The poison of arrogance

July 4, 2010 – 7:07 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Arrogance is the most toxic waste-product of technology companies. Past examples abound: IBM, AT&T, Microsoft… All their hauteur got them were expensive antitrust actions and customer backlash. Last week, we got yet another example of the insufferable behavior still prevailing in the high-tech world — with the to-be-expected response from regulators and markets.

Navx is a €1m a year French company whose business is speed radar location databases. In France, it is illegal to sell or use selling radar detectors, devices that pick the microwave or laser radiation emitted by speed guns and automated cameras. But providing speed trap location data is lawful. In fact, the French Interior Ministry maintains a public database for fixed radars. And companies such as Navx, or various GPS makers supply location information for mobile radars.

To sell its product, Navx relies massively on Google AdWords: the company buys keywords that guarantee a high ranking in search results associated to terms like “avertisseur radar” (radar warning). Over the years, Navx invested a large part of its revenue in keywords purchases, up to €400,000 a year. For Navx, like for millions of other businesses all over the world, the result was a massive dependency on Google systems. For Navx, Google worked very well: in October 2009, 69% of new subscribers revenue came from AdWords. The company was still losing money, but growth was promising. Then, Google pulled the plug, arguing Navx business was illegal. Google’s ukase came at the worst possible time: Navx was about to complete its second round of funding. The company lost most of its new revenue stream, causing investors to get cold feet, in turn causing Navx to lay people off, and so on.  Navx argues the legality argument was a mere pretense: Google had a real, ulterior motive for the ejecting the speed trap location ads from its system. Navx believes its tiny but growing service came to be viewed as competition for Google’s own geolocation services. That’s a possibility.

Such a story is typical of Google’s opaque world. Countless examples are offered in books, in newspaper and magazine stories where businesses went belly up because some  geeks in Mountain View turned the dials of an unseen algorithm, without the slightest regard for the impact on the very businesses that pay their salaries. Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (31)

Drop that -phone!

July 4, 2010 – 7:02 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

I’ll explain the ‘’-’’ in a moment. Today’s piece is about the power of words to shape thought, to distort, to mislead. More specifically, I contend “smartphone” is the wrong word for the new genre of mobile devices.

I’m not completely naïve, however. In the end, I’ll agree there is little chance we’ll settle on another word.

Once upon a time, philosophers held thought preceded words: you thought of something and then struggled to find the right words for that gem. Later, psychologists of the twentieth century persuasion, came to think, no, to say words preceded thought: one could only think of thoughts for which they already possessed words for. As much as I like our dear Lacanians, some of whom hover around the Valley, the word ineffable leaves them… speechless.

Devoid of a clean theory, we can wallow in examples.

The most visible one is the PC, the personal computer. Derivative thought first gave us “microcomputers”, because they were “like” minicomputers, themselves “like” the only serious computers, mainframes — only smaller. Next, because size matters, we’d get nano computers, pico computers, femto computers…

Fortunately, the gestalt, the user experience won: This is my computer, as opposed to the institution’s. The beginnings weren’t always easy: I recall a book called “You bought a personal what?”, published in the late seventies. I also remember our collective indignation at Apple when, in 1981, IBM boldly misappropriated the concept and introduced The Personal Computer and proceeded to win the market, that is until Microsoft gave it to the clones. The P word worked and won.

Decades ago, Motorola was the king of cell phones. Cell was a good word because it pointed to the amazingly powerful innovation of cellular telephony. Previously, mobile phones called a radio station and kept using the same frequency as the user moved around. This severely limited the number of users and forced mobile phones to have powerful radios to stay connected over long distances. With cellular telephony, frequencies  were reusable as users were magically handed over from one lower-powered radio station to another as they drove around, leaving the frequency behind, ready for another user.

The Motorola name came to be associated with radios of all kinds, from cars to the Moon. I recall Motorola execs calling their successfully miniaturized cell phones of the late eighties “little radios”. They were rightly proud of their technical prowess, I owned several StarTacs and MicroTacs. But when cell phones gained PDA features, Motorola’s clock got cleaned by the likes of RIM (Blackberry) and Palm (Treo). For a long while, Motorola’s culture remained backward-focused on the phone part of the customer experience. The new phone boss, Sanjay Jha, is now an Android convert: a couple of impressive Droid devices have put Motorola back in the race. Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (13)

Le Monde’s escape velocity

June 27, 2010 – 4:17 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

In rocket scientist parlance, escape velocity is the speed needed to break free from Earth’s gravitational field. Last Friday, by an overwhelming majority, Le Monde’s staff voted to escape the black hole of French politics — or, at least, to give their paper the  best chance to do so.

Disassembling the utterly complex chain of ownership control at Le Monde would take most of this column. Let’s just say the newsroom, which historically controlled 22% of the company, gave a resounding 90% vote for a triumvirate including the head of Lazard France, Matthieu Pigasse (41); the co-founder of Yves-Saint-Laurent, Pierre Bergé (80); and Xavier Niel (43), the founder of Free, France’s largest non state-related telecommunication company. Together, the investment banker, the philanthropist, and the telco maverick are likely to become the main shareholders of the most prestigious French newspaper — one that is facing a severe cash crisis (see last wee Note Le Monde on the Brink). The journalist’s choice was supported by most constituencies in a position to influence the group’s fate. Only one voting body chose the other bid; technically it can trigger a deadlock for the ultimate vote at the board level, scheduled for this Monday; this is a highly unlikely scenario, one that would immediately lead to a bankruptcy filing.

Two years ago, such choice would have ben unthinkable. On paper, the other bid, led by Claude Perdriel — owner of the left-leaning newsweekly Le Nouvel Observateur —, supported by the Spanish group Prisa and by France Telecom-Orange, would have got the prize. But their offer got mired in politics, and Le Monde’s staff reacted strongly against it.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s involvement doomed the Perdriel bids. When he summoned Le Monde’s current CEO, Eric Fottorino, to warn him, it felt like George Bush telling the New York Times’CEO: “You have two choices, here is my preference, be careful.” For any journalist, this type of ultimatum is the perfect repellent. Especially when, hoping to influence the decision, the executive branch pushes every lever.

To understand how it works, here, you have to keep in mind how the executive branch keeps the French medias under the tightest possible leash. When a government-friendly columnist is unhappy about his employer, he calls Sarkozy’s chief of staff (nicknamed the vice-president) who, in turn, calls the head of the broadcast network to express his concern. It always works like a dream, especially when the CEO of a network (radio or TV) is a government appointee or, for a private company, when the main shareholder is a FON — Friend Of Nicolas). Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (4)

Intel’s bold bet against ARM: visionary or myopic?

June 27, 2010 – 3:50 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

Today, Intel’s x86 architecture reigns supreme on PCs (and millions of servers, such as Google’s, that use the PC organ bank). Anywhere else, the ARM processors have won; they’re in billions of devices, regular cell phones, smartphones, entertainment devices, navigation systems and legions of other embedded applications.

Understandably, perhaps, Intel didn’t want to play in the low end of the processor market. But we now see the emergence of RPCs, Really Personal Computers, more commonly called smartphones. Nokia, RIM, Apple and the fast-rising army of Android licensees all use high-end ARM derivatives.

Intel’s answer is a family of low-end x86 devices, Atom processors. So far, Atom processors haven’t been used in smartphones, only in netbooks.

‘Wait’, says Intel, ‘over time, our proven semiconductor design and manufacturing capabilities will allow us to reduce the power consumption and cost of x86 processors. That’s how we’ll win this emerging market, just as we won the PC.’

Easier said than done. The older and more complicated x86 architecture is inherently disadvantaged against the more modern ARM architecture. And, as we’ll see, there is more to this fight than semiconductor design and manufacturing prowess.

For context, let’s go to Mary Meeker’s latest (June 7th, 2010) Internet Trends presentation.

By 2012, she predicts, smartphones shipments will exceed PC unit volumes. Approximately 480 million smartphones versus 430 million PCs, going to 650 million next generation devices by 2013:

Just as important, by next year, smartphones unit volumes will overtake “feature phones”:

Smartphones, feature phones? Without losing ourselves in taxonomy games, let’s turn to the popular Blackberry devices: they are good examples of the smartphone category. Anything less is a feature phone, sometimes called a regular phone, or a “dumb phone”. Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (17)

Le Monde on The Brink

June 20, 2010 – 11:19 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Within two weeks, the French newspaper Le Monde will run out of cash. By this Monday at noon, candidates to the takeover of the most prestigious French daily will have disclosed their offers. By June 28, the staff will vote and make the final decision for the fate of the 66 years-old paper.

More importantly, the newspaper’s independence will be under severe pressure.

Le Monde is the textbook example of the evolution of French press over the last years:

  • A steady erosion in readership.
  • A lack of budget discipline, made worse by loose governance.
  • The core newsroom’s reluctance to support the digital strategy
  • The collective certainty the “brand” was too beautiful to fail and that a deep-pocketed philanthropist will inevitably show up at the right time to save the company.
  • An difficulty to invest into the future, to test new ideas, to built prototypes, to coopt key talent or to invest in decisive technologies.
  • A bottomless investment in the heavy-industry part of the supply chain, in costly printing facilities.
  • An excessive reliance on public subsidies which account for about 10% of the industry’s entire revenue. Compared to Sweden, French newspapers have 3 times less readers, but each one gets 5 times more subsidies.

To a large extent, these characteristics are shared by most French newspapers. This could explain the dire situation of the Gallic press. As of today, four major properties are on the block, or urgently looking for saviors:

  • Le Monde seeks at least €100m (for a first round).
  • Le Parisien, a popular daily, is for sale; although quite good from an editorial perspective, it is not profitable and its family ownership wants to refocus on sports-related assets.
  • La Tribune, the n°2 business daily, is looking for a majority investor.
  • Liberation is also facing a  cash stress.

Le Monde’s situation is by far the most critical and the most emblematic. Here are the key elements : In 2009, the Groupe Le Monde had a revenue of €390m, an operating profit of €2.2m, and a net loss of €25 m. It is crumbling under €100m in debt, the result of a failed acquisition strategy. Its arcane shareholder structure includes Lagardère Group for 17%; the Spanish group Prisa (owner of El Pais) for 15%; the newsmagazine Le Nouvel Observateur for 5%; its staff for 22% and various other entities for the rest. Its main assets are : The daily Le Monde and its weekly magazine; Le Monde Interactif (including Le Monde.fr); three other magazines; and a printing plant. Over the last three years, it looked like this:

Over the last fifteen years, Le Monde’s management proved unable to come up with a cogent strategy. The group tried to expand into the regional press and into the magazine sectors without any coherence behind such moves. The only tangible achievement was the creation of Le Monde Interactif, this against most of an internet-adverse newsroom. In fact, Le Monde’s digital unit had to handle 34% of its ownership to the Lagardère Group in order to get sufficient funding. Read More »

Posted in journalism, newspapers | Comments (42)

Science Fiction: Nokia goes Android

June 20, 2010 – 11:17 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

OPK, that is Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, Nokia’s CEO calls his new head of mobile devices, Anssi Vanjoki in his office, hidden inside the company’s research center at 995 Page Mill Road, in Palo Alto, California. On his desk, three devices: a Nokia N900, a Motorola Droid and an iPhone.

‘Anssi, we’re hosed.
I assumed the dumb customer position and bought these three devices all by myself.
For our N900, I had to order on-line, the locals don’t carry our Maemo device. See what happened…’
He turns to his iMac, [this is science fiction, remember], types Nokia in the search window and gets this:

Now, a click on the “sponsored link” gets this:

.

A blank window. [This is not science fiction].
Anssi protests: ‘This must be a problem with Apple’s browser!’ But, no, the bug repeats itself with Chrome, Firefox, even with the Nordic Opera.
OPK continues:
‘We pay for this sponsored link and it gets us to a blank page.
Either Google is after us, or we’re incompetent, or both.

Anyway, I found our on-line store, a bit too complicated for a user like me. So, I saved time and a few dollars buying my own N900 from Amazon, one click, much simpler. By the way, Anssi, what are we doing selling, or trying to sell, or trying to give away a Windows 7 netbook? Don’t answer.
Then I needed to get a SIM for my $459 unlocked N900. I went  to the big AT&T store down the road. Boy, these guys make it too complicated and they don’t fully support the N900. Fortunately, things get better on University Avenue, I’ve done all my shopping there. First, the friendly people at T-Mobile got me a SIM, installed it, checked everything, even the micro-SD card I bought.
Next block: Verizon, a little less friendly, a little slower but they got me a Droid under 30 mins. Three blocks down, the Apple store. They were a little surprised I wanted an iPhone as their new device was coming out “Real Soon Now”. The manager came out, a Turkish engineer who recognized my name on the driver’s license, smiled and set me up in less than 15 minutes. You should see their portable sales terminal, all the sales people carry one on their hip, an iPhone with a scanner and a credit card reader.
How come we don’t make one? Don’t answer. Read More »

Posted in hardware | Comments (110)

iPad Media Apps: can do better

June 13, 2010 – 9:01 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

It’s time for a first assessment of a few iPad media applications. To sum up: a) most are disappointing;  b) no need to worry. Instead of subjectively pointing fingers at hits and misses, let’s rise to a bird’s eye view and see if we can understand why some apps work and why others don’t. Then we’ll proceed to a wish list for the next round of new and revised apps.

No one expected competition to come straight from… Safari, the web browser that comes with the iPad. Last week, while planning this column, I asked friends in the industry how they use their tablet and which their preferred media apps are. Many of them mentioned Safari as one of their favorites. Jacob Weisberg, chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group e-mailed back : “You don’t need the apps! The Safari browser is a great way to navigate magazines and newspapers. As I wrote in that column, the PDF-type magazine apps feel like a huge step backwards – remember Zinio? I don’t like being locked in a walled garden within a walled garden. But I hold out hope for the next generation of apps [Slate is about to release its own, inspired by BBC and NPR]“.
Alan Mutter who writes the excellent Newsosaur blog, was finishing his own column (he’s more like a Friday guy) and said “[Safari] makes it possible to access a beautiful rendition of any site on the web, including those operated by publishers offering sub-par iPad apps”, he was referring explicitly to Time Magazine and the New York Times.
Marion Maneker, contributor to Slate’s business website The Big Money, responded fully in a post discussing his favorite apps but underlined the advantages of Safari: “Right now many newspapers are better read through the websites. It’s great to be able to save the site URL as its own app-tile on the iPad’s Home screen”.
Even Alan Rusbridger, the editor-in-chief of The Guardian said in an interview, a couple of months ago, how he was surprised to see how well his site renders on the iPad. (That could be one of the reasons why 2ergo, the company that designed the excellent Guardian app for the iPhone, is not rushing to deliver for the iPad).

So, that’s the first idea: simply browsing the web through Safari appears to seriously challenge publishers’ efforts to create good applications.

That could explain why many apps appear stuck in two weird modes. The first one involves encapsulating the web experience into an app, and coming up with a design closer to the original paper. For the second mode, newspapers and magazines choose to replicate the carbon-based reading experience on the iPad with PDF-based reading applications. Not exactly a great leap forward either. But it is convenient: over the last weeks, I found myself buying more newspapers on my iPad than I did on newsstands.

It works fine as long as three conditions are met.

- The price has to be right. When a physical newspaper costs €1.30-1.50, it doesn’t make sense to demand €1.59 on-line for exactly the same content. Apple’s rigid pricing policy doesn’t help in the matter. In the Euro zone for instance, a newspaper will sport one of two prices: €0.79 or €1.59 (which translates into $0.99 and $1.99 in the US store). Many editors find this pricing either too low or too expensive, especially when, in a country like France, a 20% VAT applies on digitally delivered content – which undermines the profitability. Most of went for the €0.79 price, which is a good thing.
The price issue is especially critical critical for magazines. For glossies, the equation is pretty simple: for the same price, it must offer more. Otherwise, it’s a much better deal to pickup a copy at the newsstand. Except for foreign publications: Vanity Fair costs $4.95 in the US and £4.20 in the UK, versus  €8 to €9 in Paris; this is a case where the iPad version of the magazine is a good bargain. Read More »

Posted in mobile internet | Tagged | Comments (23)

Thus spake Steve Jobs: The PC isn’t dead yet

June 13, 2010 – 8:59 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

Daniel Lyons, the Newsweek tech writer notorious for his Fake Steve Jobs blog, penned an epistolary piece last week (R.I.P., Macintosh) in which he asks and answers the question: “Is Apple ignoring its signature line of computers and laptops? Yup.”

The columnist claims that with the iPhone and the iPad as the Dear Leader’s new pets, Steve Jobs has kicked the Mac to the curb (or kerb for our British readers). Lyons backs his claim with the following evidence: Apple’s 2010 WWDC was focused on the iPhone OS only; there were no Best Applications awards for the Mac, only for iPhone/iPad apps; and, drum roll, the iPhone OS was renamed iOS (the name is licensed from Cisco, just as the iPhone moniker was).

Lyons may be onto something, but in his desperate quest for page views at Newsweek (itself kicked to the curb by its soon former owner, the Washington Post Company) our columnist has yielded to the crass motives and hyperbole he loves to lampoon.

Yes, Steve Jobs said the PC (including the Mac) isn’t “the future”, but he didn’t go on to euthanize it.

Let’s go back to the evening of June 1st, 2010. We’re at the D8 conference discussed here last week. Steve Jobs is interviewed by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher; you can find the entire 95-minute video here.
(Sorry, iPad users, it’s Flash…but, wait…nevermind. Although the interview shows up as Flash on my antique personal computer, when I watch it on my iPad, behold!, the site detects the iPad client and spews an H.264 video stream. We can take this as a sign that the WSJ doesn’t want to miss the advertising revenue of 100 million iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad devices out there, and as a preview of what other sites will do, as well. And perhaps it’s a problem with my old desktop machine or older eyes, but the video look better on the iPad than it does on my PC.)

I’m watching the video as I write this. It completes and, in places, corrects my recollection of the event. Whatever one thinks of Steve Jobs—and the video won’t change many minds—the conversation contains a number of gems, such as Steve’s pithy view of the enterprise market (between 28:30 and 29:15), his take on the Adobe controversy, his pronouncement of carriers as “orifices” (that was a few years ago, recalled by Walt for laughs), the importance of editorial functions (Jobs doesn’t want us to “descend into a nation of bloggers”), how he looks at his job (around 59:00), and more. I know an hour and a half is a lot, but pay attention to what’s said and not said and, just as important, the face and body language.
The bit about the future of the PC comes between minutes 45 and 51. There, Apple’s CEO lays out his vision of the post-PC era in a string of very carefully weighed statements, interspersed with personal insights into the changes in user interaction brought about by the new very personal devices.

As Apple unties the software platform from the iPhone, one can imagine a number of iOS-powered devices in its future. Apple won’t necessarily follow HP’s example, but the latter has made it clear that they’ll use the newly-acquired Palm WebOS in devices such as printers. This is a high volume business, one where the traditional embedded software is user-hostile. Just imagine a Palm Pre screen grafted onto a printer. Read More »

Posted in hardware | Tagged | Comments (22)

Mediocrity is king

June 6, 2010 – 9:37 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Last week, the Huffington Post reached a new apex. Viewed from France, where ads are localized, its home page carried a remarkably tasteful ad: a farting application for the iPhone (see below). As prudery still rules in American media, you’ll notice that the farter’s exhaust aperture has been blurred. Fine.

A quick précis: France is a country of 65m people, with a modern tech infrastructure. Internet to the home is faster than in the United States and way cheaper than in Australia. The cellular networks work even better than the AT&T’s, and the three carriers use a single worldwide standard, GSM. Its internet population numbers 45m, a fast growing proportion of which speaks serviceable English, good enough to read the parts of the Huffington Post that are not written in Shakespearian English.

With this in mind, let’s focus on two interesting aspects of the HuffPo advertising mishap.

First, it shows how advertising is sold: by the bulk. The HuffPo sales people’s intellectual horizon doesn’t extend very far. This is what I call the Burundi Syndrome, one where American companies see the ROW (Rest of the World) as an aggregation of second class people. Consider Apple’s geographical definition for instance: its London-based EMEA division encompasses Europe, Middle-East, Africa. A vast zone ranging from Burkina-Faso to Sweden — where the average student is way more educated than its American counterpart and where the per capita GDP is just 20% lower than in the US (OK, Burkina Faso — I’ve been there too — has a long way to go).
Coming back to the Huffington Post, the choice of a below grade ad served on a ROW market demonstrates a tragic inability to understand the true power of the internet, i.e, making contents globally accessible to a solvent population.
That’s the first distinction between great media brands and cheap ones. Neither the New York Times, nor The Sydney Morning Herald nor the Guardian would delegate the sale of their non-domestic ads without some sort of guarantee covering the advertisers’ relevance.

Second, and more importantly. By allowing such a degradation in its premium advertising space (a home page is supposed to be just that), the HuffPo acknowledges that its content is, in fact, cheap. It therefore admits that volume, rather than targeting or relevance, drives the value of its content.

And volumes the Huffington Post delivers. A lot. According to ComScore (which is blessed with the rigor of a Greek public accountant), the Huff Post cruises at 26m unique visitors per month. Other sources agree on more than 20m UV, which is above the New York Times (19m UV/ Nielsen), and twice as much as the Washington Post.

How do I dare question such an audience success? Simply because, in my not-so-humble-opinion, The Huffington Post is not, per se, a news organization. Its content relies upon on a mixed bag of high profile bloggers, drawn from Arianna Huffington’s vast personal network; these individuals deliver thoughts of varying depth, ranging from fun stuff to leftovers quickly produced by an obscure assistant. Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (30)

Jobs, Ballmer, and Zuckerberg: Three Fixated Leaders at D8

June 6, 2010 – 9:36 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

by Jean-Louis Gassée

The eighth installment of the Wall Street Journal’s annual D: All Things Digital conference was held last week outside Los Angeles, your author in attendance. You’ll find full coverage of the proceedings here, and the speakers list here; it was an impressive roster, du beau linge, as we say in France.
Staged as a series of interviews conducted by Wall Street Journal high-tech guru Walt Mossberg and conference co-producer Kara Swisher, D8 brings us “straight-up conversations with the most influential figures in media and technology.”
On the D8 site, the one-hour fireside chats are mercifully chopped into digestible ten-minute segments. The D8 audience is limited to 500 people, a cross-section of high-tech execs and entrepreneurs, VCs, media investment bankers and attorneys, a few Hollywood types genuinely involved in bleeding-edge tech, some pained-but-valiant old-media reporters, and a handful of bloggers who are able to pay the stiff conference fee ($5K). Discouragingly, there were very few Europeans—discouraging when so much of our future is fought and decided within a five-mile radius that encompasses Palo Alto, Cupertino, and Mountain View, where HP, Apple, Google, and Facebook are. Below are my notes from the show about three fixated leaders: The two Steves (Jobs and Ballmer) and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs opened the conference with the only interview of the night. True to form, he tells us Apple will continue to design and create devices that provide the best user experience. He doesn’t care what the pundits say, he measures the win/lose proposition one customer at a time. That’s why he’ll spare no effort, avoid no fight in preventing anything—carriers, enterprise sales, Adobe—from adulterating the relationship between Apple and its customers.

The numbers support him—the iPad sold 2 million units in its first 60 days on the market—and the customer satisfaction surveys (JD Powers and Consumer Reports) validate his strategy. With the iPhone and iPad, Jobs has envisioned a new genre of very personal computing (see the March and May 2010 Monday Notes on this topic).

With this coming week’s Apple Worldwide Developer’s Conference, a new iPhone, and more goodies around the corner, Apple’s future looks secure… unless you start worrying about the side-effects of the unrelenting focus on the device and the user experience. Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments (11)