Coyote Tracks

"Note to [Larry] Page: When you make Apple look like the easy and reasonable vendor to deal with, you’ve done something dramatically wrong."

— Sarah Lacy

(Source: pandodaily.com)

Not a race, but a series

It’s hard to write about Apple’s most recent earnings report—let alone the reports on how 55% of the total smartphones sold by Verizon were iPhones, or the evidence that all iOS devices combined slightly outsold all Android devices combined last quarter—without sounding biased. If you like Apple, you’re going to be tempted to say “I told you so” (even if you didn’t); if you don’t, you’re going to be tempted to spin it, like the analyst John Gruber noted whose reaction was, in a nutshell, “I would have been right in my predictions about iPad sales going down if the iPad-buying public wasn’t stupid.”

There have been two narratives competing over the last year, one favoring Android and one favoring iOS, but it’s quite possible that both are true:

• Android, by its very nature of being free to license and sprouting up on a myriad of devices, is clearly not only going to overtake iOS but outdistance it handily in terms of units shipped and sold.

• Consistently, iPhones outsell Android devices on the same network by a big, big margin and Android is so far a non-starter in the tablet space. Thus, the advantages of Android’s license model don’t help it hold on to market share.

I’ve speculated in the past that more purchasers end up with Android phones rather than deliberately choose them over iOS, and Verizon’s results lend some credence to that speculation. We don’t know for sure what’s going to happen when we have our first full quarter of new Ice Cream Sandwich-based phones available that aren’t competing against a brand new iPhone, but the consumers in the “ended up with Android” not only don’t know what confection their phone is running, they don’t care. It’s the people who chose Android because it was Android who do, and—again, this is speculation, but I think there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence to support it—those people are a smaller percentage of Android owners than the percentage of iPhone users who specifically wanted an iOS phone.¹

Yet I don’t think most Apple watchers—including those of us who figured that Verizon Android sales would drop once Verizon had the 4S available—really thought the first point above was going to be proven wrong. I still don’t think it will. It’s just that the tide of Android devices is going to be primarily composed of “free with contract” uglies, not the kind of cool phones that compete with the iPhone. (Which is not to downplay cool Android phones, which I suspect will get more competitive, not less.)

The other truth that I think might get lost in the momentarily triumphalism, though, is that there remains no intrinsic reason why not only two but even three or four mobile platforms can’t all thrive. Unlike the early days of microcomputing, smartphones have been born into a world of widely used platform-independent protocols and data formats. The “walled garden” metaphor has become very fashionable to bash Apple with, but it’s never been easier to switch platforms than it is now, even if your platform is iOS. People who long for the early days of computing have forgotten those were also the days where, when you switched platforms, you found that years of your writing was stored in proprietary word processing files on floppy disks that your new PC was physically unable to read.²

A year from now it’s very likely—although not a given—that Android will be back on top. Windows Phone might shoot up the charts, quadrupling its market share from negligible to inconsequential. Open WebOS might okay just kidding. But we all benefit from a market where whoever’s going “Ha! We’re #1!” each quarter knows that #2 isn’t all that far behind, and may even be ahead by some measures.

ExtremeTech: "Google is FUBAR" →

Sebastian Anthony:

[Google] wants to be more like Facebook and Apple, both of which have a completely-unified, walled-garden approach — and both of which are enjoying huge leaps in revenue and profits, while Google falls short of quarterly expectations. Nothing happens on an Apple device without Cupertino’s knowledge, and as a result Apple can perfectly tailor its devices for its users. Facebook enjoys unprecedented access to the surfing habits, likes, shares, and messages of its users. On the other side of the fence, with a slew of discordant, disconnected properties, Google seems to be flailing. “Search Plus Your World” and the March 1 privacy changes are simply the next step in Google’s (rather messy) attempt to weave everything together, before it loses any more ground.

Anthony’s article is a little histrionic, and there’s an eye-rolling assertion roughly every other paragraph. (In the one above, note the assertion that Apple watches everything its users do. Really? The closest one can come to that is pointing at iCloud, and unlike Facebook or Google, Apple has no advertising service to “enhance” by mining your data.)

However, what fascinates me about this article is that I think Anthony has come to the right conclusion by starting at the wrong premise. Here’s the premise:

Google has pushed in all of its chips in an epic gamble to beat Facebook at its own game. Google has abandoned its bread and butter in search of greener, tighter-targeted, socially-relevant pastures. The thing is, though, Google doesn’t actually have a choice in the matter. Going social is the right play. Indexed search has peaked. Apps — be it web apps or native mobile apps — are the future, and the only way to index them is through social sentiment, which Google can’t currently do… until it links all of its services together on March 1.

And the conclusion?

[Google is FUBAR because] it is biting the hand that feeds it. Indexed search might have peaked, but it’s still huge, and still propelled Google to over $10 billion in revenue this past quarter. To become Facebook, Google must forsake almost everything that brought it success in the first place. It must irreparably alter its fleet of successful web properties to become more Facebooky. It must alienate users with weird, ungooglesque features. It must force Chrome and Google+ down the throats of users who are simply looking for a brilliant search engine.

I think Anthony is correct about the path Google is taking and what the likely outcome from following it is. Where I disagree is the contention that Google has no choice.

What Google is doing, ultimately, is attempting to remake itself into a portal. Yahoo! is a portal and we know how well that’s worked out for them—and they’ve done a lot better than other portals from a decade ago did. (When’s the last time you visited Lycos? Did you know Lycos was even still around? It’s true!) On the surface, remaking themselves into a portal is clearly madness—but Google has a huge advantage the other companies don’t: the huge userbase, with the leading search engine and news site and groups and social networking and maps and—

—wait. That is Yahoo, isn’t it? Hmm.

While it’s a wee bit excessive to say, as Anthony did, that “Google has sold its soul to the capitalist devil,” there’s a truth in that excess: Wall Street doesn’t reward companies that merely turn in consistent profits quarter after quarter. Companies have to grow quarter after quarter. This relentless focus on growth nearly always punishes companies that take a “do one thing well” approach, unless the “one thing” they do well involves philosophy and process. You certainly see that in Apple, and I’d argue you see it to a large degree in Richard Branson’s Virgin Group.

But Google’s “one thing well” has historically been indexed search. While they’ve had “sticky” web applications like Gmail for years, their main focus has been enabling you to get off their site as fast as possible. Google still needs to be able to do that, but now they’ve also declared that they want to keep you on their site as much as possible. I don’t see how this can be reconciled.

DRM on the Cloud →

Nilay Patel:

A quick scan of the market reveals DRM is making a startling comeback as the media industry turns to new cloud-based distribution models. Scores of modernized DRM systems are behind some of the most successful media services on the market: Spotify, Rdio, Netflix, Amazon, and Apple all still use proprietary and incompatible DRM for music, movies, books, and apps, and the movie industry is pressing ahead with UltraViolet, the most ambitious and wide-ranging DRM system ever devised. DRM has become a foundational element of the consumer media experience, especially when it comes to streaming services; Apple’s success in removing it from sales of downloaded music appears to have blinded the industry to its continued and growing use nearly everywhere else.

But as DRM becomes more and more pervasive, it paradoxically becomes less and less restrictive: iTunes makes it trivially easy to share apps, books, and movies between devices registered with Home Sharing, Netflix will now happily authorize 50 devices per user account even as it wraps each movie stream in Microsoft PlayReady DRM, and Spotify and Rdio users likely never consider the layer of DRM managing the music files they’ve synced for offline playback. (Spotify is particularly ironic: it delivers music in the open-source Ogg Vorbis format, but then wraps synced files in proprietary DRM that expires after 30 days unless the user re-connects to Spotify.) In fact, DRM has become so invisible to the user that one wonders why it’s being used at all: as Jobs predicted, the use of DRM hasn’t made even the slightest dent in media piracy, and it seems a silly waste of time and money to continue building DRM systems so advanced they appear to not exist in the first place. Modern DRM is invisible to the user and ignored by the thief.

Some interesting observations from the Verge’s generally most interesting writer. I hadn’t really thought about streaming services as “the return of DRM,” precisely because—as Patel notes—the DRM never seems to get in your way as a user. (There are other rights issues that get in your way, when movies and TV shows disappear from Hulu or Netflix before you can watch them, but that’s a different problem.) Yet even as these present a good case that you can have DRM-encumbered media that isn’t annoying to use, Patel is right in that they don’t actually present a convincing case that they’re necessary.

Physibles and piracy →

Ray Walters, Extreme Tech:

With the digital media arena all but conquered by piracy, the infamous site The Pirate Bay (TPB) has begun looking to the next frontier to be explored and exploited. According to a post on its blog, TPB has declared that physical objects named “physibles” are the next area to be traded and shared across global digital smuggling routes.

While the bombastic TPB tone induces less fear than eye-rolling, the idea of “physibles” is really interesting. Extreme Tech is convinced, as they say in another article, that “in a few short years, every household will have a device that’s capable of printing any solid object, and even basic mechanical objects.” I’m skeptical (no doubt those printers are in everyone’s garages next to their flying cars), but they’re definitely going to have an effect beyond the geek-centric “maker culture” in another decade or so.

And, of course, there will be piracy. The question is how much of a big deal that’s going to be, financially speaking. Piracy can definitely have more of an effect on an industry than some would like to believe, but at the same time it’s in a given industry’s best interest to severely overstate that effect in an effort to curry legislative action. For all the kvetching about piracy in the software industry’s 40-or-so year history, it’s hard to find publishers who have been conclusively put out of business due to pirates.¹ The same appears to be true of all digital media, and the chances are that this is going to be true even when the digital media is a set of 3D printing instructions.

Facebook Coalition To Google: Don’t Be Evil →

The “coalition” is mostly Facebook, as far as I can tell (it looks like the original headline on John Battelle’s blog left out the word “coalition,” in fact). This is a neat hack to take places Google has hardcoded in Google+ results and to instead use Google’s own tools “to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded,” and it’s a brilliant way of calling Google out for the kind of sleazy way they’re choosing to prioritize their own social platform over competitors.

Having said all that, Facebook chiding Google for being evil is kinda like Voldemort telling Sauron he needs to lighten up about the hobbits.

Don't mess with The Dodd →

MG Siegler quotes Chief MPAA Extortionist Chris Dodd:

“Those who count on quote ‘Hollywood’ for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who’s going to stand up for them when their job is at stake. Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake.”

Siegler adds:

Amazingly, this discussion is morphing beyond the destruction of the fabric of the Internet and into the underlying notion that our political system is fundamentally corrupt.

What’s amazing is the notion that we may actually be doing something about it. As Matt Yglesias wrote, public engagement matters: “SOPA/PIPA opponents actually got in the arena and did politics instead of complaining about how this showed that politics is corrupt and stupid.” The problem with our political system isn’t that it’s unresponsive—it’s that it’s usually responding to the wrong things. But if we let that be a rationale to just write the whole thing off as a lost cause, then we’re doing what the real cynics in the system—like, for example, former senator Chris Dodd—want us to: nothing.

(Source: thehill.com)

xScope 3 →

If you’re a Mac web nerd, this is a fantastic—if slightly obscure-seeming—design tool for (in IconFactory’s words) “measuring, aligning and inspecting on-screen graphics and layouts.” I’ve been thinking about buying xScope for over a year and have waffled for over a year, because its $30 price tag seemed too high for what, for me, would be an “occasional” tool. (I’m more a developer with a bit of design sense.) At its current sale price of $20, though, it’s a no-brainer.

The enemy of my enemy

Yesterday a huge file sharing site, “Megaupload.com,” was taken offline due to a criminal conspiracy indictment. Do the copyright wars have a new martyr? At first glance, maybe! Everybody gets to blame their favorite villain: the evil media industry, the draconian federal government, or both. It becomes a political a Rorschach Test. Ultimately, the fix is either upending the foundations of market capitalism, or destroying the power of the state to dismantle the intellectual property regime. (I frequently start laying out my own political arguments whenever I write a sentence like that, then carefully backspace over them and sip rye until the temptation subsides.)

But. But. But. Here’s the thing. Megaupload—like the late Kazaa and LimeWire—makes an even worse martyr in the copyright wars than Jack Kevorkian did in the debate over assisted suicide. The indictment lays out the case against them. Their business model was built around getting “popular files” uploaded that would be downloaded repeatedly, thus showing ads to non-premium subscribers—and rewarding premium subscribers who provided those popular files. The more often a file was downloaded, the more money Mega got. Show of hands: who thinks the files that brought in the big bucks were home videos of cats?

Ars Technica observed that the indictment is “full of strange non-sequiturs,” and the RIAA (and MPAA) had a collective hatred for Megaupload that bordered on the pathological, which tends to engender sympathy from the Internet at large given that the RIAA and MPAA together have a higher douchebag quotient than a Los Angeles BMW dealership. But seriously, folks. The site’s owners sent email to one another with lines like, “Hope YouTube is not implementing a fraud detection system right now” and attachments showing reward payments to users for uploading “10+ Full popular DVD rips, a few small porn movies, some software with keygenerators (warez).” In 2007, Megaupload was booted out of Google AdSense for having “numerous pages” with links to “copyrighted content” according to the indictment.

And if that’s not enough, let’s just quote Megaupload CTO Mathias Ortmann talking about their business: “We’re not pirates, we’re just providing shipping services to pirates.”

I don’t want to give the impression I think all—or even most—copyright actions are wise, let alone effective. Trade groups purposefully overstate losses and dominate policy discussions with FUD—arguably, even the term “piracy” is using the terms they define. (It’s a world of stupid to equate torrenting Game of Thrones with armed theft and murder on the high seas.) People who really just want easily-reproducible shit for free will always find a way to get it, and any publisher is far better off working on ways to make sure that customers can legally get what they want as easily as possible with the fewest restrictions. That should be the lesson that media moguls take away from iTunes, but to them the lesson is, “make sure all digital video content outlets are crippled in some way and we won’t have another iTunes.” If we think of hardline copyright proponents as a bunch of assclowns, they have nobody to blame for that but themselves.

Yet being reflexively against something based on its supporters is just as nutty as its inverse. (“The RIAA certified my favorite CD as gold? Those assholes! I’m going to go break it, right now!”) We’re not talking about one of those “RIAA sues deaf Buddhist nun in monastery with no electricity for $9.8 million” cases here. And while I don’t doubt that thousands of legitimate users of Megaupload are genuinely shafted by this outcome, if the best restaurant in town turns out to be a mob front, hundreds of innocent diners are going to be denied that terrific Penne Arrabiata. So it goes.

There are a lot of stories out there which are genuine examples of terrible government overreach and/or the evils of the current copyright system. Megaupload’s story is not one of them. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” is not a universal truth—and sometimes it puts you in the company of pretty crappy friends.

Dan Wineman: “Unprecedented Audacity” →

Dan Wineman is (understandably) less than pleased with one aspect of Apple’s new iBooks Author.

Apple is trying to establish a rule that whatever I create with this application, if I sell it, I have to give them a cut. And iBooks Author is free, so this arrangement sounds pretty reasonable. Here’s the problem: I didn’t agree to it.

Wineman is right, in that if you export your newly-created book in “iBooks format,” you can only sell it through the iBookstore. However, I’m not quite sure it’s as nefarious as Wineman thinks it is—or rather, it’s probably nefarious for different reasons.

When you export a book in iBooks format, you get an .ibooks file on your desktop. It’s clearly a relative of EPUB—you can drag the file onto BBEdit and it’ll open it as if it were an EPUB, for instance. But it isn’t. It has a mimetype of “application/x-ibooks+zip”. This doesn’t appear to be Apple’s proprietary fixed-layout EPUB, because some of the required elements for that are missing. But while it’s close to EPUB 3, I don’t think it is. It doesn’t have the required navigation document, for a start. The content files are full of references to very iBooks-specific things (and the stylesheets are, weirdly, linked in using XML syntax, not XHTML or HTML5), and the CSS files contain -ibooks- vendor-specific attributes. Some of these appear to be from CSS3 modules that EPUB 3 has adopted, but not all—and of course there’s no reason to be using vendor-specific prefixes unless you’re expecting your output to be, well, vendor-specific.

So Apple’s “audacity” is that they’ve created a snazzy creation tool that, from all appearances, only works with their viewers. Wineman is correct in that it’s the license, not the technology, that prevents you from taking a .ibooks file and selling it somewhere other than Apple’s store. But you don’t have much reason to sell something this thing creates outside Apple’s store, ’cause it ain’t gonna be creating those snazzy multimedia books for your Kindle Fire.