Piracy is part of the digital ecosystem

January 22, 2012 – 8:15 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

In the summer of 2009, I found myself invited to a small party in an old bourgeois apartment with breathtaking views of the Champ-de-Mars and Eiffel Tower. The gathering was meant to be an informal discussion among media people about Nicolas Sarkozy’s push for the HADOPI anti-piracy bill. The risk of a heated debate was very limited: everyone in this little crowd of artists, TV and movie producers, and journalists, was on the same side, that is against the proposed law. HADOPI was the same breed as the now comatose American PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) and SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act). The French law was based on a three-strikes-and-you-are-disconnected system, aimed at the most compulsive downloaders.

The discussion started with a little tour de table, in which everyone had to explain his/her view of the law. I used the standard Alcoholic Anonymous introduction: “I’m Frederic, and I’ve been downloading for several years. I started with the seven seasons of The West Wing, and I keep downloading at a sustained rate. Worse, my kids inherited my reprehensible habit and I failed to curb their bad behavior. Even worse, I harbor no intent to give up since I refuse to wait until next year to see a dubbed version of Damages on a French TV network… In can’t stand Glenn Close speaking French, you see…” It turned out that everybody admitted to copious downloading, making this little sample of the anti-Sarkozy media elite a potential target for HADOPI enforcers. (Since then, parliamentary filibuster managed to emasculate the bill.)

When it come to digital piracy, there is a great deal of hypocrisy. One way another, everyone is involved.

For some large players — allegedly on the plaintiff side — the sinning even takes industrial proportions. Take the music industry.

In October 2003, Wired ran this interesting piece about a company specialized in tracking entertainment contents over the internet. BigChampagne, located in Beverly Hills, is for the digital era what Billboard magazine was in the analog world. Except that BigChampagne is essentially tracking illegal contents that circulates on the web. It does so with incredible precision by matching IP numbers and zip code, finding out what’s hot on peer-to-peer networks. In his Wired piece, Jeff Howe explains:

BigChampagne’s clients can pull up information about popularity and market share (what percentage of file-sharers have a given song). They can also drill down into specific markets – to see, for example, that 38.35 percent of file-sharers in Omaha, Nebraska, have a song from the new 50 Cent album.

No wonder some clients pay BigChampagne up to 40,000$ a month for such data. They  use BigChampagne’s valuable intelligence to apply gentle pressure on local radio station to air the very tunes favored by downloaders. For a long time, illegal file-sharing has been a powerful market and promotional tool for the music industry.

For the software industry, tolerance of pirated contents has been part of the ecosystem for quite a while as well. Many of us recall relying on pirated versions of Photoshop, Illustrator or Quark Xpress to learn how to use those products. It is widely assumed that Adobe and Quark have floated new releases of their products to spread the word-of-mouth among creative users. And it worked fine. (Now, everyone relies on a much more efficient and controlled mechanism of test versions, free trials, video tutorials, etc.)

There is no doubt, though, that piracy is inflicting a great deal of harm on the software industry. Take Microsoft and the Chinese market. For the Seattle firm, the US and the Chinese markets are roughly of the same size: 75 million PC shipments in the US for 2010, 68 million in China. There, 78% of PC software is pirated, vs. 20% in the US; as a result, Microsoft makes the same revenue from the Chinese than from… the Netherlands.

More broadly, how large is piracy today? At the last Consumer Electronic Show, the British market intelligence firm Envisional Ltd. presented its remarkable State of Digital Piracy Study (PDF here). Here are some highlights:
- Pirated contents accounts for 24% of the worldwide internet bandwidth consumption.
- The biggest chunk is carried by BitTorrent (the protocol used for file sharing); it weighs about 40% of the illegitimate content in Europe and 20% in the US (including downstream and upstream). Worldwide, BitTorrent gets 250 million UVs per month.
- The second tier is made by the so-called cyberlockers (5% of the global bandwidth), among them the infamous MegaUpload, raided a few days ago by the FBI and the New Zealand police. On the 500 million uniques visitors per month to cyberlockers, MegaUpload drained 93 million UVs. (To put things in perspective, the entire US newspaper industry gets about 110 million UVs per month). The Cyberlockers segment has twice the users but consumes eight times less bandwidth than BitTorrent simply because files are much bigger on the peer-to-peer system.
- The third significant segment in piracy is illegal video streaming (1.4% of the global bandwidth.)

There are three ways to fight piracy: endless legal actions, legally blocking access, or creating alternative legit offers.

The sue-them-untill-they-die approach is mostly a US-centric one. It will never yield great results (aside from huge legal fees) due to the decentralized nature of the internet (there is no central servers for BitTorrent) and to the tolerance in countries in harboring cyberlockers.

As for law-based enforcement systems such has the French HADOPI or American SOPA/PIPA, they don’t work either. HADOPI proved to be porous as chalk, and the US lawmakers had to yield to the public outcry. Both bills were poorly designed and inefficient.

The figures compiled by Envisional Ltd. are indeed a plea for the third approach, that is the  creation of legitimate offers.

Take a look at the figures below, which shows the peak bandwidth distribution between the US and Europe. You will notice that the paid-for Netflix service takes exactly the same amount of traffic as BitTorrent does in Europe!

US Bandwidth Consumption:

Europe Bandwidth Consumption:

Source : Envisional Ltd

These stats offer a compelling proof that creating legitimate commercial alternatives is a good way to contain piracy. The conclusion is hardly news. The choice between pirated and legit content is a combination of ease-of-use, pricing and availability on a given market. For contents such as music, TV series or movies, services like Netflix, iTunes or even BBC iPlayer go in the right direction. But one key obstacle remains: the balkanized internet (see a previous Monday Note Balkanizing the Web), i.e. the country zoning system. By slicing the global audience in regional markets, both the industry (Apple for instance) and the local governments neglect a key fact: today’s digital audience is getting increasingly multilingual or at least more eager to consume contents in English as they are released. Today we have entertainment products, carefully designed to fit a global audience, waiting months before becoming available on the global market. As long as this absurdity remains, piracy will flourish. As for the price, it has to match the ARPU generated by an advertising-supported broadcast. For that matter, I doubt a TV viewer of the Breaking Bad series comes close to yield an advertising revenue that matches the $34.99 Apple is asking for the purchase of the entire season IV. Maintaining such gap also fuels piracy.

I want Netflix, BBC iPlayer and an unlocked and cheaper iTunes everywhere, now. Please. In the meantime, I keep my Vuze BitTorrent downloader on my computer. Just in case.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Why Apple Should Follow Michelin

January 22, 2012 – 8:15 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

What’s the use of offering more than 500,000 wares if customers can’t find their way through the gigantic bazaar? I know, I already harped on about the lack of curation in Apple’s App Store, but that was 16 months ago…when the Store contained a “mere” 250,000 apps.

Since then, the iPhone has sold in ever larger numbers (we’ll soon see if the December quarter number crossed the 30 million units line, and by how much) and with more than 18 billion downloads, the App Store is an unmitigated success. If this is what “broken” looks like, why fix it? And how?

To answer the question, let’s take a trip back a hundred years to Clermont-Ferrand, home of Michelin. Known for its tires and tourists guides, Michelin is a very old company (incorporated in 1888), but they’ve always been at the forefront of their technology. Tires are complex products whose role in the safety, comfort, and economy of our driving experience lead Michelin engineers to joke that cars are peripheral to their lovingly engineered creations. (If you find yourself traveling through the center of France, treat yourself to a visit to L’Aventure Michelin, a really interesting museum that recounts the company’s many adventures, most of which are unknown, surprising, or forgotten.)

Edouard and André Michelin weren’t just good techies, they were astute businessmen and marketing geniuses. They seized on an obvious idea: If people take more road trips, we’ll sell more tires. And they shone in the execution that followed this intuition, they went far and well in their efforts to encourage and guide automobile travel. Michelin became famous for its world class roadmaps, for the Red Guides that grade hotels and restaurants, and Green Guides for regions, historic sites, and countries. The company also published literary Guides Bleus, forgoing culinary delights for a more cultural angle in their interpretation of locales. (I’ll skip their other marketing inventions, such as the Bibendum character and the iconic Michelin kilometer stones and road signs.)

Michelin had a staff of agents at the ready to devise an itinerary for your trip, all you had to do was write or call.

Did this “content”, as we would now call it, make money for Michelin? Possibly, but the revenue was negligible compared to the amount their tires generated. Michelin’s maps, guides, and services were created with one goal in mind, one mission: sell hardware. That’s where the real margins were, and still are.

Is Apple’s situation, it’s mission, all that different? Hardware revenue and margins are the sacred business model. Everything else, including the App Store, must support the ultimate goal. (For reference, the App Store generates less than 2% of Apple’s revenue, and much less than 2% of its profits.)

The scale of the App Store’s success, probably unforeseen by its creators, could lead management into complacency: Look at these numbers, ain’t they great? This is an incumbent’s attitude. And we know what happens to those.

But ask developers and, most important, users. For all its demonstrable success, the App Store feels broken. It’s too big and confusing, the app reviews are dry and the ratings are unreliable, search is primitive…

Label me naif, but I think Apple could do well by following the century-old Michelin model. It won’t take billions to implement, nor will it require the administration of the Apple Genii, just competent people and hard work. Here’s what a possible solution looks like:

Apple sets up a team in charge of publishing an App Store Guide. The editorial team writes opinionated (and presented as such) reviews of apps by category: Productivity, Games, Utilities, and the like. Published daily on a blog and accumulated in an on-line Guide, these reviews, one to two pages long, present the writer’s experience and opinion, culminating in a ranking in stars or numbers. It sounds simple, often the sign of a twisty road ahead…

Trouble starts quickly.

First obstacle: It’s already being done. True. How many iOS App Review Sites there are? According to this blog, the answer is…116! This is good news: Apple’s customers have an appetite for reviews, but which sites and reviewers can they trust? How do these reviewers make money? There’s no dispassionate, incorruptible Consumer Reports for apps.

Second, there’s Apple’s penchant for control. True, again — but irrelevant. Going back to Michelin, their opinion of a restaurant might be controversial, but the company has no financial gain in the number of stars they assign. They sell tires, not meals. Similarly, Apple wants to move hardware, not generate App Store revenue by favoring one app over another.

Third, attempting to sift through 500,000 apps amounts to boiling the ocean. How can one even hope to ‘‘make a dent” in that universe? But that’s no reason to sit on one’s hands. Let’s say that after a year the Apple App Guide has featured “only” 2,500 reviews, an average of 50 reviews a week, ten a day. Is that bad compared to today’s mess?

Fourth, the expense. Let’s do a gross, back-of-the-envelope overestimation: 20 reviewers at $250K/year “fully loaded” with management overhead and office expenses included. This gets us to $5M/year. Apple is notoriously cautious, if not downright stingy with (most) expenses, but $5M would be lost in the income statement noise. And this miniscule investment would exert a healthy influence on the rest of the app review ecosystem, just as the Apple Store raised the game for its independent retailers.

Fifth, the people. Will readers trust the opinions of enlisted Apple employees, or will they insist on “independent” voices? An employee’s loyalty is to the company, and there could be grumblings that a staff of corporate reviewers would choose apps that, above all else, show off the platform and the Apple brand. On the other hand, independent contractors are just that: independent. As such, they’re much more susceptible to “external influences.” There are any number of gadget blogs that smell of greasy palms and astroturfing.

Apple possesses [five s’s in a nine-letter word!] a treasure of closely-guarded user data — off-limits to a contractor — that could prove very helpful in rating apps. It’s “simply” a matter of finding, hiring, training, and managing competent and honest curators.

Today, Apple already demonstrates a type of curation when it decides which apps get featured as New and Noteworthy, or Staff Favorites. They might as well go all the way and please their users with subjective, personal reviews. Encourage the kommentariat to cluck its disapproval, allow dinged developers to rage online. If presented as an honest, competent effort — occasionally wrong but always with the Apple imprimatur — the review process will be as respected as any other high-quality editorial effort.

I hope Apple’s success won’t blind it to the need to give app seekers more than today’s skimpy categories and unreliable user reviews. Who knows, if Amazon or Google were to wake to the opportunity, their moves could spur Apple into action.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Trying a Simple Model

January 15, 2012 – 8:16 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Advertising still dominates the newspaper revenue model. Depending upon the particular country, it is not uncommon to see print dailies getting 70% to 80% of their revenue from advertising. In the early days of the digital era, when business plans were driven by “eyeballs”, everybody hoped to replicate the tried and true print advertising revenue model. Now, the collective hallucination has dissipated; a more down-to-earth vision prevails: publishers willing to preserve high quality (read: costly) journalism recognize they have no choice but getting their users to pay for it, one way another. The pendulum has swung back.

It’s a chicken-and-egg problem. You’ll be able to charge readers if you put yourself in a position to propose exclusive, unique contents. To do so, you’ll have to put together an strong line-up of professionals, as opposed to a blogger army whose output no one will ever pay a dime for.Next questions include: how much to charge ? Is it 10 (dollars euros, pounds), 20 or more?  What free-to-pay conversion rate to aim at? Can we shoot for 5%, 10% or more of the overall audience? How does a full digital operation look like?

Let’s dive into numbers for a back-of-the-envelope exercise.

First, assumptions: The following is based on my observations of markets in Europe (France, UK, Scandinavia) and the United states; numbers may vary but I trust none are widely off the mark.

In the print world, costs break down as follows:

Newsroom........................25%
Production, printing............25%
Distribution....................20%
Marketing promotion.............20%
Administration..................10%
...............................100%

Now let’s move to a fully digital operation derived from a traditional one in terms of journalistic firepower and standards.

To produce it, we’ll settle for a 200 staff newsroom, with writers, editors, data journalists, information-graphic designers, videographers, etc. We removed the staff working on the dead-tree model. With 200 dedicated people working for an online operation, you can really shoot the for stars. Such a setup costs between $25 and $30 million a year, all expenses included. Let’s settle for a middle $27 million.

Production costs fall sharply as the carbon-based version is gone. The old 45% production and printing line morphs into a conservative 15% for serving web pages and applications. We’ll assume all other costs (marketing, promotion, administrative) remain at the same level.

The cost table now looks like this:

Newsroom...............27M$......40% of the total
Production, technical..10M$......15%
Marketing promotion....20M$......30%
Administration.........10M$......15%
Total Costs............67M$

Now, let’s turn to the revenue side.

First: advertising revenue. We assume a real audience of 5 million Unique Visitors per month. By real audience, I mean no cheating, no bogus viewers, reasonable SEM and excellent SEO. People come to the site, stick to it and come back. Each user sees at least 20 pages a month. That’s on the high side. By comparison, Google Ad Planner gives the following page views per UVs:

NYT.........15 pageviews per user and per month (distant paywall)
WSJ.........14 (some paid-for section)
FT.com......11 (strict paywall)
Guardian....14 (free)

20 pages is therefore an ambitious goal. I’m convinced it can be achieved through high-performance recommendation engines (look at what Amazon does in terms of its ability to get people to click on related items).

5 million UVs multiplied by 20 pages views gives (thank you) 100 million PV. Now, let’s assume each page generate a CPM (for several modules) of $20. That’s an average as not all pages yield the same amount: parts of the inventory will go unsold, but pages served to high value, paid-for subscribers will generate twice that amount. This translates into a yearly revenue of $24 million, that is around 5 advertising dollars per visitor per year.

Again: it will vary, but it is consistent with what we see on the market for high quality, branded, publications. (By contrast, even the greatest blogs only yield one or two dollars per user).

Two, subscription revenue. Since our audience is solid and loyal to the brand, we will assume 10% of all readers will be willing to pay. Make no mistake: that is the transformation rate a newspapers such as the New York Times is aiming at (it is currently at 1%, still a long way to go). My take is a general news operation will be price-sensitive, meaning the transformation rate with a $9.99 a month price will be significantly higher than with $15 or $20 per month; by contrast, a specialized publication is less rate-sensitive and can be pricier.

In my model of a general news product, I set the price to $10 a month, which makes the one-tenth conversion rate more realistic. Then, I factor in two items:
- 15% taxes (it ranges from 8% in the US to 20% in France)
- a 13% cost of platform including transaction, database, etc (that’s should be a goal as Google OnePass charges 10%); this line is distinct from the technical costs applied to the entire digital operation.

All of the above taken into account, a digital subscriber paying $10 month will generate a net ARPU of $89 a year for the company. Multiplied by 0.5 million paid-for users (i.e.10% of the global audience), this translates into a revenue of $44 million for digital subscribers.

The revenue table now looks like this:

Advertising......24M$...35% of the total
Subscription.....44M$...65%
Total............68M$...100%

$68 million in revenue for a cost of $67 million (all numbers rounded), leaves a mere 2% operating margin. Nothing to brag about. It could easily translate into an accounting loss, especially since it will take a while to reach several of these goals: a 10% free-to-paid transformation rate, a high number of pages per viewers, both are several years (of losses) away for many publications.
But these are the only dials I set on the ambitious side; the rest (subscription price, audience), is rather conservative; for instance if you simply set the subscription rate at $12 a month instead of $10 — that is fifty cents per weekday — the operating margin jumps to 13%.
And I also set aside many things I firmly believe in, like keeping some print operation in the form of a compact, high-end weekly for instance (with a staff of 200, it sounds feasible), developing ancillary products such as digital book publishing, etc.

Once again, while I feel my numbers are well-grounded, others will find this little model simplistic and questionable. The simulation is aimed at showing there is a life after the death of the daily print edition. Success is a “mere matter” of persistence.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Will Microsoft buy RIM or Nokia?

January 15, 2012 – 8:15 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

We continue along the lines of last week’s Monday Note kriegsspiel with the latest speculation Will Microsoft, at long last, buy RIM? The idea has been kicked around for at least five years: Days after the iPhone’s introduction in January 2007, Seeking Alpha suggested that the Xbox maker ought to buy RIM in order to build an XPhone. In retrospect, this would have saved both companies a lot of grief.

It’s early 2007 and the BlackBerry maker is riding high. With its Microsoft Exchange integration; a solid PIM (Personal Information Manager) that neatly combines mail, calendar, and contacts; and the secure BlackBerry Messenger network, the “CrackBerry” is rightly perceived as the best smartphone on the market. I love my Blackberry and once I manage to get a hosted Exchange account for the family, I show my un-geeky spouse the ease of over-the-air (OTA) synching between a PC and the BlackBerry. ‘No cable?’ No cable. She promptly ditches her Palm device. One by one, our adult children follow suit. For a brief time, we are a BlackBerry family.

But the Blackberry’s success blinds RIM executives. They don’t see – or refuse to believe – that the iPhone poses a threat to their dominance. A little later, Android comes on the scene. Apple and Google deploy technically superior software platforms that, by comparison, expose the Blackberry’s weaker underpinnings. In 2010, RIM acquires the QNX operating system in an effort to rebuild its software foundations, but it’s too late. The company has lost market share and shareholders see RIM squander 75% of its market cap.

Now, imagine: On the heels of the iPhone introduction in 2007, Microsoft acquires RIM and quickly proceeds to do what they’ve only now accomplished with Windows Phone 7: They ditch the past and build a modern system. This would have saved Microsoft a lot of time and RIM shareholders lots of money. Instead, Microsoft mocks the iPhone and brags that the venerable (to be polite) Windows Mobile will own 40% of the market by 2012.

Things don’t quite work as planned. Early 2010, Microsoft wisely abandons Windows Mobile for the more modern Windows Phone 7 (a moniker that combines the Windows Everywhere obsession with a shameless attempt to make us believe the new smartphone OS is a “version” of the desktop Windows 7).

And things still keep not working as planned. WP 7 doesn’t get traction because handset makers are much more interested in Android’s flexibility and, particularly, their price. Android’s Free and Open pitch works wonders; the technology is sound and improves rapidly; OEMs see Microsoft as the old guard, stagnant, while Google is on the rise, a winner.

All the while, Nokia experiences their own kind of “domination blindness”. In 2007 Nokia is the world’s largest mobile phone maker, but they can’t see the technical shortcomings of their aging Symbian platform, or the futility of their attempts to “mobilize” Linux. iOS and Android devices quickly eat into Nokia’s market share and market cap (down 80% from its 2007 high).

In 2010, Stephen Elop, formerly a Microsoft exec, takes the helm and promptly states two brutal truths: This isn’t about platforms, we are in an ecosystem war; technically, we’ve been kidding ourselves. Nokia’s new CEO sees that the company’s system software efforts – new and improved versions of Symbian or Maemo/Moblin/Meego – won’t save the company.

Having removed the blinders, Elop looks for a competitive mobile OS. Android is quickly discarded with the usual explanations: We’d lose control of our destiny… Not enough opportunities for differentiation… The threat of a race to the bottom might have entered the picture as well.

This leads Elop back into his former boss’ arms. Microsoft and Nokia embark on a “special relationship” that involves technical collaboration and lots of money. It’ll be needed: By the end of 2011, WP 7 has less than 2% market share. Nokia’s just-announced Lumia smartphone is well received by critics but will it demonstrate enough superior points to gain significant share against the Android-iOS duopoly? I’ll buy one as soon as possible in order to form an opinion.

The “MicroNokia” relationship isn’t without problems. Many Nokia fans are outraged: Elop sold out, Nokia’s MeeGo was unfairly maligned, the company has lost its independence… See Tomi Ahonen’s blog for more. (And “more” is the right word. Ahonen’s learned, analytical, and often rabid posts range between 4,000 and 10,000 words.)

The Nokia faithful have a point. In my venture investing profession, we call an arrangement such as the MicroNokia partnership “buying the company without paying the price.” Right now, Microsoft appears to control Nokia’s future since, at this stage, Nokia is as good as dead without WP 7.

But doesn’t that mean that Nokia also controls Microsoft’s smartphone future? “Statements of direction” aside, there are no notable WP 7 OEMs. (Samsung and HTC ship a few WP 7 phones, but their share is infinitesimal compared to their Android handsets.) With Android growing so fast, why would a smartphone maker commit to WP 7 while Nokia holds a privileged status on the platform?

Microsoft is making smart moves against Android by using their patent portfolio to force Android handset makers to pay (undisclosed) royalties. With LG as the latest licensee, Microsoft appears to have snared 70% of Android OEMs. The (serious) joke in the industry is that Microsoft makes more money from Android than from WP 7.

But success with patents doesn’t translate into more WP 7 OEMs, which leaves us to wonder: Will Microsoft consummate the relationship and acquire Nokia, whether the entire corpus or, at least, the fecund (smartphone) bits? For years, Microsoft has claimed they’re all about choice, and when it comes to the PC, that’s true: Businesses and consumers have a wide choice of PCs running Windows. But their customers have no real choice when it comes to WP 7: It’s Nokia or…Nokia. They might as well tie the knot and call it what it is: Microsoft or Microsoft. It works wonders for Xbox and Kinect.

Going back to RIM, we hear it’s ‘’in play’’, that they’ve hired investment bankers to “look at their strategic alternatives”. In English: They’re looking for a buyer.

But who? Microsoft is otherwise engaged. So is Motorola. And forget Samsung.

With RIM’s market share dropping precipitously, and no sign of a rebound with spanking new models until the second half of 2012, who would want to risk billions in a market that’s controlled by competitors who manage to be both huge and fast-growing? Sure, RIM is still in the black, but its cash reserves are dwindling: the Cash and cash equivalents line went from $2.7B last February to $1.1B in November 2011. What’s left will evaporate quickly if revenue and profits keep dropping, as they’re likely to do for the foreseeable future.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Cracking the Paywall

January 8, 2012 – 11:04 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

(This version corrects an error in the percentage for the price increase of the FT)

Every newspaper, magazine or website is working on a paywall of sorts and closely monitoring what everyone else is doing. In almost every news company, execs are morosely watching advertising projections and finding numbers that are not exactly encouraging. For digital media, there is no way around this year’s weak outlook: the bad economic climate only adds to the downward price pressure exerted by the ever growing inventory of web and mobile pages. In a best-case scenario, volumes and prices will remain flat. On the print circulation side, Western newspapers are likely to witness a continuing readership erosion at a rate of several percentage points.

But here is the interesting point: The strongest players don’t just bow to the inevitable, they accelerate their transition to digital. This week, I was struck by the fact two such leaders made the same move: The New York Times and the Financial Times both announced serious price hike for their newsstand price (respectively 25% and 13.6%) :
- The NYT moves from $2.00 (€1.57) to $2.50 (€1.96) from Monday to Saturday, with no change for the Sunday edition still priced at $5 (€3.92) in New York, and $6 (€4.72) elsewhere.
- The FT goes from £2.20 ($3.39 or €2.66) to £2.50 ($3.85 or €3.03) on weekdays, as the weekend edition moves from £2.80 ($4.32 or €3.39 ) to £3 ($4.62 or €3.63).

Those numbers are really meaningful: a 10% increase every two years or so can be seen as an inflation adjustment — a generous one considering the inflation rate in those countries to be about 2.5%-3.5%. At 25% increase is a strategic decision aimed at accelerating the switch to digital. (The paper version of the FT now costs 25% more than it did last October).

Interestingly enough, for a New York Times addict, reading the paper online with the cheapest package ($15 a month), is now 40% to 50% cheaper that the home-delivered version and 70% cheaper than buying the paper each day at a newsstand. As for the FT, the standard digital version is now 21% cheaper than the print subscription and 68% less than the newsstand price.

Both are working hard at converting readers to the digital paid-for model. The FT is heading full steam into digital, furiously data-mining its 4 million subscribers base to convert them into paid-for subscribers (250,000 according to the most recent count). The FT’s tactics is simple: readers are relentlessly pushed toward the paywall thanks to a diminishing number of stories available for free: from 30 free articles per month in 2007 it is now down to 8 articles; the other bold move is making registration mandatory in order to access even a single story.

Last year, the New York Times came up with a less readable strategy: the adjustable paywall. And it seems to work. The NYT has been able to collect 324,000 paid-for digital subscribers in nine months. Considering the NYT has about four times less non-paying digital registered users than the FT (therefore a lesser conversion potential), this is not bad.

The Times builds its paid-for strategy on three key factors:

1 / The uniqueness of its content. Let’s put it this way: The New York Times has no equivalent in the world when it comes to great journalism, period. This valued content helped collect 34 million uniques visitors a month in its domestic market, and 47 million worldwide. More than any other newspapers in the world, the NYT has a huge base of loyal users. If it manages to convert only 5% of its global audience, say 2.4 million people, and extracts an ARPU (combined subscription and advertising) of $150 per year, it will gross €360 million, which largely covers the cost of its newsroom ($200 million a year, by far the largest in the world).

2 / The managed porosity of its paywall. One key requirement in building the digital subscription system for the Times was keeping as many of its readers as possible. There are two main reasons for this: high audience numbers are critical for advertising revenue; and the visibility factor is crucial for a news brand. This led to a system that targets the heaviest users. But even those can easily game the system (by using several browsers on several devices, I never bump into the paywall, with no particular desire to avoid it). Similarly, prices vary from $15 to $35… for exactly the same content — this is typical of a price structure aimed at audiences with flexible purchasing powers (it is widely established that richer people tend to opt for the most expensive package, regardless of its true value).

3 / Getting in bed with Apple. Since the early iPad days, The New York Times has been working closely with Apple for applications, subscriptions, and the nascent Newsstand. Again: thanks to its unique brand and the trust it carries, the NYT experiences no trouble collecting the precious customer data the app’s default settings fail to provide. In doing so, the Times benefited from Apple’s huge promotional vortex. The Apple system is highly beneficial when it comes to building an audience. But it does so at the expense of the essential customer relationship, and at a huge cost of 30% when the goal should rather be in the 10% range.
That was the Financial Times’ rationale for breaking the Apple leash. Last week, the FT went even further: it acquired the software firm Assanka, well-known for the development of the FT.com’s remarkable web-app that insured its crucial independence from Apple (story in PaidContent). In itself, the move demonstrates the FT’s commitment to mobile products: HTML5 development remain difficult and the FT decided it was critical to integrate Assanka’s development tools.

Of these three factors, the uniqueness of content remains the most potent one. With the inflation of aggregators and of social reading habits, the natural replication of information has turned into an overwhelming flood. Then, the production of specific content — and its protection — becomes a key element in building value. As for price structures, there is no magic formula. Usually, the simpler the better (as Apple demonstrated) — especially for businesses that start from scratch. But, with pre-existing and different audience segments such as an individual and corporate users, pricing decisions become more complicated and a diversified price list can prevent cannibalization. As for the Apple vs. independent app issue, my personal take is that sleeping with Apple is a quick short-term win, an easier strategy. But, in the long run, the independent way (which, after all, is an article of faith for Apple itself) will yield better results.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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Samsung vs. Google

January 8, 2012 – 11:04 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

Android is a huge success. Google bought Andy Rubin’s company in 2005 and turned it into a smartphone operating system giant, with more than 50% of the global market and 700,000 activations a day this past December.

Perhaps, as Steve Jobs seemed to think, it was Eric Schmidt’s position on Apple’s Board of Directors that infected Google with an itch to enter the smartphone OS market. Or maybe Larry Page and Sergey Brin simply recognized the Next Big Thing when they saw it. (As Page points out, the company had begun Android development a year before Schmidt joined the Apple Board.)

Regardless of the “authenticity” of Google’s smartphone impulse, it’s the execution of the idea, the integration of Android into Google’s top-level strategy where the product really shines. Android improves quickly; the “free and open” platform is popular with developers and, perhaps even more so, with handset makers who no longer have to create their own software, a task they’re culturally ill-suited to perform. And everyone loves being associated with a technically competent winner. (I might be a little biased in my regard for the Android engineering team: Comrades from a previous OS war work there.)

For the past three years, Android has experienced a kind of free space expansion: The platform has grown without hitting obstacles. I’m not ignoring the IP wars, they’re real and the outcome(s) are still unclear, but these fights haven’t slowed Android’s triumphant march.

As we enter 2012, however, it seems the game may be changing. Looking at last week’s numbers for Motorola, HTC, and Samsung, we see a different picture. Instead of the old “there’s more than enough room for every Android handset maker to be a winner”, we have a three-horse’s-length leader, Samsung, while Motorola and HTC lag behind.

From October to December of last year, a.k.a. Q4CY11, Samsung is said to have shipped 35 million smartphones, taking it to the number one spot worldwide. Citing “competitive reasons”, Samsung no longer makes its sales/shipment numbers public, so we have to rely on ‘‘independent” observers to tally up the score. Having worked in the high-tech industry for decades, I’ve seen how this information game is played: firm XYZ sells its “research” to manufacturer W…and ends up as its mouthpiece. I’d love to follow the money, but these private firms don’t have to reveal who their clients are and how much they pay for their services. (For a more detailed discussion of these shenanigans, read an excellent piece by The Guardian’s Charles Arthur: Dear Samsung: could we have some clarity on your phone sales figures now? Another possible bias: The Guardian re-publishes the Monday Note on its site.)

But even if we “de-propagandize” the numbers, Samsung is clearly the number one Android handset maker, and, just as clearly, it’s taking large chunks of market share from the other two leading players: Motorola and HTC both announced lower than expected Q4CY11 numbers. HTC’s unit volume was 10 million units, down from 13.2 million in Q3; Motorola got 10.5 million units in Q4, down from 11.6 million in Q3.

This leaves us with the potential for an interesting face-off. Not Samsung vs Motorola/HTC, but…Samsung vs. Google. As Erik Sherman observes in his CBS MoneyWatch post, since Samsung ships close to 55% of all Android phones, the company could be in a position to twist Google’s arm. If last quarter’s trend continues — if Motorola and HTC lose even more ground — Samsung’s bargaining position will become even stronger.

But what is Samsung’s ‘‘bargaining position’’? What could they want? Perhaps more search referral money (the $$ flowing when Google’s search engine is used on a smartphone), earlier access to Android releases, a share of advertising revenue…

Will Google let Samsung gain the upper hand? Not likely, or at least not for long. There’s Motorola, about to become a fully-owned but “independent” Google subsidiary. A Googorola vertically-integrated smartphone line could counterbalance Samsung’s influence.

And so it would be Samsung’s move…and they wouldn’t be defenseless. Consider the Kindle Fire example: Just like Amazon picked the Android lock, Samsung could grab the Android Open Source code and create its own unlicensed but fully legal smartphone OS and still benefit from a portion of Android apps, or it could build its own app store the way Amazon did. Samsung is already showing related inclinations with its Music Hub and its iMessage competitor.

Samsung is a tough, determined fighter and won’t let Google dictate its future. The same can be said of Google.

This is going to be interesting.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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My 2012 Watch List

December 18, 2011 – 11:00 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

When it comes to cracking the digital media code, 2011 involved more testing than learning. Media companies seem to be locked in a feverish search mode. Their sense of urgency is reinforced by the continuous depletion of worldwide fundamentals: digital advertising’s encephalogram remains flat (at best); and when audiences grow, revenues do not necessarily correlate. As for legacy media such as large quality newspapers which still draw 70-80% of their revenue from print, they are still caught in a double jeopardy: losing circulation plus looming downward price pressure on ads. We see an unforgiving mechanism at work: on mature markets such as Europe or North America, print media currently absorbs about 25% of ad spending while time spent on newspapers falls well below 10%. On digital media the balance is just the opposite: the web takes roughly 20% of ad investments for 25% of time spent; as for mobile devices, there is almost no ad money spent (<1%), but people spend about 10% of their time on their smartphones — and the growth is exponential.

Last year, we saw many efforts in the “right” direction—”right” being a rapidly redefined. Below is a subjective list of moves, trends, innovations, attempts that burgeoned in 2011 and are likely to become more sharply defined with this coming year.

#1 Paid-for news. Many are trying, but no one has cracked the code—yet. Part of the problem is we are in a model that’s just the opposite of one-size-fits-all. We are likely to witness the emergence of many different ways of charging readers for quality content. Variables in the equation are many and sometimes hard to quantify:

- National vs. local
- General news vs. specialized
- Typologies of contents
- Most Likely Prime time reading
- Most Likely Prime device use
- Target group structure.

Go figure a reliable business model with a so many factors in the formula…

Paywalls come in different flavors. The prize for complexity goes for the New York Times’ Digital Subscription Plan launched March 17. According to the Times, its crystal-clear equation can be summed-up as follow:

Once readers click on their 21st [in a 4 weeks period], they will have the option of buying one of three digital news packages — $15 every four weeks for access to the Web site and a mobile phone app (or $195 for a full year), $20 for Web access and an iPad app ($260 a year) or $35 for an all-access plan ($455 a year). All subscribers who take home delivery of the paper will have free and unlimited access across all Times digital platforms except, for now, e-readers like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble Nook.

Weirdly enough, this overly complex and pricey scheme seems to work: by the end of Q3, the Times had harvested 324,000 paid digital subscribers. This has to be viewed in the context of a site getting 47 million Unique Visitors per month on average, and 33 million in the US alone. As for mobile access, 11 million iPhones apps and 3 million iPads have been downloaded.

To watch in 2012: how fast the NYT will recruit new paid digital subscribers. To get a good view of the key elements in NYT’s digital revenues, see Ken Doctor’s analysis in Newsonomics. Plus, after the sudden resignation of its CEO (Janet Robinson), the NYT might be entering a new era; she could be replaced by a predominantly digital person.

#2 The Web App Movement. The boldest move of the year was made by The Financial Times: in June, it unveiled a web app for iPad and iPhone, independent of Apple’s closed ecosystem. Among its many advantages, the web app allows the FT.com to foster a close relationship with all its customers. In five months, the FT.com has collected over 250,000 paying digital subscribers. Its entire digital operations now accounts for 30% of its revenue. (More on the FT.com’s economics in this PaidContent story.)

To watch in 2012: The outlook seems quite good for the FT.com. Its marketing division is working hard to tap into a huge database of 4 million registered users, including 1 million for the independent web app, half of them putting it on the home screen of their device.

#3 The Apple’s Newsstand is another item of the 2012 watch list. The project responded to publishers’ wish to see their prestigious titles rise over the crowd of garage apps, and to be able to propose long term subscription plans. In October, Apple came up with its digital kiosk, which is essentially a shortcut for publishers apps displayed in a wooden shelf. For good measure, Apple added an exclusive feature: automated downloading. In short, it is a success for magazines who register massive hikes in their digital sales, but much less so for dailies which remain a bit shy. (We been through this in a previous Monday Note)

==> To watch in 2012: the key issue for a massive move to Apple’s Newsstand remains customer data. Either Apple and the publishers will be able to work out a scheme in which about 70% of the customers will agree to provide their coordinates (see Apple’s Newsstand: Wait for 2.0), or the independent web app movement (FT.com-like) is likely to gain traction.

#4 The switch to Digital Editions, as opposed to dumb PDF, might play a critical role in the development of tangible revenue for the industry. Here, I spoke highly of great examples of tablet-specific applications such as BloombergBusinessWeek+ or the Guardian’s iPad version.

To watch in 2012: the adoption of Digital Editions will depend on three factors: 1) The publisher’s willingness to invest significantly on projects not profitable in the short-term, 2) The advertising community’s ability to understand that digital editions will bring their clients much higher benefits than PDF versions or even web sites will do, 3) The acceptance by various Audit Bureaus of Circulation that reader engagement is incomparably higher for designed-for-tablets editions (for more on the subject, read our recent column Unaccounted For Readers.) If these three items are checked, 2012 is likely to be The Year of Digital Editions.

#5 The Huffington Post contagion. Its acquisition by AOL for $315m has propelled the HuffPo to new highs. The content—largely based on unabashed aggregation and legions of unpaid bloggers—remains mediocre, but no ones really seems to care. As in the pre-bubble era, only eyeballs and hype count. The HuffPo has plenty of both. (OK, when you look at the numbers, as Ken Doctor did in this piece, you’ll see a HuffPo visitor brings 3.5 times less money than the NYT does…).

To watch in 2012: This is the year where the Huffington Post will go legit. Everyone is now kissing Arianna’s ring. Including large media company, such as Le Monde, ElPais, DieZeit and a couple of others in Europe that will help Arianna to go global. As appetizing as an alliance between Alain Ducasse and McDonald’s. Sometimes the search for strategy goes haywire…

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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2011: Shift Happens

December 18, 2011 – 10:59 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

Whatever 2011 was, it wasn’t The Year Of The Incumbent. The high-tech world has never seen the ground shift under so many established companies. This causes afflicted CEOs to exhibit the usual symptoms of disorientation: reorg spams, mindless muttering of old mantras and, in more severe cases, speaking in tongues, using secret language known only to their co-CEO.

Let’s start with the Wintel Empire

Intel. The company just re-organized its mobile activities, merging four pre-existing groups into a single business unit. In a world where mobile devices are taking off while PC sales flag, Intel has effectively lost the new market to ARM. Even if, after years of broken promises, Intel finally produces a low-power x86 chip that meets the requirements of smartphones and tablets, it won’t be enough to take the market back from ARM.

Here’s why: The Cambridge company made two smart decisions. First, it didn’t fight Intel on its sacred PC ground; and, second, it licensed its designs rather than manufacture microprocessors. Now, ARM licensees are in the hundreds and a rich ecosystem of customizing extensions, design houses and silicon foundries has given the architecture a dominant and probably unassailable position in the Post-PC world.

We’ll see if Intel recognizes the futility of trying to dominate the new theatre of operations with its old weapons and tactics, or if it goes back and reacquires an ARM license. This alone won’t solve its problems: customers of ARM-based Systems On a Chip (SOC) are used to flexibility (customization) and low prices. The first ingredient isn’t in evidence in the culture of a company used to dictate terms to PC makers. The second, low prices, is trouble for the kind of healthy margins Intel derives from its Wintel quasi-monopoly. Speaking of which…

Microsoft. The company also reorged its mobile business: Andy Lees, formerly President of its Windows Phone division just got benched. The sugar-coating is Andy keeps his President title, in “a new role working for me [Ballmer] on a time-critical opportunity focused on driving maximum impact in 2012 with Windows Phone and Windows 8”. Right.

Ballmer once predicted Windows Mobile would achieve 40% market share by 2012, Andy Lee pays the price for failing to achieve traction with Windows Phone: according to Gartner, Microsoft’s new mobile OS got 1.6% market share in Q2 2011.

Microsoft will have to buy Nokia in order to fully control its destiny in this huge new market currently dominated by Android-based handset makers (with Samsung in the lead) and by Apple. In spite of efforts to ‘‘tax” Android licensees, the old Windows PC licensing model won’t work for Microsoft. The vertical, integrated, not to say “Apple” approach works well for Microsoft in its flourishing Xbox/Kinect business, it could also work for MicroNokia phones. Moreover, what will Microsoft do once Googorola integrates Moto hardware + Android system software + Google applications and Cloud services?
In the good old PC business Microsoft’s situation is very different, it’s still on top of the world. But the high-growth years are in the past. In the US, for Q2 2011, PC sales declined by 4.2%; in Europe, for Q3 this time, PC sales went down by 11.4% (both numbers are year-to-year comparisons).

At the same time, according to IDC the tablet market grew 264.5% in Q3 (admire the idiotic .5% precision, and consider tablets started from a small 2010 base). Worldwide, including the newly launched Kindle Fire, 2011 tablets shipments will be around 100 million units. Of which Microsoft will have nothing, or close to nothing if we include a small number of the confidential Tablet PC devices. The rise of tablets causes clone makers such as Dell, Samsung and Asus (but not Acer) to give up on netbooks.

In 2012, Microsoft is expected to launch a Windows 8 version suited for tablets. That version will be different from the desktop product: in a break with its monogamous Wintel relationship, Windows 8 will support ARM-based tablets. This “forks” Windows and many applications in two different flavors. Here again, the once dominant Microsoft lost its footing and is forced to play catch-up with a “best of both world” (or not optimized for either) product.

In the meantime, Redmond clings to a PC-centric party line, calling interloping smartphones and tablets “companion products’’. One can guess how different the chant would be if Microsoft dominated smartphones or tablets.

Still, like Intel, Microsoft is a growing, profitable and cash-rich company. Even if one is skeptical of their chances to re-assert themselves in the Post-PC world, these companies have the financial means to do so. The same cannot be said of the fallen smartphone leaders.

RIM: ‘Amateur hour is over.’ This is what the company imprudently claimed when introducing its PlayBook tablet. It is an expensive failure ($485M written off last quarter) but RIM co-CEOs remain eerily bullish: ‘Just you wait…’ For next quarter’s new phones, for the new BlackBerry 10 OS (based on QNX), for a software update for the PlayBook…

I remember being in New York City early January 2007 (right before the iPhone introduction). Jet-lagged after flying in from Paris, I got up very early and walked to Avenue of The Americas. Looking left, looking right, I saw Starbucks signs. I got to the closest coffee shop and saw everyone in the line ahead of me holding a BlackBerry, a.k.a. CrackBerry for its addictive nature. Mid-december 2011, RIM shares were down 80% from February this year:

Sammy the Walrus IV provides a detailed timeline for RIM’s fall on his blog, it’s painful.

On Horace Dediu’s Asymco site, you’ll find a piece titled “Does the phone market forgive failure?”. Horace’s answer is a clear and analytical No. Which raises the question: What’s next for RIM? The company has relatively low cash reserves ($1.5B) and few friends, now, on financial markets. It is attacked at the low end by Chinese Android licensees and, above, by everyone from Samsung to Nokia and Apple. Not a pretty picture. Vocal shareholders demand a change in management to turn the company around. But to do what? Does anyone want the job? And, if you do, doesn’t it disqualify you?

Nokia: The company has more cash, about 10B€ ($13B) and a big partner in Microsoft. The latest Nokia financials are here and show the company’s business decelerates on all fronts, this in a booming market. Even if initial reactions to the newest Windows Phone handsets aren’t said to be wildly enthusiastic, it is a bit early to draw conclusions. But Wall Street (whose wisdom is less than infinite) has already passed judgment:

Let’s put it plainly: No one but RIM needs RIM; but Microsoft’s future in the smartphone (and, perhaps, tablet) market requires a strong Nokia. Other Windows Phone “partners” such as Samsung are happily pushing Android handsets, they don’t need Microsoft the way PC OEMs still need Windows. Why struggle with a two-headed hydra when you can acquire Nokia and have only one CEO fully in charge? Would this be Andy Lees’ mission?

All this stumbling takes place in the midst of the biggest wave of growth, innovation and disruption the high-tech industry has ever seen: the mobile devices + Cloud + social graph combination is destroying (most) incumbents on its path. Google, Apple, Facebook, Samsung and others such as Amazon are taking over. 2012 should be an interesting year for bankers and attorneys.

—JLG@mondaynote.com


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The Best of Curation

December 11, 2011 – 10:43 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

I love talking about the things I enjoy using. The emerging ecosystem in which a bunch of smart people curate long form journalism is definitely one of those things. The companies are called Instapaper, Longreads, Longform. I love the material they find for me and I’m in the debt of developers who wrote neat applications that help me manage my very own library of great stories.

My reading selection process for long articles (say above 2500 words) goes like this. It starts with installing the Read Later bookmarklet, developed by Instapaper, on all my internet browsers. When I stumble on something I have no time to dive into, I hit the ReadLater tab in the by browser’s bookmarks bar (below):

This causes the piece to be stored in the cloud. (There is another service/app of the same kind called Read it Later. I just got it this weekend and haven’t had much time to use it yet.)

Then, I loaded the Instapaper app on my iPhone and my iPad, it works just fine. The stories I don’t have time to read at work are now available on my two nomad devices for my daily commute, my chronic insomnia, after-dinner relaxation or long flights. Unsurprisingly, topics center around business stories, medias, tech; but they also extend to neurosciences, and in-depth profiles of creative people in a wide range of fields. In doing so, I have re-created my own serendipitous environment; as I open the app, I always find something interesting I put aside a couple of weeks earlier.

My second source of good stories is the Editor’s Pick on three long forms curation sites. Instapaper has it own Browse section and my two favorites are Longreads and Longform. There are two other such sites I use less often: The Browser and Give Me Something to Read. They’re all built on the same idea: a self-organized community of thousands people (see graph below) who pick up articles they like and put them on Twitter (and also on Facebook and Tumblr); the feeds are then re-aggregated and curated by the sites’ editors. The process looks like this :

This system combines the best of Twitter (gathering a community that selects relevant contents) with the final responsibility of human editors. Just as important, Read Later and Read It Later rely on hundreds of third party applications that use their APIs (a piece of code that allows apps to talk to each other).

Then two questions arise :
– Does this model benefit publishers ?
– What kind of business models can the aggregators hope for ?

To the first question, the answer is yes and no. From their respective sites, these companies play a referrer role as they send traffic back to the original publishers. But when it comes to apps for smartphones or mobiles, these services become value killers: their content is displayed in the apps without advertising. See screenshots from the iPhone Instapaper app below:

As for Read it Later application, it proposes (below) a web view and a reformatted text-view. No need to be a certified ergonomist to guess which one will be used the most:

For good measure, let’s say Apple is not the last entity to add features that kill value by removing ads; below the same NYT web page in normal and “Reader” mode:

For now, publishers don’t seem to care much about this type of value hijacking. The rationale is such apps are still limited to early adopters. In a study released last week, Read it Later said it recorded a total of 47 million “saves” between May and October 2011 (and 36% growth between the first and the last month.) Weirdly enough, most of the “saves” recorded involve tech-related stories from blogs such as LifeHacker, Gizmodo (both are part of Gawker Media) or TechCrunch. Long form journalism appears too small to be accounted for. Equally weird, when Read it Later gives a closer look at data coming from the New York Times, we see this:

Great writers indeed, but hardly long form journalism. We would have expected a predominance of long feature stories, we get columnists and tech writers instead.

Similarly, Longreads.com gets about 100,000 unique visitors a month, founder Mark Armstrong told me. For this last week, publishers altogether got 21,230 referrals form Longreads’ curated picks. Despite this modest volume, Longreads’ 40,000+ community of referrers is growing rapidly at the rate of a thousand every two weeks or so.

Let’s talk business model. The Longreads team includes former McCann Erickson creative director Joyce King Thomas (story in AdAge here). She seems more interested in good journalism rather than in loading the elegant Longreads with a Christmas tree of ads. In short, Longreads’ business future lies more in a membership system than in anything else — maybe some sponsorship, Armstrong acknowledges. The contents Longreads promotes through its links addresses a solvent audience, one that knows great journalism comes with a price and so do good tools to mine it. It shouldn’t be a problem to extract €10 or $20 a year, directly or via an app.

Having said that, I remain a bit skeptical of Longreads’ avoidance (for now) of the classic startup venture capital mechanism. Because barriers to entry into its type of business are low, Longreads ought to quickly build on its momentum and on the undisputed quality of its product. This means promotion and also technology to extend the reach of the service and to secure control of the distribution channel–and to make it more mainstream.

—frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

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HP Kicks webOS To The Kerb

December 11, 2011 – 10:25 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

We strongly believe that the best days for webOS are still ahead.

Thus spake Meg Whitman in her memo to the troops, an intramural rendition of HP’s official announcement that webOS will be “contributed” to the Open Source community.

…the executive team has been working to determine the best path forward for this highly respected software. We looked at all the options in the market today…By providing webOS to the open source community…we have the potential to fundamentally change the landscape.

Either she thinks we’re dimwits, or she’s being cleverly cheeky. Does she think we’ll fall for the tired corpospeak? “Victory! WhatWereWeThinking v3.0 has been released to the Open Source community”. Or is she slyly fessing up? “After much abuse inside the HP cage, it’s clear that webOS can only be restored to health if released into the wild.”

Releasing a product as Open Source isn’t always an admission of failure; see exhibits Linux or, more recently, WebKit. But the successful Open Source offerings were created in Open Source form. They weren’t “contributed” in a last-ditch effort to save face after unsuccessful attempts to monetize a proprietary version.

Furthermore, there’s real money to be made with an Open Source product…if you know what you’re doing. Look at Red Hat: nicely profitable, with nearly a $10B market cap. They make a lot of money selling Linux…or, more accurately, by selling a Linux “distro”, a suite of products and services that surround the free Linux kernel. They make money the iTunes way: Customers won’t pay for tunes that are otherwise (more or less legally) freely available, but they will pay for services around the music.

So is Open Source the way to go for webOS? I don’t think so.

Let’s look at Symbian, a product that’s similar to webOS in its complicated history: Born at Psion; moved to a Nokia-Motorola-Ericsson-Matsushita-Psion joint venture; thrown into Open Source by the Symbian Foundation, an even more complicated JV. Lately, things have become even murkier as Symbian appears to have been “outsourced to Accenture”.

Adobe’s Flex is another kicked-to-the-kerb example. When HTML5 appeared to displace Flash, Adobe officially open-sourced Flex to the non-profit Apache Software Foundation.

Even the success of Firefox, certainly the most visible Open Source application, might not be as indisputable as we first thought.  With net assets of $120M at the end of 2009, the “non-profit” Mozilla Foundation, Firefox’s progenitor, has been the great Open Source success story. 2009 revenues were $104 million, most of which was generated by sending searches to Google from the Firefox browser. In other words, Google has been Firefox’ sugar daddy as the Mountain View company battles Microsoft’s Internet Explorer quasi-monopoly.

But things have changed. Google Chrome is in its ascendancy; Google points to security holes in Firefox. Firefox served at Google’s pleasure, but is no longer needed.

Not exactly a bona fides Open Source success.

(Ironically — or at least amusingly — Meg Whitman singled out Firefox as an example of Open Source success in a post-announcement interview. To add tech credentials to appearance, she had HP director, venture investor, and Netscape founder Marc Andreessen sitting by her side. We won’t dwell on the admission that trotting out Andreessen represents.)

A closer look at HP’s official statements makes things even less clear:

HP will engage the open source community to help define the charter of the open source project under a set of operating principles:
. The goal of the project is to accelerate the open development of the webOS platform
. HP will be an active participant and investor in the project
. Good, transparent and inclusive governance to avoid fragmentation
. Software will be provided as a pure open source project
HP also will contribute ENYO, the application framework for webOS, to the community in the near future along with a plan for the remaining components of the user space.
Beginning today, developers and customers are invited to provide input and suggestions at http://developer.palm.com/blog/.

This is language designed to obfuscate rather than clarify, filled with qualifiers and weasel words. Read it again and ask yourself: Is there even one actionable sentence? are we given numbers, dates, some measurable commitment?

No. Instead, we get lame HR-like phrases:

. HP will engage the open source community — in what kind of embrace?
. active participant and investor — by how much and when?
. transparent and inclusive governance — why not opaque and exclusionary?
. a pure open source project — as opposed to yesterday’s impure and proprietary?
. near future… along with a plan — we don’t know, we’re just saying

Nowhere does Whitman state how much money, how many people, or when things might coalesce.

Allow me to translate:

We tried and tried and found no takers for webOS. Android is too strong, our old partner Microsoft leaned on us, and webOS is seen as damaged goods. We used the Open Source exit to get kudos from vocal enthusiasts. We know it’s cynical, but what do you want us to say? Good bye and good luck?

The charade (and cynicism) doesn’t stop there. Now we’re told HP might make webOS-powered tablets. Not in 2012, that year’s roadmap has been inked, HP is committed to Windows 8 tablets. Maybe in 2013. That, ladies and gentlemen, attests to HP’s unwavering commitment to webOS.

By 2013 there will be tablets coming from all the usual suspects (except RIM): Samsung, Googorola and other Android players, Amazon, Microsoft’s OEMs and newly acquired subsidiary Nokia…and, of course, Apple’s iPad HD2.

When I hear Whitman make such statements, I’m reminded of the old joke about the difference between a computer salesperson and a used-car salesman: The used-car gent knows he’s lying. For my alma mater’s sake, for HP’s good, let’s hope Meg Whitman knows she’s putting us on.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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