Category: Mobile

We’ve got two strong legs on our chair today,’ he told USA Today. ‘We have the Mac business, which is a $10 billion business, and music–our iPod and iTunes business–which is $10 billion. We hope the iPhone is the third leg on our chair, and maybe one day, Apple TV will be the fourth leg.’

Steve Jobs has a plan.

Apple haven’t been pushing the Mac as hard as they have this last 18 months. They now want everyone to have a Mac at work and at home in the spare room. Nearly 6 months ago they introduced iPhone and later the iPod touch, both which run ‘OSX’ a cut-down version of Mac OS X. They’ll likely be transitioning more and more to the ‘touch’ operating system for use in their iPods. in effect, they want everyone to have a Mac in their pocket. Apple TV, though as woefully underdeveloped as the iPhone, could be the Mac in the living room.

While people were very quick to hack open the Apple TV devices and install extra codecs and cavernous hard drives, there wasn’t the same hue and cry about an SDK – yet in truth this is what we really need to see. The Apple TV, however, represents a much more long term play than the iPhone or iPod. These pocket devices will get you to use their file formats, their networks – H.264, m4v, iTunes which will all play very nicely on the Apple TV.

The article on FastCompany describes a lot of situations where they think Apple’s hand has been forced but I think that’s a very naive position. Apple’s early adopter iPhone “credit” of $100 was obviously planned but held back on. Likewise, the SDK was planned but all things take time and it probably wasn’t the hollers of a few self-centred geeks to make the difference. It describes how other manufacturers have a touch screen phone, which is true, but for the most part they’re disasters. It describes a world where it was hard (or illegal) to get music onto MP3 players before the iPod (despite the existence of CD rippers for half a decade) and it puts a lot of faith in subscription music – something which, despite being readily available, not many people seem to want (to be honest, does the analyst think that Apple couldn’t implement subscriptions?). The final straw really has to be the contention that the iPhone is the “remote control” for your Apple TV.

I think the lack of enthusiasm comes from cautiousness and I’m not going to suggest that said analyst has invested heavily in Microsoft, Creative, TiVo, Real or any of the other players in this market who have a lot to lose if Apple maintains it’s lead. Note I said lead. We’re not talking about a monopoly (like, for instance, the desktop operating system monopoly held by Microsoft). Yes, it’s probably correct that Apple is likely overvalued at over $180 per share but the same is certainly true of Google as well. Earnings and assets don’t need to add up to share price as the latter is more an indication of how people perceive the value to be. If you’re able to sell Apple at $190 it’s because someone values it at that price which means it’s that valuable. It’s a supply and demand market aside from the considerations of assets. How could anyone but the market put a value on the turnaround Apple has made in the last decade? In May of 2008 we’re going to be celebrating the tenth year of iMac. iPod has been out since October of 2001 and yet half a decade later Apple commands the lions share of the online music business. How could any analyst make these sorts of realistic guesses? Would he look at the Apple TV and declare it a flop or would he take into account the reception the iPod received in 2001 as an indicator?

What the analyst misses is the win-win situations. It’s true that Apple makes a lot of money from AT&T and presumably O2 with iPhone subscriptions but it’s important to realise that Apple also makes money from each and every iPhone sale. Similarly, the Apple TV may not be resounding success right now but at the same time it’s not a loss per unit (like XBox) or selling at a loss-making discount to get Amazon sales ranking (like the recent run on the Zune).

So, Mac, iPod/iTunes, iPhone, AppleTV – the four legs of Apple’s strategy. Are we sure there are only four legs on this chair? You’d like to wager on that?

One of the coolest things about my new iPhone is the email client. It’s real IMAP email. I have absolute confidence that what it displays is what is on my IMAP server. It is, of course, in complete contrast to the mail client that shipped on my N800 which was unreservedly shit. (it was, hoever, better than the IMAP client on the K800i which was an exercise in frustration). I came to some sort of compromise with the N800 which really involved not having more than 1 email account configured on the device and that improved matters. Things started to go well when I simply stopped using it for email. We’ve both been very happy with the email handling since then. Sadly, despite the developer community around Maemo, there isn’t a good replacement for their built in Email client (a lament that really harks back to an earlier comment about how Open Source never innovates). There is a replacement. But it’s not designed for humans.

Email is still, to a degree, a killer app. I still have some friends and family who don’t use email at all and crazy as that sounds, they don’t seem too badly affected by it. Honestly it made me consider that this whole Digital Divide thing might be smoke and nonsense. I mean how can Western Europeans in 2007 survive without email? It simply cannot be. Even my Dad, who dates from about 1684 AD has email.

Anyway. The thing that flabbergasts me, as a heavy email user since about 1991 is that email is still very much the province of “computers”. There’s email on mobile phones but that’s more of a pain in the butt than anything and there’s email in your TV, as an additional subscription service. Is it just that people are more familiar with email as a Web Service a la Hotmail, GMail, Yahoo Mail as opposed to a device feature?

I’ve always hated webmail and much preferred receiving email on my workstation, laptop, handheld, whatever.

I guess I’m looking for a golden convergence. I want the portability of my email on my iPhone. But I want to have email on my TV so I can make use of the big screen as well as on my computer where I have a big screen, excellent keyboard and all the other goodness – and all accessing the same online mail stores which are also aggressively cached. There’s precious few UK ISPs offering IMAP services for a start but surely that has to change, right?

I don’t want to use something that looks like webmail (due to the 14th commandment as handed down by Moses – “You shalt not use webmail as it looks ass”)

The article The REAL Reason the Linux Community Didn’t Come Up With the iPhone starts off with an interesting premise.

Lately, there seems to an explosion of interest in Open Source.

Sure. As much as there has been an explosion in interest in the last decade.

The article is really a rebuttal of a piece about how Open Source rarely innovates. The argument wobbles between support for “wisdom of crowds” to holding up Android and OpenMoko as sterling examples of how the Linux crowd could have come up with the iPhone.

I think, sadly, the author missed the point.

Open Source rarely innovates. I say rarely because the few Open Source projects that have shown some real innovation are usually the itch of one or two smart guys.

I’ve always considered laziness to be a very important quality in someone. The desire to get things done with the minimum amount of work is central to my own work ethic. I want results and I will work for them but I have a hard time starting any piece of work where I cannot see the value in it. (Sending emailed reports is one area that is pointless when there are web tools which generate them. Go click a bloody button)

Some of the best IT guys I know are excessively lazy. They’ll work solidly for 3 days to create a script that will shave five minutes off their work day or remove some piece of work that is boring or otherwise undesirable.

The developers behind most of the Open Source apps out there are similarly lazy. They work hard until the functionality is good enough and focus on areas like stability and when they have achieved their goal, the momentum decreases. Areas of development, like user interface, often are left alone because these guys are hardcore techies. Editing text files is easy. Why should there be a nice GUI? They’ve created apps like vi or emacs to simplify an aspect of their life – it’s not meant to be taken as a life philosophy.

Read the comments. Count how many Linux-philes deride the Mac because of eye-candy without realising that eye-candy in many cases is responsible for the usability of functionality.

What the author misses is that while Linux and Mac OS X share a distant ancestry in that they’re both based on crufty old UNIX designs from 20 years ago, Mac OS X has innovated in ways that are not reliant on the underpinnings of the operating system. Through frameworks they’ve made some great functionality available to developers who want to concentrate on the business logic. Their frameworks inspire people to create new and fabulous.

This is why Android, despite being touted as an answer to iPhone, looks like ass. Might also be important to note that while it is now Open Source, it wasn’t OS during development and there remain a lot of questions about how it will be presented. It’s not shipping for another year on any handsets (if indeed it gains traction) so it’s ultimately vapourware.

Similarly, the innovation apparent in OpenMoko seems to be routed in the rounded edges and the fact it comes in two colours. There’s certainly zero innovation in the current design and based on the fact it can’t make calls or send SMS messages currently (in the GUI) it’s going to be a long while. A developer picking up OpenMoko will be saddled with hardware that barely works. His time and energy is going to be based entirely on working with others to overcome the current shortcomings and get the device to the state it needs to be to compete with the most run of the mill mobile phones. Trotting it out as an example of how the Open Source innovated is very poor show. You can Photoshop/GIMP all the screenshots you want. It currently doesn’t do any of that. (if I draw a picture of a manned rocketship on the surface of Mars, is it the same as actually building it? No, didn’t think so).

The virtue of the iPhone is not in the fact it has a phone or an internet communications device but that people actually find it easier to use. They think it looks lovely, they want to paw it and stroke it. You don’t think “looks” or “eye candy” are important?

Why has the white/orange model of OpenMoko sold out?

The whole article is so inconsistent that it actually makes me cross, gives me irritation.

However, the corporate for profit model is simply NOT how Open Source works or wants to work. In fact, innovation is not usually a profitable undertaking. Consumers fear change. What they love is incremental improvements and businesses like releasing new versions of the same thing – it helps drive sales. The only ones who are free to innovate are those with nothing to lose – like the Open Source world, for example.

Innovation is not usually a profitable undertaking?

If Innovation is, as the author describes, the very lifeblood of Open Source, then where the hell is the innovation in Open Source? The author is quick to correlate “borrowed” or bought technology with Open Source.

It’s one thing to point at Mac OS X and claim the GUI was invented at PARC and Engelbart invented the mouse – but the innovation present in the original system in the first Macintosh was so far ahead of what Xerox were offering and what Microsoft would eventually deliver that it beggared belief. The reason – a couple of really really REALLY smart guys at Apple who had a vision. The PARC design couldn’t overlap windows but the Mac developers didn’t know that. So their version had overlapping windows. What the author misses is that Apple paid Xerox for access to their lab. There was no Open Source involved, these were both companies investing in innovative research.

I’m not a critic of Open Source; quite the opposite. Open Source is incredibly important in establishing the fundamentals of a system. The guys in Infurious are very motivated to feed back patches into the frameworks they are using in order to build apps. We use Linux, we use BSD, we use MySQL, we use Apache, we use gcc – Open Source is at our core.

I am a critic of revisionism however. Trying to paint IBM as a proponent of Open Source 50 years ago is silly, as is claiming that Xerox PARC was the result of open source philosophy.

It’s a silly article.