Balkanizing the Web

May 2, 2010 – 12:14 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Creeping Balkanization is the internet’s worst enemy. As worldwide literacy grows exponentially, for the web, such expansion results in increasing pressure from corporate interests and regulatory nationalisms. Rising from its arcane beginnings as a DARPA research project, the net has become a symbol of borderless communication between individuals and of unlimited access to knowledge. Unfortunately, the net is about to become a heavily controlled environment, serving two classes of citizens: a dominant class that sets the rules (technological, legal and commercial) and the underclass of citizens and consumers.

Consider these two macro trends:

The first one stems from the world’s linguistic evolution. As of today, there are about one billion English-speaking people worldwide, half of which are native speakers. This latter proportion keeps growing as education improves; this growth reinforces the prevalence of English as the main internet lingua. With 500m people, English accounts for 27.5% of the connected population. Chinese makes the second language group with 400m people, 22.6% of the net population (and the mother of all government-mandated restrictions).

Beyond that, only the Spanish group (7.8% of the internet population) and the Japanese (5.3%) are above the 5% threshold. French accounts for 3.2% of internet users, with a global number of 57m.
Asia’s expanding literacy involves not only national languages (such as Mandarin or Hindi), but also the learning of English. In fact, the “use” of English could be much larger than shown in official statistics. Back in 2006, according to linguistics professor Braj Kachru, the “use” of English, as he called it, involved more than 500m people in India and China combined (see story in the Asian Times).

In many European countries, teenagers’ exposure to the English-speaking internet (for example through illegal downloads of movies and series) is a powerful learning vector.

The second trend involves the telecommunication infrastructure. The physical world is increasingly connected. Take optical fiber: its 2009 global market (outside China) represented 171m of fiber-kilometers, a 22% growth versus 2008 ; and that doesn’t reflect each fiber’s capacity to carry more data as carriers use more sophisticated modulation/demodulation circuitry. Read More »

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Very Personal Computing

May 2, 2010 – 12:11 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

The center of financial gravity in the computing world—the Center of Money—has shifted. No longer directed at the PC, the money pump now gushes full blast at the smartphones market. One of my colleagues, Bob Ackerman, calls smartphones the very personal computers. Measured by size and potential, they’re both smaller and bigger than today’s PCs.

The Math

Consider the numbers: HP, the world’s foremost PC maker, sold $10B of “Personal Systems” in its last reported quarter:

(turn “on” display image in your mail reader
to see the graphics)

Despite their premier position, HP isn’t making much PC money: $500M, 5% Operating Profit. (The full HP Q1 report in PDF can be found here.)

Now let’s turn to Apple’s most recent quarter. Smartphones constituted 40% of the company’s revenue:

When we add up the numbers, we see that the iPhone = Mac + iPods. And this rough calculation “misunderestimates” the weight of the iPhone OS. In the more mature iPod category, the iPod Touch (the iPhone without a phone) grew by 63% year-to-year according to Apple COO Tim Cook in the most recent earnings conference call. (Full Q2 2010 SEC filing available here.) Read More »

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Reconciling efficiency with serendipity

April 26, 2010 – 8:31 am | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

For digital media publishers, Design is the biggest challenge. Business model is king, of course, but it needs strong design to reign. The same goes for content. Without clever navigation, after a quick stunt on the home page, a good story might die buried deep inside the bowels of a site before realizing its full potential. (Smartly enough, Slate.com used to call “compost” its stacks of forgotten stories). In this regard, many web structures are lethal: they give way too much weight and visibility to novelty, at the expense of relevancy.

After more than fifteen years of internet presence, many online publications are still having trouble moving past the newspaper metaphor. Columns, pages, sections, vertical scrolling…, the old-world graphical newspaper attributes still rule the web and contribute to a quasi-failure on three critical counts:

#1 The identity test. Check for yourself. Take the home page of a dozen online newspapers; once you’ve cut off the header displaying the publication’s title, they become extremely difficult to differentiate from one another. To say nothing of connecting to the paper’s brand. General grid, typography, colors palette, are almost all alike. Of course, the web lowest denominator rule is largely to blame – but there is more.

#2  The personality test. Browse every physical newspaper and see how you “get it”.
First, you’re quickly able to capture of the news cycle’s dominance and its intensity. The size of headlines and illustrations, the space devoted to stories, the angles, all give you a clear idea of the day’s flavor.
Second, you’ll be able to quickly assess the publication’s political leaning, again by evaluating the hierarchy of treatments. Because of the computer screen’s narrow funnel, as opposed to the carbon-based paper UI, it is much more difficult to do so for an online publication.

#3 The serendipity test, i.e. the ability to enjoy something that we were not looking for, a sort of semi-accidental discovery. To me, this might be the most important feature/function.
A print publication, magazine or daily, carries a mix of contents that, in turn, leads to a collection of experiences. I pick the publication because of the implicit contract between the publisher and me, a contract based on trust and expectations.
Trust combines editorial judgment and execution; it can fluctuate. A newspaper can become less trustworthy if its editorial leadership weakens. Expectations carry the serendipity factor: I know this newspaper is going to trigger my curiosity without taking me into totally unchartered territories. I take this paper for its business section to see how it covers the Goldman Sachs scandal, but I will find this fantastic profile of an unknown tycoon, or this opinion piece that challenges my views on a particular subject, but is well balanced, well written. Read More »

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iPad: Which way do you lean?

April 26, 2010 – 8:31 am | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

The iPad is a strange animal—we don’t know where it fits, yet. Is it a laptop replacement? Is it an entertainment device? Can I do “real work” on it or is it merely a brobdingagian iPod Touch, a more colorful Kindle with better email and Web browsing?

Spiritual traditions associate the angle of the spine with the state of mind. We use the phrases “lean back” and “lean forward” to differentiate between “production” and “consumption” activities. When I write, I lean forward; when I watch The Fugitive, I lean back in my airline seat. Laptops are mostly lean forward devices, even if we watch the occasional movie on the road. Is the iPad a lean back device?
Apple’s ads for the new product, on TV and Silicon Valley billboards, depict lean back use with (insufferably clean-looking) models in lounge attitudes as they surf, flip pages, and select videos. And their posture doesn’t change when they tap their way through the iWork for iPad productivity suite. What, I’m supposed to do work while reclining like the models in the ads? It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation that illustrates the tablet PC’s uneasy positioning. If you don’t offer an office suite you’re pilloried: This product is useless! But if you deploy the obligatory word processor+spreadsheet+presentation triad your ergonomics/UI contradictions are exposed.

(The apps in the iWork suite—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote–show great promise, which is a way to say that they’re imperfect. See last week’s comments on file sharing.)

Apple’s properly black microfiber iPad Case accessory valiantly struggles against the posture incongruity. It folds into a lectern and offers a better typing angle than when the device rests on your thighs:

The lectern works reasonably well in landscape mode, but shows its kludgy side when you rotate it to portrait. The raised top side becomes the left side, still raised. Ah well…

My occasional frustration with the iPad’s shortcomings is partly due to their contrast with the device’s shining qualities. For me, the half skeptic/half enthusiast, the charm hasn’t worn out after three weeks. The iPad is fast, the touch UI is very well executed, the battery lasts forever, and I can fly through “office tasks” such as pruning, reading and replying to email, or traversing the fifty or so blogs I follow on a daily basis.

When we turn to printing, however, we see another illustration of the iPad’s unsettled position. At home or in the office, I’m on a WiFi network that lets me see the printers on my PC or Mac. Windows 7 and OS X can find and connect to them quite easily so I’d expect to see my printers from my iPad, as well. But no. If I want to print from my iPad, the simplest solution—and trust me, I’ve tried many—is to email my file to a PC and print the attachment.

Just as on the iPhone, peripherals aren’t part of the picture. It’s part of the iPhone/iPad ethos: No peripherals, no need to get the right driver. Move right along, sir, nothing to drive here. But that hauteur hasn’t thwarted enterprising geeks. On the iPhone they came up with a number of file sharing and printing workarounds. I bought a few and wasn’t too impressed. On the iPad, I tried PrintCentral and Fax Print & Share Pro.

They both try to bridge the device’s limitations but, in my certified klutz experience, they create more problems than they solve. Network connections break, documents don’t print or else print gibberish, to say nothing of instructions such as “Enter your iPad’s address on computer: http://192.168.1.122:8080.” Right…so much for simplifying computing.

PrintCentral asks you to install a software module (WePrint Server) on your PC or Mac so it can take your iPad document and print it “normally”. And so it does, if you can manage your way through a forest of menus and settings. On the other hand, PrintCentral does provide file sharing. I can download a file from a server (I tried both Word and Pages files), open it in one of the applications the iPad supports, and then edit and save it. This is in contrast with the iPad’s native file sharing where I can click—pardon—tap on a document residing in (remote) file server, such as iDisk, and view its contents, but nothing more. Better than nothing but not good enough for production purposes.

The other app I tried, Fax Print & Share Pro (beware of longish names on anything, cars, banking services, software) is even more ambitious. It purports to print directly to my Brother 2170W wireless networked printer, but no deal—it prints gibberish, even if I carefully re-install it (I’ve been trained on 12 years of Windows) and select the recommended “IP Printing” variant.
(As a side note, I’m partial to Brother printers. They’re made by a Japanese sewing machine company, thus the delicate mechanics of moving paper inside the beast tend to work. Further, they don’t insist on installing hundreds of megabytes of self-serving crapware on my machines, and the drivers are updated nicely via Apple’s Software Update channel.)
The Fax part of Fax Print & Share Pro comes with four free fax transmissions. I used up three of them trying to get it to work. On the first try, it faxed the cover page but not the document. Second attempt: No cover page and the app told me that the file couldn’t be faxed. Finally, I tried a simpler .rtf document. It worked, but the impression had been made. Third time wasn’t a charm.
I haven’t tried the app’s Fedex Online Printing module. Click on the link and you’ll see that “strange” file formats aren’t supported. As we say in America: Some restrictions may apply.

The diversity of supported and unsupported file types gets us back to the driver problem, one that bedevils normal humans—and could $$pell an opportunity for Apple and others. The printer driver converts your file’s contents—what you see on the screen—into instructions that the printer understands. The problem is that files are built in a bewildering but necessary variety of ways, and there’s no real standardization in printing.
When you see a printer on the network and say Print, the document ought to print. It’s almost as simple as that on a personal computer, even if the chain is sometimes fragile and a link breaks. The iPad isn’t there yet, but if I can see a network printer on the device, “driverless” printing for The Rest of Us can’t be too far behind. I’m not assuming the iPad will ever offer all the printing capabilities that we “enjoy” on a PC/Mac—that would ruin the simple (too simple, some say) iPad user experience. However, I believe the day isn’t too far off when I’ll be able to open and save a document from/to MobileMe’s iDisk without a third party app. (Today’s iDisk app works on the iPad, although it’s still the small screen iPhone version.)
The next step for Apple or an enterprising developer would be to take my file, convert it somewhere in the cloud, and then send it to my printer without asking me to deal with the plumbing. It’s more complicated than I make it sound but, as the PrintCentral example shows, we’re already doing it locally. Replace my local PC acting as an intermediary between my iPad and my printer with a remote server and we have direct printing. Present tense used with poetic license.

As for the iPad’s louche identity, nothing that a couple of million units won’t make taxonomically correct.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Data Schizophrenia

April 18, 2010 – 7:28 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Let’s discuss a developing data management contradiction. People thinking in strategic terms about the monetization of digital medias, publishers, marketers, are unanimous. Collecting and poring over data has become more important than ever.
That’s one trend.

The other involves the gatekeepers. As I briefly explained last week, we now face a small club of high tech giants — Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo and Apple — who, over the years, acquired an unprecedented ability to gather and process data. As competition is heating up among them, the data they’ll be able to get will continue to increase in tactical and strategical value. As a corollary, they are increasingly inclined to keep such data close to the vest.

The latest example came up with the April 8th launch of Apple’s iAd initiative for the iPhone platform. As Steve Jobs delicately puts it, mobile ads “suck”, his own words for what we’ve been saying all along in the Monday Note (see The future of content navigation). Digital ads suffers from an inherent flaw: they are designed to take the viewer away from the content (again: see Jobs’ keynote speech for details, go directly to the 44 minutes mark to watch the ad chapter). Hence the solution envisioned by the Cupertino boys: embedding the ad within the application – which, in the process, becomes the commercial Trojan Horse of mobile computing. Next step: connecting the ad to a transaction system that will collect a 40% commission fee.

The data? Apple keeps them. Publisher, consider yourself lucky, you get the money and a set of basic numbers. As pointed out by Peter Kafka in The Wall Street Journal’s blog All Things D, contractually speaking, the terms are unambiguous.

Section 3.3.9 of the developer agreement, stipulates:

“Notwithstanding anything else in this Agreement, Device Data may not be provided or disclosed to a third party without Apple’s prior written consent. Accordingly, the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited.” Read More »

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iPad Second Impressions

April 18, 2010 – 7:28 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

I’m “stuck” in Paris (poor me), volcanic ash from Iceland has closed the airports. Stranded but not ignored. I have my iPad. In business meetings, in cafés and restaurants, the iPad is, as I reported two weeks ago, an all-around guy- and-chick magnet. Sit down, stroke the screen, and Parisians, not normally the easygoing sort, admire and strike up a conversation. Norway’s Prime Minister, stranded as well, used his iPad to govern remotely…très chic. I’ve never seen anything like this.

I gave myself two weeks to form an opinion of the iPad. (And note well the my and opinion: I may let a fact sneak in here and there, but I intend to convey my personal impressions. (As we say on-line: YMMV. You might come to a different conclusion.) I carried my brand new iPad everywhere, and I mean everywhere: From the smallest room in the house to the office, out to the coffee shop, into the 747 cabin and then on, to a magazine industry conference in Paris. I wanted to know if this dog would come back to the pail after a fortnight. Call me a skeptic, but I’ve spent too much time inside too many sausage factories to trust a demo, a first impression.

I’d pre-ordered two iPads and was given an appointment on launch morning at the Palo Alto Apple Store. In and out in a few minutes, then back home for the unveiling. Initial setup was easy, although you should learn from my mistake: I’d forgotten to prevent iTunes from synching automatically. I have thousands of pictures in my iPhoto library; this was going to take hours. My suggestion: Get the apps you want from the App Store and start enjoying your new iPad right away. Sync your media while you sleep. With more than 3,000 programs, most of them written for or adapted from the iPhone, the App Store is a pleasant and welcome surprise. My existing iPhone apps look a bit dwarfish on the bigger screen and pixelated when blown up in 2X mode, but they’re serviceable.

So how does the iPad feel?

Work
I purchased the iWork productivity apps: Pages (word processing), Numbers (spreadsheet) and Keynote (presentations). This isn’t the iPad’s strongest suit. When you transfer a document to the iPad, the hyperlinks are “unfolded”. Here’s the original…

…and the same file on the iPad:

I hoped the URLs would somehow fold back “under” the linked words when re-imported into my Mac, but no.

The trouble doesn’t stop there. On a networked PC and Mac you can drag-and-drop a file from one machine to another by using a shared folder arrangement. Here, the desktop metaphor breaks down because the iPad (and the iPhone) doesn’t have an explicit, exposed file system. To ship my Monday Note draft from my Mac to my iPad, I have to email it to myself as an attachment, or use a convoluted iTunes service. The email method is simple. I click—sorry—tap on the attachment and the iPad automatically offers to open it in Pages.

The iTunes method, slightly more complicated, uses the File Sharing section in the Apps tab that you see when you connect your iPad:

This is, in effect, a folder. You add your PC or Mac files and they’ll show up in My Documents on your iPad after the next sync. When you’ve finished tapping your Great American Novel, you can sync it back to your desktop computer through the same mechanism.

Applications such as Air Sharing HD and GoodReader help, but not completely. With Air Sharing and a WiFi connection, your iPad can show you the files on your PC or Mac, but you can’t use them—you can’t open them in your iPad apps.

There’s also a Mac app called PhoneView. Once your iPad is connected, you’ll see “everything” inside. Proceed with caution.

Geeks can go here to see more details about the promising doc compatibility and sharing features…and “promising” is the right word. I’m disappointed. I can’t perform tasks such as writing (or editing) a real-life, hyperlinked document on my iPad. Let’s hope the iWork software updates will quickly make the promise a reality.

Email
Very nice. Fast, easy to set up, easy to use. For me, it’s fully functional; not much to say beyond that. I hear we’ll get a “unified” mailbox some day.

Web Browser
Browsing shows off the iPad’s speed and smooth finish. It has the Apple design “touch”, literally. Scrolling and pinch-zooming are well-tuned and convenient. The browser doesn’t have tabs, but bookmarks sync with my Mac through MobileMe.

Speaking of scrolling and zooming, the Maps app (in collaboration with ex-friends at Google) is spectacular on the iPad. Treat yourself to a satellite view of your favorite city, move around with one finger, zoom with two. I just sent myself this iPad screenshot; you push the Home and Sleep buttons to take it, just like on the iPhone:

As on the iPhone, the iPad’s built-in Safari bookmarks show a User Guide, very nicely done. Enterprising geeks have discovered that Apple uses a specific framework, dubbed AdLib, to create a “desktop-like” Web application. They speculate that this augurs well for more high-quality Web apps from Apple.

Entertainment
Everything works well–even very well. I’ve loaded iTunes movies, rented one, I’ve used Netflix and the ABC app. Same for the iPod function and its CoverFlow. “Nothing to see, here”, by which I mean no trouble, no disappointment, the iPad does a spectacular job.

Games
I have nothing to say about games; I’m simply the wrong customer. Out of curiosity I loaded Smule’s Magic Piano, and Korg’s iELECTRIBE, Accordio and miniSynth Pro. Very impressive although, again, I’m not the target. As food for thought and extrapolation, I typed “iPad game” into Google: 112 million hits.

eReader
After two weeks, Apple’s iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle still look good. I hear the debate about e-ink versus backlit screen. I don’t mind reading on a computer screen, but I also like paper. I can load a math textbook from the Kindle bookstore on my iPad, and solve exercises using pen and paper. As an investor, I’ll be watching what the iPad (and its competition) does for–or to–the textbook industry.

Turning to newspapers and magazines, I like the agitation surrounding the iPad. The presentation I gave to the Presse Magazine conference in Paris last week confirmed the  enthusiasm and the anxiety. There’s much skill, energy and €€ in play.

I’ve tried the New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Popular Science, GQ, the Zinio magazine distribution app, Paris Match and Le Monde. They’re all promising but they show that the genre still needs work on both the UI side and particularly with the business models. I have an aversion to subscriptions that make it difficult to cancel, and only Le Monde lets me buy a single issue using their in-app purchase mechanism.

Regarding the UI, the gold dust needs to settle for some, while others need to lose their East Block smell. The former (names withheld) enjoy the new UI toys a bit too much. They’re tiring, distracting. The latter need to do better than a timidly sexed-up screen replica of the paper-based product.

Still, I’m hopeful. There’s no good culture without bad taste; the excesses prove that designers are pushing the envelope and conquering uncharted territory. The medium has yet to coalesce and find its sui generis place, but I’m optimistic because there’s enough competition, interest, and customers to make “it” happen—a thriving electronic newspaper and magazine industry. As for Apple’s role as an advertising platform (iAd?), that, too, will be worth watching.

Presentation
Keynote, Apple’s PowerPoint-compatible superset app, shows us the iPad idiosyncrasies. I brought the official iPad-to-VGA adapter with me to Paris, hooked it up, and hoped for the best. Zero setup, as we have come to expect, with no fiddling with F-keys or Desktop Properties. The projector displayed the presentation while my iPad displayed a (limited) presenter’s console. But, wait, switching out of Keynote, there’s no way to display the main screen. The iPad manual says I can display photos using a projector, but there’s not a word about a general replica of the iPad screen. At the conference I tried to show a movie but got an “Unauthorized” message, instead.

The conference organizers had insisted: Don’t forget the VGA adapter for the iPad. I didn’t. But, while I brought two machines for friends, I forgot to pack mine. No problem…almost. My configuration automagically resurrected itself on one of the spare machines when connected to iTunes. This gave me the opportunity to use MobileMe’s Find My iPhone service. It found my two iPads, the one left behind in my office and its freshly minted clone. The one in it found in Paris is shown below:

I could lock it, display a message on it, or remotely wipe its content. I chose the latter, I’ll see the results when I get back. In the meantime, as advertised in the screenshot above, the one left behind is now “dead”.

Conclusion and memoriam
Has the long-suffering tablet device finally emerged? The iPad isn’t perfect but, for me, it’s more than good enough, and extrapolating from the iPhone trajectory since 2007 we’ll see a steady string of improvements, especially if competitors such as HP and (the now-disliked) Google spur Apple and drive investment and creativity.
A final word…for Bill Gates. In 2001, he predicted that within five years, the Tablet PC would be the most popular form of PC sold in America. The timing was off, but he might end up being right, even if he might not enjoy the fruits of his vision.

Being a visionary is a bitch.

Bill’s prediction was only one of a long string going back to Dynabook, Newton, Grid, Go and other prophecies. The iPad might be the real thing, finally.

—JLG@mondaynote.com

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Aligning The Digital Planets

April 11, 2010 – 6:47 pm | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

Let’s pause and look at trends that have emerged over the last few years: How will they affect the digital newsmedia industry? First, we’ll try and list a few undisputed facts. Then we’ll drift towards conclusions bordering the uncharted territory of predictions. It’s worth the risk.

The web fuel problem. The internet economic engine isn’t firing on all cylinders. For online news, that’s an understatement. The primary source of income, advertising, has proven itself unable to sustain ambitious journalism. There might be exceptions here and there, a few news organizations have found their way to profitability, but they flourish in niche beats. For example, Politico, which covers Washington DC’s arcana — but it relies on hybrid model (web and print).

Others benefits from a powerful mothership such as New York Times Digital’s DealBook on finance: with a 2.5 to 3m unique visitors a month, this eight journalists operation could break even if it were granted a separate P&L. (DealBook also brings intangible but highly valuable status to the NYT in its fight against the Wall Street Journal.) But these are specialized products.

Observers mention the Huffington Post, with its presumed 10m UV/month, as the prototype for a popular internet news success. To me, the HuffPo is not a journalistic product per se. Taking third party content, the HuffPo builds a clever participatory mash-up, with a focus on juicy stuff. The whole thing is staged it in such a way (splashy editing, pictures, headlines) that it triggers loads of prattling — and page views. Fine. But this is not hardcore journalism.

As we speak, a 50-100 people newsroom stands no chance of living by advertising alone.
This state of affairs won’t change anytime soon. Last year, US ad spending fell by 9% and we know the recovery will take a while. As the CEO of Zenith Optimedia (Publicis Group) said last week in Paris: “In terms of revenue, 2012 will be like 2006″. This even though he predicts the money invested on the internet will keep progressing and will end up coinciding with the time people spend online.

That’s fact #1: don’t count on advertising. At least not in full ad-supported mode, not for a while.

Audience concentration. Worldwide traffic on social networks has doubled in one year. If we go back to December 2007, it grew threefold since then.

On major markets, there is no sign of saturation. Actually, quite the contrary: in the US, the growth is 43% in just two years. This growth partly organic, with Facebook now beyond the 400m members mark. But time spent is increasing as well. On Facebook, it now reaches almost 6 hours a month, six times more than its nearest competitor MySpace, and two more hours than just a year ago.

In the meantime, the time spent on clever utilitarian sites such as free classifieds is still growing in less-mature markets. In France, Le Bon Coin (see our story Learning from free Classifieds) is still growing at a triple digit rate and serving about 4.5 billion page views a month, with users viewing 30 or 40 pages for each visit. Worldwide, an increasing number of people rely on LinkedIn for job-hunting, as scores of large companies use it for recruitment (read this piece in Fortune).

Each time I travel to the United States, I see thirty-somethings glued to an increasingly dominant triple-windows setup: Facebook for social interaction, Craigslist for daily dealings, and Hulu for catch-up TV viewing. (Add a couple of news aggregators from Google and others and you get the whole picture). That was in case you still wondered why time spent on newspapers has gone down, from 42 minutes a month in 2006 to 32 minutes now (these are US figures, to large extent applicable elsewhere).

That’s Fact #2: the audience is flocking to social nets, and to a narrow group of useful/entertaining sites, at the expense of newsmedia. Read More »

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The Adobe – Apple Flame War

April 11, 2010 – 6:45 pm | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

The short version:

Who, in his right mind, expects Steve Jobs to let Adobe (and other) cross-platform application development tools control his (I mean the iPhone OS) future? Cross-platform tools dangle the old “write once, run everywhere” promise. But, by being cross-platform, they don’t use, they erase “uncommon” features. To Apple, this is anathema as it wants apps developers to use, to promote its differentiation. It’s that simple. Losing differentiation is death by low margins. It’s that simple. It’s business. Apple is right to keep control of its platform’s future.

The longer version:

The upcoming 4.0 release of the iPhone OS will come with licensing language that prohibits the use of Adobe’s Flash-to-iPhone compiler. The compiler is a clever way around the absence of a Flash interpreter on Apple’s smartphone OS. It takes Flash code in and outputs iPhone OS code, allowing Flash content and apps to run on the iPhone (and iPad). Problem solved.

Not so fast, says Apple, we’ll only allow applications that are written “natively” with our tools. No cross-platform tools, no Flash-to-iPhone compiler, no Flash.

Less than 24 hours later, an Adobe employee, Lee Brimelow, posts a virulent critique of Apple’s latest prohibition, titled “Apple Slaps Developers In The Face”. He concludes with a vigorous ‘Go screw yourself Apple’ and then adds a postscript: ‘Comments disabled as I’m not interested in hearing from the Cupertino Comment SPAM bots.’ Ah, yes. The one-way mirror…
[What the irate gentleman fails to say is this: The only developers slapped in the face are those who don’t use Apple development tools because they want to write a cross-platform app that may or may not use the particular features of the iPhone OS.]

He’s not alone in condemning Apple. In his blog, sunnily called “Why does everything suck?”, Hank Williams asks if “Steve Jobs Has Just Gone Mad” and wonders about “Insane Restraint of Trade”.

Adobe appears to be worried. In its latest SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission, the stock market regulator) filing, the company admits that its ‘business could be harmed’. If Apple succeeds in turning developers away from Adobe’s tools, a new version of which, CS5, is about to be announced, well, the money pump will stutter.

There are calmer minds, however. In his highly-recommended blog, Daring Fireball, John Gruber explains why Apple changed the iPhone OS licensing agreement. It’s strategic, really: Apple doesn’t want anyone else to have control over which OS features the applications have or don’t have access to. I’ll explain in a moment why it’s rational for Apple to fend off cross-compilers, and why it’s not too rational for Adobe employees and others to criticize Apple for keeping control of its future.

But, first, a bit of history.

Read More »

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Catching The iPad Wave: Seven Thoughts

April 5, 2010 – 8:32 am | Edited by Frédéric Filloux

1. Design

The iPad is all about design, and interface expectations. From a graphic design standpoint, with the iPad, the quantum leap is its ability to render layouts, typefaces, page structure. No more web HTML lowest common denominator, here. What comes out from an art director gets WYSIWYGed on the iPad — if the implementation is right.
Two things will be needed, though : talent and tools. Talent requirements for the iPad won’t be limited to conceiving great graphic arrangements fitting the 9’7″ (25cm) screen. As in multimedia  journalism where storytelling talent is to be enhanced by technical skills, layout and contents will have to be supported by great technical implementation. Clumsiness is not an option.
As for the tools, there is a need for what I’ll call “the first  layer” of content creation, i.e. the design phase that stands above the hard coding. What we need is a set of tools to be used by production people to arrange contents; it is badly needed: consider how often multimedia designers rely on… PostIt to sketch their projects out. Apple could provide this toolkit, of course. As for others, don’t count on Quark Xpress, they badly missed the web design train, but rely more on Adobe, they’re said to have an iPad design toolbox in the pipeline.

The WSJ.Com – OK for a Generation 1 app, but...

The WSJ.Com – OK for a Generation 1 app, but...

2. Innovation / Disruption

The app market is likely to split into two different paths. “Generation 1″ iPad applications will be a direct translation of the print reading experience, slightly improved using the finger-as-a-pointing-device feature for browsing and zooming. That’s the Wall Street Journal way. No point in blaming their designers; like everybody else, they had to crash-code their apps: game developers are handled console prototypes 12 to 24 months in advance of the actual release; for the iPad, it was just weeks. (We’re told many apps never “saw” an actual iPad before they shipped, they were written and tested entirely on the software simulator that comes with the Apple development tools…)
“Generation 2″ apps will have to reinvent navigation, the invitation and handling of user input, the integration of videos or animated graphics, a key challenge.
Publishers will be well advised to stimulate out-of-the box thinking by drilling into new pools of designers, through public, crowdsourced contests. Inevitably, great stuff will emerge; it will not be applicable before a year or two, but this innovative/disruptive stimulus approach is essential (not only for media, but also for books). Read More »

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Wanna see my Japanese etchings — on my iPad?

April 5, 2010 – 8:31 am | Edited by Jean-Louis Gassée

The frenzy surrounding Apple’s new product, the iPad, could give a new life to the old pickup line. I just got mine, that thing is an equal opportunity guy and chick magnet. Better than the proverbial (and fake) Ferrari car keys negligently dropped on the counter in a bar. Here, with the iPad, you can forget to take your bicycle pant clips off, the magnet will still work.

Seriously, I’ve never seen such excitement since I’ve been in the high-tech business (42 years). Not the Macintosh intro and its justifiably historic “1984” commercial, not the iPhone launch in January 2007. The fact I’m only citing two Apple events already signals how Apple, and I actually mean Steve Jobs, have been able to engineer launches as well as (sourpusses will say better than) its products.

But, before we proceed, let’s deal with the product review. I want to use it for a couple of weeks, just to see how the initial reaction evolves, how the dust and the bugs settle down, how the iPad feels at work, at home and on the road – I’ll take mine to Europe in a week.
In the meantime, here are a few reviews by recognized experts:

- Starting with a negative one, by Cory Doctorow, a science-fiction writer and Open Source, anti-DRM advocate, here. A useful counterpoint to the overriding enthusiasm.
- David Pogue gives us a friendly tongue-in-cheek, his usual tone, walk through the pros and cons, here.
- The Wall Street Journal’s hugh-tech guru, Walt Mossberg, gives it a pretty good pat on the pad, calling it a game changer, here.
- At Wired, Steven Levy (ex-Newsweek) explains: Apple’s iPad is “One Small Step for Tablets, One Giant Leap for Personal Computers”, including a tip of the hat to a just deceased PC pioneer, Ed Roberts, here.
- An enthusiastic BoingBoing piece by Xeni Jardin, here.
- Lastly, Dan Lyons (the Fake Steve Jobs author turned Newsweek columnist when Steven Levy left) switches his opinion. He panned the iPad at the January 27th event but graciously changes his mind in a piece titled “Think Really Different”, here.

And, many, many more (Google gives 74 million hits for “iPad review”), mostly positive.
I’ll conclude this section with a Steven Levy quote: “The iPad is like the Beatles of 2010, it takes something that we thought we knew and makes it seem fresh.”
Can the iPad live up to such an endorsement?

And, we have the launch itself, which makes Red Army precision marching drills look like a drunken Spring Break outing. Consider the synchronization: all the Big Media reviews came out Wednesday March 31st evening at the same time exactly. iPad App developers were under strict embargo orders, which they respected: no press releases before Launch Day. The order got rescinded and we had a deluge of on-line PR material starting Friday morning – at 10:00 am.

Saturation bombing comes to mind when you see all TV channels, ABC, CBS, NBC…, news and comedy; all newspapers, from The NY Times to USA Today; magazines such as Time and Newsweek:

and

And, of course, the Apple fans themselves, lining up outside Apple stores the night before.
You’ll find pictures take at the Palo Alto Apple Store here, scenes like this are all over the Web.

Read More »

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