teachers (there are less kids in front of them) but higher paid ones, along with higher respect and better working conditions. He’ll travel to Brussels and renegotiate the European Treaty, pitching the notion of growth (eureka!) against the “austerians“. On this, he might be right somehow (see last week’s Paul Krugman’s column in the New York Times titled Death of a Fairy Tale.)

All this doesn’t mean the Socialist presidency will be as dangerous as too many like to say. People making more than one million euros per year will indeed enter a 75% tax bracket: The new president claimed “[he] doesn’t like rich people” (a few years ago, he assigned a threshold of wealth to the equivalent of $60,000 a year). But vis-à-vis the much-bashed “Finance”, he’s likely to act as a pragmatist. A possible chief of staff for Hollande could  be Jean-Pierre Jouyet, currently chairman of the Financial Markets Authority and former minister of European affairs. There is no shortage of left-leaning talented people, and this middling leader is likely to surround himself wisely — on many counts, he can’t do worse than his predecessor.

France won’t fall from the cliff, nor will it shine brightly under the new regime.

And it won’t innovate either.

What made this campaign so depressing was both sides seemed to willfully ignore one of the most potent engines of the economy, that is innovation and a country’s ability to foster it. Both candidates seemed totally disconnected from critical challenges in which France is failing in every possible way.

Take higher education. The failure is unequivocal, regardless of political leanings. France might have about 80 universities, most of them second or third rate and producing mostly unemployable people. And if you dare a transatlantic comparison, you generate killer statistics. France’s budget for higher education and research is the equivalent of Harvard University’s endowment (€24 billion or $31 billion for French universities and public laboratories and $32 billion of cash reserves for Harvard). Overall, France’s spending per student is less than half of the US — and 15 times less if you compare to the Ivy League colleges. French faculty members, unions and politicians have made their best efforts to disconnect universities from the business world. They’ve been remarkably successful. As a result, Gallic colleges have become poorer, and largely unable to cope with the legions of students that land onto their benches, facing underpaid and unmotivated professors.

Of course, France has a different way to produce — and to reproduce — its elites. Two highways, actually: l’Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) and l’Ecole Polytechnique. Mr. Hollande is an offspring of the first (so was his former partner, Ségolène Royal, the unlucky but picturesque 2007 presidential candidate.) As someone who grew inside this comfy seraglio and who traveled very little abroad, the new French president can’t envision an alternative to this trusted model for running the country. As for Polytechnique, it produces the top French engineers, a caste in itself, that has little to do with those graduating from top anglo-saxon colleges. The difference between a Polytechnique student and a Stanford one is the former will dream to manage, one day, a large industrial concern such as Thales (defense electronics) or the energy group Total, while the Stanford grad will want to see his/her name on a campus building — after a creating a successful business, needless to say. As the New York Times noted in a recent story about the return of class war,

Just under half of France’s 40 largest companies are run by graduates of just two schools: ENA,(..) and École Polytechnique (…). Together the schools produce only about 600 graduates a year. There are fewer than 6,000 ENA graduates alive today, compared with at least 160,000 Oxford alumni.

This doesn’t constitute the best soil for a start-up culture. And the venture capital activity is not likely to help either. In 2011, French VC funds invested €822 million in start-ups, a 21% drop vs. 2010. Even worse, 64% of these funds went to second or later rounds of financing, initial funding collected a mere 8% of the total. Not exactly a risk-prone attitude.

Again, international comparisons hurt. French VC invested last year about €13 or $16 per company and per inhabitant; that compares to $93 in the United Sates and more than $110 in Israel. Speaking of Israel, if we take into account the money flowing from abroad, the figures are even more staggering as VC funding per capita rose to $280 in 2011 according to IVC-KPMG data:

In 2011, 546 Israeli high-tech companies attracted $2.14billion from local and foreign venture investors, the highest amount in 11 years. This is almost 70 percent above the $1.26 billion raised by 391 companies in 2010 and 91 percent above the $1.12 billion raised in 2009.

In their excellent book Start-up Nation, the story of Israel economic Miracle, authors Dan Senor and Saul Singer also write:

Comparing absolute numbers, Israel — a country of just 7.1 million people –attracted close to $2 billion [in 2008] in venture capital, as much as flowed to the UK, Germany and France combined. (…) In addition to boasting the highest density of start-ups in te world (a total of 3,850, one for every 1,844 Israelis), more Israeli companies are listed on the Nasdaq [list here] than all companies from the entire European continent.

To complete this quote: about 250 companies originating from Israel had an IPO on the Nasdaq. Today 50 companies remain listed vs. 47 European companies including 3 French ones.

None of the above was mentioned, even remotely, during the French election campaign. Nicolas Sarkozy did very little about fostering innovation — he didn’t have a clue. As for François Hollande, the strongest part of its electorate (largely composed of teachers and other public servants) opposes any rapprochement between private sector and public higher education. And let’s not mention the underlying “ideology” of venture capital, carried interest, IPO’s, flexible employment rules, etc. Hollande’s supporters will also oppose any removal of cobwebs from the 102-year-old labor code that greatly complicates the management of companies employing 50 or more people. As a result, France has 2.4 times more companies with 49 employees than with 50, read this story in Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

This makes France a rather start-down nation. Nothing to celebrate.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Apple: Q2 Thoughts

May 6, 2012 – 9:51 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

There was a time when clever individuals could sustain themselves by exploiting people’s ignorance and anxiety. Augurs studied the flight of birds to explain the will of the gods; haruspices practiced divination by inspecting the entrails of sacrificed animals. For fear of bursting into uncontrollable laughter, so the joke goes, the fortune tellers studiously avoided making eye contact with one another in chance street encounters.

Not much has changed.

Our modern-day haruspices, the Wall Street anal-ists, must struggle mightily to keep a straight face (although perhaps not so mightily–they’ve had a lot of practice).

Before Apple’s April 24th earnings release, Wall Street observer Karl Denninger put on his poker face in a Seeking Alpha post:

Profit margins on hardware are very difficult to sustain over 10% for long periods of time. Someone always comes after you and this is not going to be an exception to that rule. But that in turn means that you either must cut your own prices (and margins) to compete or watch your market share get diced up into little tiny pieces by a bunch of guys wielding machetes.

Colorful. And with a disclosure of his own AAPL posture:

Lightly short and more likely to add to that position over time than cover it, eyeing major support in the $400 area.

The entire longish post is enlightening, in a “special” way, as is his September 2010 Seeking Alpha post where he predicted serious trouble for Apple’s new tablet (for which he uses a nickname that, we’ll assume, elicited schoolyard snickers from his cohort in the Tea Party, a group he helped found. New age male sensitivity be damned.) And what was the trouble he saw when he fondled the sheep’s liver? RIMM was “coming after” Apple; they had just announced the QNX-based BlackBerry PlayBook. Don’t laugh.

The idea, here, is that Everything Becomes a Commodity. It’s a common fallacy among the Street watchers, a meme, “a unit for carrying cultural ideas”, in Wikipedia’s words. It’s built on the idea that market forces—competition—will erase all advantages at a “molecular” level. Yesterday, customers were paying more for product A because of some unique feature or service. Tomorrow, a competitor will provide the same (more or less) at a lower price. Commoditization always wins, say the sages. QNX is better than iOS so the PlayBook will, clearly, murder the iPad.

Fun aside, Mr. Denninger is but a member, if that’s the right word, of a class of ideologists who seem to be curiously unaware of their surroundings. Where is the ineluctable commoditization they predict?

It isn’t a new idea. When I landed in Cupertino in 1985, the Pepsi and Playtex marketeers that tagged along with the new CEO insisted that the tech game was over, personal computers are now commodities, marketing would have to do for Apple what the Leo Burnett ad agency had done for Philip Morris with its Marlboro Man campaign.

True, the Marlboro Man was an exemplary marketing success that made a huge monetary difference for an otherwise commodity product. Marlboro didn’t make a “superior” product–blonde non-mentholated 100mm filtered cigarettes are all the same. The only pieces tobacco companies could move across the chess board were imaginary and romanticized.

But high tech isn’t a commodity market. In very French words I told the young commoditizing Turks how wrong they were: Moore’s Law and good software would create the opportunities that make a difference. Commoditization isn’t ineluctable.

Are clothes all the same? Tube socks at Costco, perhaps. But for the rest of our wardrobe, material and cut (and brand) matters.

Food? Do we buy commoditized calories, or do we care for the difference that the quality of ingredients and preparation make? Fresh string beans and asparagus, lightly fried in butter and properly salted—you can’t get that from canned vegetables packed in a margarine sludge, ready to pop into the microwave.

Do we buy cars because they go fast and the wheels are (most of the time) round? I can hear the young Turks claiming that people don’t buy cars, they buy transportation (all while jumping into their BMWs). But when Detroit began putting accountants at the head of car companies, they rode the steep downhill slope of commoditization. That Audi is now one of the most profitable car companies on the planet tells us something about the importance of technology, design, manufacturing, and quality.

I used to refer to BMW as a good example for Apple: Don’t worry too much about market share. A well-made, well-marketed product will see its difference rewarded by the marketplace. And, indeed, BMW became larger than Mercedes Benz. And now we have Audi.

Quality shows, and Apple continues to show quality. Last quarter they enjoyed an incredible 47.4% Gross Margin. Higher than expected and very unusual for a hardware company.

As an ex-entrepreneur and a venture investor, I’m a fan of Gross Margin—it’s what you can spend. Revenue is nice, but it doesn’t tell you when and how much you can eat. Because Apple’s Operating Expenses have become such a small percentage (8.1%) of revenue, Apple’s Operating Margin approaches 40%. As Horace Dediu notes in his Which is best: hardware, software or services? comparison of Apple to Microsoft and Google, this is unusual for a hardware company:

Can this growth continue unabated? Probably not, both Microsoft and Google have shown that there’s a plateau, a margin level that can’t be exceeded. But their examples also show sustainability.

Of course, Apple execs are cautious forecasters. Their much second-guessed guidance for the next quarter calls for “only” 41% Gross Margin, significantly less than last quarter’s. But the commoditization predicted 27 years ago isn’t about to happen.

I’ll quote Horace Dediu’s May 1st post once again:

Apple is the most valuable company in technology (and indeed in the world) because it integrates hardware, software and services. It’s the first, and only, company to do all these three well in service of jobs that the vast majority of consumers want done.

A mere matter of execution…

—JLG@mondaynote.com

Posted in hardware | Tagged | Comments (16)

Advertising: The trust Factor

April 29, 2012 – 9:34 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

The digital advertising equation is outlined in the Nielsen graph below. The Global Trust in Advertising survey released this month (summary on Nielsen site and PDF here) underlines one key finding: For the vast majority of digital users, trust lies first and foremost in recommendations and opinions from their peers. As for the bulk of formats found on web sites or on mobile (such as various flavors of display advertising), they fall to the bottom of the chart. Nielsen’s study, based on 26,000 respondents in 56 countries, was conducted in Q3 2011.

Here are the expanded results (click to enlarge):

By themselves, these figures provide the perfect explanation for the current state of the advertising industry and, more specifically, for the digital ads segment.

Then, superimposing the ad revenue structure of most news medias companies would show an alarmingly symmetry: these businesses derive most of their revenue, allocate most of their effort to the least trusted ad vectors: display banners of various forms (on web, mobile or social), online video ads, etc.

The survey also provides a grim view of what people trust: they put more of their faith in a branded website (58% positive), a brand sponsorship (47%) ad, or even a product placement in a TV series (40%) than in a display ad on a website or on mobile (33% each)!

Even worse is the general distrust of advertising: on this list of 19 ad vectors, only 5 are are trusted by 50% of the respondents.

Let’s focus on a few items:

Recommendation from people I know: Trusted: 92% Not Trusted: 8%
Consumer opinions posted online: Trusted: 70% Not Trusted: 30%
Problem is: traditional medias don’t own these two segments. Social networks and consumer websites do. It’s a key Facebook’s strength to have people engage in conversations around brands and products. (IMO: a pathetic waste of time). Interestingly enough, the social network environment doesn’t boost the despised banners that much: When served on a social network, banners gain a mere 3 percentage points (at 36%) against a plain website or a mobile context. This must be a matter of concern for Facebook’s revenue stream: its unparalleled ability to pinpoint a target doesn’t raise the level of trust.

Editorial content such as newspaper articles. Trusted: 58%, Not trusted: 42%
Not surprising, but worth a bit more thought. It pertains to the level of trust readers put in the medium of their choice — carbon or bits. As expected, a fair and balanced product review written by a non-corrupted journalist (every word in the sentence counts) will be trusted. That’s what I call the Consumer Reports syndrome. This organization deploys 100+ professionals testers — and no ads beyond the ones for its own paid-for services and extra publications. Among its enviable base of 7 million subscribers, half pay $6.95 a month (or, a much better deal, $30 dollars a year) to access ConsumerReports.org — this is good ARPU compared to other digital medias who only make a few bucks per year and per viewer in advertising revenue.

What does this mean for online outlets? They should consider beefing up the volume of product reviews, while preserving the reliability of their coverage. This also raises the question of the separation between journalism, advertorial and plain advertising. By no means should a publisher accept blurring the lines: beneficial on the short term but damaging on the long run. Having said this, when I see a growing number of anglo-saxons magazines making big money from high quality advertorials, I tend to believe online medias should consider sections of their websites or applications harboring such content. But two requirements need to be met: (again) no confusion whatsoever; and editorial standards for what will indeed carry commercial content, but in a well-designed, informative, visually attractive package. One important point to keep in mind: this type of service is typically out of reach for a Facebook, a Google or a Microsoft. But moving in such a direction requires unified thinking between publishers, the sales house (and the ad agencies they are dealing with) and the editorial team. A long way to go.

Ads served in search engine results:  Trusted: 40% Untrusted: 60%
Speaking of Google, here’s another interesting finding in the Nielsen survey: by and large, readers doesn’t trust search ads. To many viewers, text ads popping up on pages, on YouTube video or on emails, are seen as intrusive and irrelevant (to say the least: look at this hilarious site featuring inappropriate ad placements.) Still, search ads account for about 60% of online ad revenues. Why? Essentially because it provides a cheap, convenient, and totally disintermediated way of promoting a product. On this count, Google makes no mystery of its intention to vaporize the advertising middleman thanks to its superior technology.

The digital advertising party is just warming up. The business will continue its ongoing transformation. Currently, digital accounts for 16% of the global ad spending. It is likely to gain 10 more percentage points over the next five years. Not all markets nor products carry the same potential: According to the Financial Times, Unilever currently spends 35% of its US budget on digital, compared with 25% in Europe and only 4% in India. For news medias, the opportunity is that brands and agencies are still searching for the right formula. Brands face an incredibly complex challenge as they have to play with many dials at the same time: traditional ads, digital, web, mobile, apps, social, behavioral. And all are tightly intertwined, creating flurries of new metrics: ROI naturally, but also engagement, sentiment, feelings.

Like elsewhere in the digital world, the most successful players will be the genuine tinkerers. Software giant Adobe is said to spent 20% of its digital budget on experimental campaigns. They test, measure, adjust and iterate.

It is up to digital medias to go from passive to active in the quest for the right model. Their economics depend on it.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

Posted in advertising, online publishing | Comments (8)

Apple Is Doomed: The Phony Sony Parallel

April 29, 2012 – 9:33 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

In the weeks preceding the April 24th release of Apple’s quarterly earnings, a number of old canards sent the stock down by about 12%: Carriers are going to kill the iPhone Golden Goose by cutting back “exorbitant” subsidies; iPhone sales are down from the previous quarter in the US; inexorable commoditization will soon bring down Apple’s unsustainably high Gross Margin.

The earnings were announced, another strong quarter recorded, and the stock rebounded 9% in one trading session:

At least one doubter is finally convinced: Henry “The iPhone Is Dead In the Water” Blodget has become an Apple cheerleader, penning a post titled Yes, You Should Be Astonished By Apple. (Based on Henry’s record, should we now worry about the new object of his veneration?)

There has never been a dearth of Apple doomsayers. The game has been going on for more than 30 years, and now we have a new contestant: George Colony, an eminent industry figure, the Founder and CEO of Forrester Research, a global conglomerate of technology and market research companies.

Mr. Colony, an influential iPad fan, maintains a well-written blog titled The Counterintuitive CEO in which he shares his thoughts on events such as the Davos Forum, trends in Web technology and usage, and, in a brief homage, his hope that “Steve’s lessons will bring about a better world”.

We now turn to his April 25th post, Apple = Sony.

There are two problems with the piece: The application of a turgid, 100-year old “typology of organizations” that’s hardly relevant to today’s business scene, and an amazingly wrong-headed view of Sony and its founder, Akio Morita.

Colony offers the banal prediction that others have been making for a very long time, well before Dear Leader’s demise: With Steve Jobs gone, Apple won’t be the same and, sooner or later, it will slide into mediocrity. It happened to Sony after Morita, it’ll happen to Apple.

In an act of Obfuscation Under The Color Of Authority, Colony digs up (nearly literally) sociologist Max Weber to bolster his contention. Weber died in 1920; the 1947 work that Colony refers to, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, is a translation-cum-scholarly commentary and adaptation of work that was published posthumously by Weber’s widow Marianne in 1921 and 1922.

From Weber’s work, Colony extracts the following typology of organizations:

1. Legal/bureaucratic (think IBM or the U.S. government),
2. Traditional (e.g., the Catholic Church)
3. Charismatic (run by special, magical individuals).

This is far too vague; these types are (lazily) descriptive, but they’re fraught with problematic examples, particularly in the third category: Murderous dictatorships and exploitative sects come to mind. What distinguishes these from Apple under Jobs? Moreover, how do these categories help us understand today’s global, time-zone spanning rhizome (lattice) organizations where power and information flow in ways that Weber couldn’t possibly have imagined a hundred years ago?

Having downloaded the book, I understand the respect it engenders: It’s a monumental, very German opus, a mother lode of gems such as the one Colony quotes:

Charisma can only be ‘awakened’ and ‘tested’; it cannot be ‘learned’ or ‘taught.’

True. The same can be said of golf. But it does little to explain the actual power structure of organizations such as Facebook and Google.

Instead of shoehorning today’s high-tech organizations into respectable but outdated idea systems, it would behoove a thought leader of Mr. Colony’s stature to provide genuine 21st century scholarship that sheds light on – and draws actionable conclusions from — the kind of organization Apple exemplifies. What’s the real structure and culture, what can we learn and apply elsewhere? How did a disheveled, barefoot company become a retail empire run with better-than-military precision, the nonpareil of supply chain management, the most cost effective R&D organization of its kind and size? And, just as important, are some of these marvels coupled too tightly to the Steve Jobs Singularity? That would be interesting — and would certainly rise above the usual “Charismatic Leader Is Gone” bromides.

Now let’s take a look at the other half of the title’s equivalence: Sony.This is Muzak thinking. It confuses the old and largely disproven brand image with what Sony actually was inside — even under Morita’s “charismatic” leadership.

I used to be an adoring Sony customer, bowing to Trinitron TVs and Walkman cassette players. But after I got to see inside the kitchen (or kitchens) in 1986, I was perplexed and, over time, horrified.

Contrary to what Colony writes, there was no “post-Morita” decadence at Sony. The company had long been spiritually dead by the time of the founder’s brain hemorrhage. The (too many) limbs kept moving but there had been no central power, no cohesive strategy, no standards, no unifying culture for a very long time.

Sony survived as a set of fiefdoms. Great engineers in many places. (And, to my astonishment, primitive TV manufacturing plants.) During Morita’s long reign, Sony went into all sorts of directions: music, movie-making, games, personal computers, phones, cameras, robots… For reasons of cultural (one assumes), Sony consistently showed an abysmal lack of appreciation for software, leaving the field to Microsoft, Nokia for a while, and then Google and Apple.

Under Akio Morita’s leadership, Sony took advantage of Japan’s lead in high-quality device manufacturing and became the masters of what we used to call the Japanese Food Fight: Throw everything against the wall and see what sticks. When the world moved to platforms and then to ecosystems, Sony’s device-oriented culture — and the fiefdoms it fostered — brought it to its current sorry state.

Today, would you care to guess what Sony’s most profitable business is? Financial Services:

How this leads to an = sign between Apple and Sony evades me.

This isn’t to say that Apple can’t be contaminated by the toxicity of success, or that the spots of mediocrity we can discern here and there (and that were present when Steve was around) won’t metastasize into full blown “bozo cancer”. But for those interested in company cultures, the more interesting set of questions starts with how Apple will “Think Different” from now on. Jobs was adamant: His successors had to think for themselves, they were told to find their own true paths as opposed to aping his.

From a distance, it appears that Tim Cook isn’t at all trying to be Jobs 2.0. But to call his approach “legal/bureaucratic” (in the Weber sense), as Colony does, is facile and misplaced.

If we insist on charisma as a must for leading Apple, one ought to remember that there’s more than one type of charisma. There’s the magnetic leader whose personality exudes an energy that flows through the organization. And then there’s the “channeling” leader, the person who facilitates and directs the organization’s energy.

Is the magnetic personality the only valid leader for Apple?

—JLG@mondaynote.com

[I won’t let the canards cited at the beginning go unmolested. See upcoming Monday Notes.]

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NYT Digital Lessons

April 22, 2012 – 9:51 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

The New York Times Company’s latest quarterly numbers contain a rich trove of data regarding the health of the digital news industry. Today, we’ll focus on the transition from traditional advertising to paywall strategies being implemented across the world. Paywall appear as a credible way to offset — alas too partially — the declining revenue from print operations.

First, the highlights.

(See NYTCO’s press release here and stock here. Unless otherwise stated, all figures are for Q1 2012 and comparisons are Q1 2012 vs. Q1 2011.)

  • Total Revenue is stable at $499.4 million.
  • Operating profit is down by 23% at $19.6 million. When excluding depreciation, amortization and (generous) severance packages, OP is up 9.4% at $57 million.
  • Print advertising for all properties and from all sources is down 8.1% at $238 million
  • Circulation revenue is up 9.7% at $227 million.
  • Digital subscriptions, launched just a year ago, reach 454,000. That’s a 16% growth vs. Q4 2011.
  • Digital advertising for the entire NYTCO (this includes NYTimes.com, BostonGlobe.com, Boston.com, About.com, etc) is down 10.3% to $71 million.
  • Such decrease is primarily due to About.com losing 24% of its ad revenue to $22.6 million, and 50% of its operating profit to $7 million. This online guide is entirely dependent on advertising.
  • But the real bad news is the decline in digital advertising for the NYT News Media Group  consisting mostly of the NYT and the Boston Globe. Revenue dropped by 2.3% to $48.5 million for the quarter.
  • Digital advertising accounts for 22.5% of the entire NYTCO ad revenue, and for 30% of the NYT News Media Group’s digital advertising revenue.

We can discern four trends:

#1:  Digital advertising is struggling, even for a major brand such as the New York Times.
Again the evolution :
FY 2010: +18%
FY 2011: +10%
Q1 2012 (Y/Y):  -2%

This confirms a much feared trend. By and large, in a news context, the performance of digital advertising is on the decline. All indicators are now flashing red: CPM (cost per thousand impressions), cost per click, volumes, yields, etc. The cause is well-known, and way more acute for digital than for print: ads and news contents do compete for the same eyeballs. The more attractive and eye-catching the content is, the lesser the ad yields. Behavioral advertising won’t change that much — at least for hard core, high value-added news environment.

This decline also announces a major shift in the way ads are sold. The advertising flow is likely to split: premium ads such as well-placed special packages will still be sold for high prices by in-house teams. But the bulk of the inventory will shift downward to bazaars in which gazillions of pageviews will be dumped into real-time exchanges supposed to optimize prices. The bad news: such schemes are likely to fuel deflationary trends for remnant (i.e. sub-premium) inventories. The good news: media organizations such as online news outlets or pure players are likely to join such marketplaces and perhaps gain an operating role of sorts — assuming they are smart enough to cooperate (I’ll address this in an upcoming column).

#2 Paywalls work. With roughly half a million paying subscribers, the NYTimes.com has captured the equivalent of 39% of its weekday print circulation of 1.3 million. In its financial statements, the Times doesn’t break down its revenue structure, but a significant part of the 13% increase in circulation revenue (print + digital) is attributable to digital subscriptions (the rest comes from the recent print price hike).
Estimates are difficult but here are some clues: on these 500,000 digital subs, it is estimated that 60% pay the basic $15/mo rate while 40% opt for the full $35 digital package. This would translate to digital subscribers contributing $34.5 million (18%) to the $190 million in NYT Media Group circulation revenue that appear in its quarterly statement. 18% is not that bad for a paywall that is barely one year old (even though this estimated revenue doesn’t reflect the cost of the NYTimes’ massive promotions for its paywall program). But again, compared to the $48 million of digital advertising, it is significant.

#3 A warning to paywall dreamers: some restrictions apply. In order to be successful, a digital subscription must check the following boxes:
– Own a sizable share of a given (and preferably solvent) segment of the population. In other words: start from a large built-in audience. Globally, the New York Times has about 34 million unique visitors per month – a large pool for conversions to the paywall.
Don’t expect a paywall to work for a small site or a niche product — unless it is a reference for its community. Even then, in spite of its reference status in New England, the Boston Globe shows a mere 18,000 paid-for digital subscribers.
– Allow time to grow the subscriber base. A paywall strategy must spread over several years. The free audience first has to be converted into registered users able to be thoroughly data-mined; then the paywall will be tightened with less and less articles available for free (the NYT recently lowered its threshold from 20 to 10 free articles); the entire process will take at least two to four years, depending on where you start from.
– Carefully manage porosity. That’s why some people refer to a “semi-permeable membrane” (see the interesting conversation between Clay Shirky and NYT’s Digital manager Denise Warren on NPR last January). While it is tightening its paywall, the NYT leaves willingly plenty of free access to its content: if you land its site from a search engine, from Facebook, Twitter, or from a blog, no limit applies (same for the FT.com, actually). Such tactic has two virtues: it doesn’t affect natural referencing and incoming traffic from search engines (which could weigh as much as 30-40% of the audience), and the brand remains exposed to many — such as social networks users.
– Quality is non-negotiable. A successful paywall requires exclusive, unique, authoritative, high-quality content. A paywall isn’t the right solution for streams of “commodity news” or user-generated contents. It won’t work for the Huffington Post. Despite its enormous audience, the HuffPo’s embryonic original content won’t do much to alter its “Left wing Fox News” positioning (Even though the HuffPo managed to score a Pulitzer Prize for National reporting for its remarkable Beyond The Battlefield series.)

#4 Print is still alive. While print advertising is drying up, the share of circulation revenue keeps rising (in relative terms.) The good news: price hikes don’t seem to matter: the recent increase to $2.50 had no effect on sales. Actually, the Times uses its weekend edition (priced at $5.00) to channel digital subscriptions by providing the best deal of its complex rate card. Which leads to two conclusions: a sizable reservoir of readers is ready to pay for quality-on-paper at almost any price (see a previous Monday Note Cracking the Paywall); and commercially strong weekend editions can be a potent vector for digital subscriptions.

Print and digital strategies are more intertwined than ever.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Nokia: Three Big Problems

April 22, 2012 – 9:44 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

Nokia’s results for Q1 2012 are in: They’re not good. (See the earnings release here, Management’s Conference Call presentation here.)

Compared to the same quarter last year, Nokia overall revenue is down 29%, to $9.7B. And the company is now losing money, $1.8B, 18.5% of revenue. [Nokia’s official numbers are stated in euros, I convert them at today’s rate of $1.32 for 1€.]

One year after Nokia’s decision to jump of its “burning platform”, this yet another bad quarter and leaves one to wonder about the company’s future. Many, like Forbes’ Erik Savitz, think The Worst Is Still To Come.

I see three life-threatening problems for the deposed king of mobile phones.

First and potentially most lethal: Nokia is burning cash. As the chart above documents, Nokia’s Net Cash went down 24% in one year. From page 5 of the Earnings Release: “Year-on-year, net cash and other liquid assets decreased by $2B…. Sequentially [emphasis added], net cash and other liquid assets decreased by $.9B”. Here, the word sequentially means compared to the immediately preceding quarter, as opposed to the same quarter last year.
Elsewhere in the document, on page 6, we learn Microsoft provided $250M in “platform support payments”. If you back this amount out, you see Nokia’s operations have in fact consumed $1.15B, a significant fraction of the company’s $6.4B Net Cash. This cannot continue for very long and leads Henry Blodget to worry Nokia could go bankrupt in two years or less.
Henry’s view might be a bit extreme; Nokia has assets they could convert to cash, thus giving itself more runway for its recovery efforts. But, as we’ll see below, the company’s prospects in both phone categories don’t look stellar. And bad things happen to cash when the market loses confidence in a company’s future: vendors want to be paid more quickly, customers become more hesitant, all precipitating a crisis.

Second, the dumbphone (a.k.a. “Mobile Phones”) business, still Nokia’s largest, is now in a race to the bottom:

Volume is huge, 70.8M units; it dipped 16%, not a good sign. Worse, the ASP (Average Selling Price) went down 18% to $44 (33€). Mostly in developing countries, Nokia is now losing ground to the likes of Huawei and ZTE selling feature phones and smartphones, both very inexpensive. Unsurprisingly, Nokia claims they’ll counterattack with their Asha family of mobile phones. Few, outside of Nokia, or even inside, believe they can win a brutal price cutting fight against those adversaries.

Last, Nokia’s last hope: Their new Windows Phone “Smart Devices”.

As the chart above shows, Nokia’s smartphone business keeps sinking: -51% in volume compared to the same quarter last year. And, with a $189 (143€) ASP, it can’t make any significant money as $189 is about what it costs to build one.

As for the latest Lumia smartphones, the reviews have been mixed. So are sales, according to Stephen Elop, Nokia’s CEO. Going to the earnings release, I searched for the word “Lumia” in the document. It appears 29 times. — without any number attached to it, just words like “encouraging awards and popular acclaim”. Which can only mean one thing: Actual numbers better left unsaid.

Things don’t get better when, according to Reuters, mobile carriers in Europe pronounced themselves ‘‘unconvinced”, finding the new Lumia smartphones “not good enough”. It is worth noting things could be better in the US where AT&T appears to make a real effort selling Lumias, and where Verizon recently stated its interest in fostering a third ecosystem with Windows Phone devices.

Unfortunately, we also hear a puzzling rumor: Existing Lumia phones wouldn’t be upgradable to the next OS version, Windows Phone 8, code-named Apollo. Both Mary Jo Foley, a recognized authority on things Microsoft, and The Verge, an aggressive and often well-sourced blog, support that theory.

So far, in spite of the potential damage to their business, neither Microsoft nor Nokia have seen fit to comment. Should it be true, should current Lumia buyers find themselves unable to upgrade their software, Microsoft would be about to commit a massive blunder.

But why would they do this? Apparently, the current Windows Phone OS is built on the venerable Windows CE kernel. Setting veneration aside, Microsoft would have decided to use a more modern foundation for Windows Phone 8. And said modern foundation would not run on today’s hardware. For Nokia’s sake, I hope this is incorrect. The company already convinced its customer Symbian-based phones had no future. Sales plunged as a result. Doing the same thing for today’s Lumia devices would be even more dangerous.

A little over a year ago, in February 2011, Nokia’s brand-new CEO, Stephen Elop issued his ‘‘memorable” Burning Platform memo. In it, the ex-Microsoft executive made an excellent point: Having no doubt observed the rise of Google’s Android and of Apple’s iOS, he concluded Nokia was no longer in a fight of devices but in a war of ecosystems. Elop next drew an analogy between Nokia’s jumbled smartphone product line and a burning North Sea oil-drilling rig. To him, the company had no choice: instead of staying on the platform and dying in the blaze, he suggested plunging in freezing waters — with a chance of staying alive. Which, as he soon revealed, meant jumping off Nokia’s Symbian and Meego software platforms and joining the Microsoft Windows Phone ecosystem.

Today, Nokia bleeds cash, its dumbphone business in a race to the bottom, and its plunge into the Microsoft ecosystem isn’t off to a good start. What’s next for the company? Can it turn itself around, and how?

With hindsight, it appears the premature announcement of the jump to Windows Phone osborned Nokia’s existing smartphones. Their sales dropped while the market waited for the new devices running Windows Phone. Some, like Tomi Ahonen, an unusually vocal — and voluminous — blogger, think Elop should be fired, and Symbian and Meego restored to their just place in Nokia’s product line. This isn’t very realistic.

Closer to reality is Microsoft’s determination to get back in the smartphone race, almost at any cost. (For reference look at the billions the company keeps losing in its online business. $449M this past quarter.)

At some point in time, if Lumia sales still barely move the needle, Microsoft would have to either drop Nokia and look for another vehicle for Windows Phone. Or it will have to assume full control of Nokia, pare down what it doesn’t need, and do what it does for the Xbox, that is be in charge of everything: hardware, software, applications.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Facebook in Frantic Mode

April 15, 2012 – 11:16 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram — for one billion dollars — tells a lot about Mark Zuckerberg’s state of mind. Which is at least as interesting as other business considerations and was best captured by cartoonist Ingram Pinn in last week’s Financial Times comic. To illustrate John Gapper’s excellent Facebook is scared of the Internet column, Ingram Pinn draws an agitated Mark Zuckerberg frantically walking through a hatchery, collecting just hatched startup-chicks as fast as he can, while, in the background, AOL and Yahoo collect older chickens in larger carts.

In last week’s Monday Note, I hinted that I’d never put my savings in Facebook’s stock. (For that matter, I see writing on business and owning stocks as incompatible). When I read the news of the Instagram acquisition, I wondered: Imagine Facebook already trading on the Nasdaq; how would the market react? Would analysts and pundits send the stock upward, praising Zuckerberg’s swiftness at securing FB’s position? Or, to the contrary, would someone loudly complain: What? Did Facebook just burn the entire 2011 free cash-flow to buy an app with no revenue in sight, and manned by a dozen of geeks? Is this a red-flag symptom of Zuckerberg’s mental state?

Four things come to mind.

1/ Because he retains 57% of Facebook voting rights, Zuckerberg rules its board and can make any decision in a blink of an eye, no debate allowed. This can be a great asset in Silicon Valley’s high speed tempo, or it can stir up shoot-from-the-hip impulsiveness.

2/ Facebook’s founder attitude reminds one of Bill Gates during Microsoft’s heydays: no crack allowed in the wall of its dominance. The smallest threat must be eliminated at any cost. Where Microsoft used legally dubious tactics, Facebook unsheathes its wallet and fires a billion dollars round. In the startup world, this will have two side effects: For one, Facebook is likely to become the exit of choice Google once was. Two, the size of the Instagram transaction (some of it in stock) is likely to act as a beacon for any startup harvesting users by the millions. It sets an inflationary precedent.

3/ By opting for such a deal, Facebook’s management reveals its own feelings of insecurity. It might sounds crazy for a company approaching the billion users mark and providing an array of services that became a substitute to the internet’s basic functions. But, with this transaction, the ultra-dominant social network acted like an elephant scared of a mice. Instagram has 35 million users? Fine. But how many are using the service more than occasionally? Half of it? How many are likely to switch overnight to a better app? Most likely many will. Especially since Instagram is not a community per se, but a gateway to larger ones such as Twitter and Facebook.

4/ From a feature-set perspective, Facebook might find itself in a quandary. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger designed the ultimate stripped-down application: a bunch of filters and a few basic sharing features. That’s it. It is both Instagram strength and main weakness. Such simplicity is easy to replicate. At the same time, if Facebook-Instagram wants to raise the feature-set bar, it might lose some of its users base and find itself competing with much better photo-sharing applications already populating Apple or Android app stores.
To put it differently, Facebook photo-sharing model had been leaking for a while. Zuckerberg just put  a serious plug on it, but other holes will appear. A couple of questions in passing: Will Facebook continue to accept and encourage loads of third parties photo-sharing apps that connect to its network? Some are excellent — starting with Apple’s iPhoto, especially the iDevice version that will always benefit of an optimized hardware/software integration. How does Facebook plan to deal with that? And if it chooses to grant some level of exclusivity to the Instagram app, how will the audience react (especially when you read comments saying “We liked IG because it wasn’t FB”)?

Lastly, the bubble question. Again, three things.

First, let’s be fair. If indeed there is a new internet bubble, Facebook isn’t the only player to fuel it; investors who lined up at Instagram’s doorstep did it too. A few days before the deal, IG raised $50 million at a half billion valuation; Zuckerberg snatched the company by simply doubling the bet.

Two, comparing the FB/IG deal to Google’s in 2006 acquisition of YouTube for $1.65 billion doesn’t fly either. From the outset, everyone knew internet video was destined to be huge; it was a medium of choice to carry advertising. Therefore, the takeover by Google’s fantastic ad-machine was likely to yield great results. YouTube became a natural extension of Google services — just look at how competing services such as DailyMotion in France, or Vimeo are doing without the ad rocket-engine.

Three, the metrics used in an attempt to relativize the deal are dubious at best. Instagram had no monetization strategy–other that a lottery-like exit. This says applying any kind of cost per user ($33 for the theory in vogue) is bogus. Being unable to project any sustainable revenue mechanism makes such a valuation process completely pointless. In Instagram’s case, the only way to come up with a price tag was guessing the amount of money a small group of suitors–Facebook, Google and Twitter–might be willing to cough up for Instagram’s eyeballs.

If this deal shows one thing, it is the frenzied, cutthroat competition these three players are now locked in. Mark Zuckerberg is not through with collecting hatching eggs. He won’t be alone either.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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iTunes’ Windows Problem

April 15, 2012 – 11:16 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

The best thing that happened to Apple in the last two decades was Steve Jobs’ 1997 return to power after he reversed-acquired the company he’d co-founded 20 years before.
And the best thing that has happened in the Apple 2.0 era is iTunes.

Without iTunes’ innovative micropayment system and its new way of selling songs one at a time, the iPod would have been just another commodity MP3 player. Instead, the iPod became Apple’s “halo product” and the genre’s king, with a lasting dominant market share (70% or more) and, in 2006, surpassing the Macintosh in revenues: $7.7B vs. $7.4B.

The iTunes-powered iPod rescued the company’s image. Then teetering on the edge of insignificance, Apple came to be perceived as a serious contender.

This was nothing compared to the contribution iTunes was about to make to the iPhone. A song is simply a string of zeroes and ones, so is an app; the only difference is the destination directory (I am, of course, simplifying a bit, here). The well-debugged iTunes infrastructure turned out to be a godsend for the new Jesus Phone: The smartphone became an “app phone” and the rest of the industry followed suit. iTunes App Store downloads now surpass music traffic:

But…

Today, the toxic waste of success cripples iTunes. There are times when I feel that iTunes has reached Windows Vista bloatware proportions: Increasingly non-sensical complexity, inconsistencies, layers of patches over layers of patches ending up in a structure so labyrinthine no individual can internalize it any longer. (Just like the Tax Code.)

iTunes’ metastasis happened naturally as it tried to incorporate new packaging and delivery systems. The media — music, videos, apps — is no longer the message. iTunes gives you TV seasons, college courses, audiobooks, podcasts; it passes files between Macs and iPads, syncs devices, uploading and downloading everything through the Cloud…and should we mention Ping, the unfortunate attempt at “social”?

iTunes has turned into an operating system — kludgier and uglier than many — a role it was never meant to fill.

This criticism might sound excessive. Apple is doing obscenely well, Mac and iDevices show impressive growth, the stock keeps climbing. Why worry about iTunes? Business is great!

That’s the line RIM and Nokia execs once took.

On the music side, do we like looking for music, managing it, fixing inexplicably broken playlists? Do we care for bizarre recommendations from the Genius? (No connection with the really helpful ones in Apple Stores.) Buying music from Amazon is easier, more informative, more pleasant — and downloads drop right into my iTunes library.

Admittedly, managing apps has become much easier…if you use WiFi sync to a Mac or PC where the larger screen helps when you’re sorting through dozens of programs (I’ll confess that I hoard a mere 170 apps…). But it still feels like it falls short of what an independent module, with its own tools and UI, should be able to do.

Things take a turn for the worse when it comes to transferring files between, say, an iPad and a Mac. The It Just Works motto doesn’t apply. While Keynote documents sync automagically between an iPad and an iPhone, there’s no such love between the iPad and the Mac. iTunes offers a kludgy solution, semi-hidden at the bottom of the Apps section, although I doubt anyone uses this method. E-mail and DropBox are faster.

The rumors of a new iTunes version (perhaps called 11, a versioning number increment that signals a major update) have rekindled criticism of the aging giant and invited suggestions for fixes or more radical structural changes. For a sampling, see iTunes: Time to right the syncing ship,  Erica Sadun’s TUAW post, and a counterpoint by Scott P. Hall who thinks ‘iTunes is well structured, and easy to use’. Most of us agree with pointed put-downs such as these (from Jason Snell):

Apple has packed almost everything involving media (and app) management, purchase, and playback into this single app. It’s bursting at the seams. It’s a complete mess. And it’s time for an overhaul.

….

And let’s be honest: iTunes is at its worst when it comes to app management. The app-management interface in iTunes is ridiculously slow. iTunes can fill up your hard drive with tens of gigabytes of iOS apps that can easily be downloaded from Apple. Syncing apps frequently destroys folders and makes apps disappear. The interface that shows where the app icons will appear on your iOS device is unstable, unreliable, and inefficient.

…and from Erica Sadun (emphasis added):

iTunes is an unwieldy behemoth, slowly suffocating from its own size and age.

….

Forget about launching iTunes: music browsing and playlist selection (not to mention creation) needs to migrate into Spotlight (or some similar always-on feature). Tunes should be part of the computing experience, not a separate app.

Let’s hope that “iTunes 11” does more than move furniture around and add another layer of patches. Personally, I’d vote for breaking it down into separate modules such as Music, Video, and Apps. This wouldn’t rub against the Apple grain: There’s the everything-in-one-app Outlook philosophy, and then there’s the Apple practice of separating Mail, Address Book, and iCal. Also, breaking up the iTunes “monopoly” would make fixes and upgrades more manageable.

But there are two possible flaws in this line of thinking.

First, it assumes that the iTunes problem is confined to the client app, to the software we run on our desktops and devices. This isn’t likely to be the case. We’re no longer in the era of PC desktop software where patiently redoing the Mac OS foundation got us OS X. It’s almost certain that many of the iTunes problems we experience in the client actually come from poorly designed applications in Apple’s Cloud, running on noble but out-of-date architectures such as WebObjects.

A possibly more significant impediment is Apple’s “Windows problem”. As Allen Pike explains on his blog (pointed to by John Gruber), Windows is iTunes’ ball and chain (emphasis added):

[…] they can’t split iTunes into multiple apps because many, if not most iOS users are on Windows. iTunes is Apple’s one and only foothold on Windows, so it needs to support everything an iOS device owner could need to do with their device. Can you imagine the support hurricane it would cause if Windows users suddenly needed to download, install, and use 3-4 different apps to sync and manage their media on their iPhone? It’s completely out of the question.

I remember my surprise when I bought my first iPod mini and saw iTunes software running on Windows. Imagine, Apple writing Windows software! Good UI, runs well, doesn’t feel like a dragging-one’s-feet port. But there’s a price: Some of the iTunes problems might stem from its use of cross-platform development tools, an approach that encourages (and sometimes insists on) a least common denominator experience. (I just checked, iTunes on Windows is very close to the Mac version.)

Allen Pike is right: iTunes, or its successor, must run on Windows. But I don’t see how that’s an unbearable burden on Apple, especially in light of the economics involved. If cross-platform tools are too limiting, Apple could develop “separate but equal’’ versions of iTunes as a way to keep selling iDevices to Windows users. (On this topic, the iPhone/iPad maker has done a much better job catering to Windows users than what RIM/Blackberry and Nokia have done for Mac users.)

Let’s hope Apple doesn’t become complacent, that they aren’t blinded by iTunes’ spectacular numbers. Let’s hope they deliver a really Apple-like iTunes experience. Paraphrasing a grand departed French politician, I like iTunes so much I want five of them.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Facebook’s Bet on Privacy

April 8, 2012 – 11:21 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Would you buy Facebook shares? A few weeks ahead of its mammoth IPO, millions of people probably dream of getting a slice of it. Spreadsheet jockeys have done their job and demonstrated with unanimous conclusiveness that, indeed, Facebook deserves its expected $100 billion valuation — or that gravity’s law will inevitably apply.

Facebook numbers are both fascinating and frightening. The social network will pass the 1 billion members mark this year and the capillarity of its services is creating an alternate internet before our very eyes. It has already become a credible substitute for email; it soon will be the dominant news channel for millions. At the same time, it is hugely profitable: Facebook’s margin reaches 62% and its $3.5 billion cash pile will allow occasional mistakes or, if you prefer, bold experiments.

Then, what could go wrong for the ultra-dominant digital rhizome? Two things: its contempt of privacy and Wall Street frothy expectations.

Two years ago, I interviewed David Kirkpatrick for Le Monde Magazine. He’s the author of the Facebook Effect, a book that remains a must-read if you want to understand the company and its founder. In our conversation, he described a Mark Zuckerberg perfectly aware of the sensitivity of privacy issues, but at the same time deeply convinced social norms would evolve towards nearly-total transparency. According to Kirkpatrick, Zuckerberg felt that, as long as users where given the proper tools to control it, privacy should not be an issue for his empire’s future. Put another way, Zuckerberg deeply believes in Facebook’s Grand Bargain: its core followers will accept full openness as a default setting and trade personal data in exchange of its features-rich service. He actually lived by this belief. And monetized it brilliantly.

Facebook’s most valuable currency is not the “Credits” used in its games, but its huge trove of consumer data.

The efficiency of this system comes form the “platform effect”, from Facebook’s federation of millions of sites that embed the “Like” button or allow their own users to register with their Facebook ID. Trying to protect one’s privacy while using Facebook is a hard Protean task as the company constantly changes its rules. Applications hosted by Facebook only make things worse as user personal data are allowed to leak to third party developers in a sneaky and overly abundant ways.

Last week, as a part of its remarkable What They Know series, the Wall Street Journal published a compelling story titled Selling You on Facebook:

A Wall Street Journal examination of 100 of the most popular Facebook apps found that some seek the email addresses, current location and sexual preference, among other details, not only of app users but also of their Facebook friends. One Yahoo service powered by Facebook requests access to a person’s religious and political leanings as a condition for using it. The popular Skype service for making online phone calls seeks the Facebook photos and birthdays of its users and their friends.

You might ask: What’s the connection between these privacy concerns and the upcoming IPO? Well, Facebook derives most of its revenue from advertising. And said advertising revenue stems from its ability to profile its users like no one else in the business. Still, in spite of its ability to serve an ad targeted to a South Texas single mother who likes Bob Dylan and Taco Bell, Facebook yields little revenue per capita. Where Yahoo makes $7 per user and per year and Google $30, Facebook’s ARPU actually amounts to a mere $4.39.

A further problem: Facebook does so after saturating its most solvent markets.

Now, let’s turn to Wall Street expectations. A $100 billion valuation would mean Facebook being traded at 27 times its 2011 revenue. For comparison, Google, Apple and Microsoft, all highly profitable, are valued between 4 or 5 times their respective revenue for their last fiscal year.

Hence the math: In a recent story published in Fast Company, Farhad Manjoo quotes a Dartmouth finance professor who said “[to justify Wall Street expectations] Facebook will need to see $70 billion in annual revenue by 2021, up from just $3.7 billion in 2011″, which translates into a 25% to 30% growth over the next decade… in the context of an advertising market growing at 4% per year, as Manjoo points out.

To meet these goals–even by going way beyond the one billion members mark–Facebook will have to extract more bucks from each one of its users. This means making an even better use of the data users traded for services.

This brings us to the biggest risk for the Facebook economics. If Facebook doesn’t play the privacy game well, two things are likely to happen. One, members will pressure the social network to limit its use (meaning the sale) of user data. Two, legislators will enter the fray. We already see early signs of political challenges with movements such as the Do Not Track initiative, one that is laying the ground work for legislations all over the world. This concern was reflected in the Risk Factor section of Facebook’s S-1 filing :

Our business is subject to complex and evolving U.S. and foreign laws and regulations regarding privacy, data protection, and other matters. Many of these laws and regulations are subject to change and uncertain interpretation, and could result in claims, changes to our business practices, increased cost of operations, or declines in user growth or engagement, or otherwise harm our business.

Facebook’s future relies in great part on its ability to wisely adjust the privacy dials. Even at the expense of its shareholders’ dreams.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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