Category Archives: technology

The Apple Hater Continuum

technology

Ever notice that if you mention how much you love an Apple product, someone will inevitably come along and point out that you could have bought _product X_ that does _task Y_ just as well as your Apple product, plus _task Z_ as well. Oh, and it costs less too!

Yeah, I can hear you groaning from here.

It’s been my experience that these critiques usually come from users who know quite a bit about computers. Often, it’s the kind of person that friends call to fix their computer when it breaks. This type of user might even build their own PCs. In short form: they know more about computers than the average person.

It seems that as someone learns more about computers, the less they like Apple products, but there’s this cross over. Many of the really, really stupidly bright, mega-rockstar type technology people I know use Apple products. There’s an apparent majority amongst the Silicon Valley community who, at a minimum, recognize that Apple builds great products, even if they use something else. Have a look at photos taken at your favorite conference and you’ll see a lot of Apple logos staring back at you.

When plotted on a graph, this pattern looks strangely similar to the “uncanny valley graph”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley.

!http://www.bradlanders.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/apple-fondness-graph.png(My probably wrong view of Apple haters)!

Before you get too excited, let me explain why this is a horrible graph that I probably should have abandoned early on:

* This graph doesn’t work in reverse. E.g., I’m pretty sure John Gruber (and his ilk) isn’t the smartest guy in Silicon Valley. Hell, he lives in Philadelphia. I also don’t think the guy over at the Verizon store is dumb. He’s usually pretty helpful, and I certainly can’t understand Verizon’s product offerings as well as him, so he’s got one up on me.
* Not everyone conforms to this graph; nor do I think that’s a problem. For example, there are a ton of brilliant engineers at Google (and elsewhere) who are more knowledgable about computers than I could ever hope to be. I’m generalizing here. This is _my_ blog. I get to do that. Feel free to yell at me if it makes you feel better.

“Joel Spoolsky expressed”:http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html (far better than I have here) a reason why more savvy users might not recognize the value of Apple products.

bq. Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like “Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music” and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it’s interesting because it’s peer to peer, completely missing the point that it’s interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it _right away_.

As a user becomes more familiar with the computer, all of the arcane settings and components that frustrate normal users become a source of mastery. Like a talented guitar soloist, they revel in their own ability to wield their device. I know the feeling. Sometimes I feel like a real badass when I try some new bash hack that I picked up somewhere on the internet, and bash is about as terse and arcane as it gets1.

This leads us to the rightmost portion of the graph. As you move furthest to the right, you get in to groups of people for whom computers are their livelihood. They probably work in the industry, and many of them are developers and technology business entrepreneurs. For this group, tasks like setting up customized notification applications have become minutia. These people play a computer like Chopin played the piano.

Even though some in this group still rabidly dislike Apple products, the appreciation by many reaches a new level. Once you’ve tried to replicate Apple-like simplicity, you recognize how difficult it is. However, if your at this point and you still _like_ the minutia of building a computer, you’re probably not going to be an Apple fan.

I think I just had an epiphany. Time to make some more flame-bait graphs.

p(comment-meta). [1] – Calm down, I love bash, but imagine your mom trying to use it. Yes, I also realize that there are far more arcane technologies. Can we go back to watching the movie now?

A challenger appears

technology

bq. “What Happens When It’s Google/Android Vs. Amazon/Android?”:http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/google-versus-amazon-android/ – MG Siegler

Amazon, amongst Google’s Android partners, strikes me as the greatest threat to direct competition with Google’s expanding efforts to become… Well… Amazon.

“Kyle Kramer on HN”:http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556350 wonders what happens if:

bq. [Google] Fork[s] the platform in a new direction that renders Amazon’s devices useless…

Large portions of Android are open source. The top layer — the “Google” layers — belong to Google, but Amazon has the option to fork Android as well.

Amazon is an online retailer and an infrastructure company. They’ve got a ton of brilliant engineers that understand software (AWS), as well as products (Kindle). One could argue that Google has more “product” people, but one could also argue that their product people don’t have that much of a lead on Amazon.

I’m not saying this is a walk-on win for Amazon, but I see the next 10 years shaping up to make the old IBM vs MS vs Apple battle look like an undercard fight.

Augmenting my command line tool kit

technology, ,

A nice little list of command line tools for a variety of tasks. I’m probably not going to be using the calendar any time soon, but I already use htop, iptraf, mtr, and siege (along with the obvious ones like xargs and vim).

“A little collection of cool unix terminal/console/curses tools”:http://kkovacs.eu/cool-but-obscure-unix-tools

unix-tools.png

Bash one-liner: Average file size in current directory

technology

Earlier today I was working with a large group of files where I needed to estimate the growth over time. In these scenarios, it’s useful to know the average size of the files in a collection. This bash one-liner does the trick.

ls -l | awk '{s+=$5} END {print "Average file size: " s/NR/1024 "k"}'
^[1]    ^[2] ^[3]    ^[4]                             ^[5]

  1. ls -l prints a list of files in long format.

  2. Awk is like a swiss army knife for processing text in regular formats (comma, space, tab, separated content).

  3. Awk uses blocks are similar to Ruby’s. A block {} without any label is executed for each line in the input. Awk syntax supports most common operaters, so the expression s+=$5 works a lot like you’d think it would. ‘s’ is just a variable (implicitly declared) to store a sum. The dollar sign is used to reference “fields”; $5 is the fifth field in a separated (space is the default) list. This keeps a running total of the fifth field in each record.

  4. The END {} block is executed when the EOF is reached. The call to print() outputs to the stdout.

  5. String concatenation in awk is automatic, so you can just enter/exit quotes at will and awk print() will concat the output.

Google: Your data is safe in our cloud; Customer: I’m still scared

technology

“Google enterprise chief: Data is safer on our cloud than your PC”:http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/03/10/google-enterprise-chief-data-is-safer-on-our-cloud-than-your-pc/

Statistically, there is little question that this statement is true, but Google faces the same challenges as airlines do when it comes to customer perception.

Statistically, you are much safer flying on an airplane than you are driving in a car, yet people are disproportionately afraid of flying when compared with riding in a car. Some propose that a major component of this fear is control related. In an automobile, the rational fear that should be present is subdued by a sense of direct control and familiarity: you are the one driving the car, and despite the fact that you are driving at speeds that can easily kill you, the sensation is familiar.

The same rules apply for cloud vs local storage. Statistically, you’re far less likely to lose data in Google’s cloud, but with your data on your own computer, you feel more in control, and it’s a mechanism you’re familiar with. If Google is smart, they’ll pursue a propaganda campaign informing customers about the statistical reality. I have a feeling that this is going to become a growing concern, not just with enterprises, but with consumers as well.

It’s not greed, it’s narcissism

technology,

The folks over at Readability published an “open letter to Apple”:http://blog.arc90.com/2011/02/21/an-open-letter-to-apple-reprint/ today, explaining their dissatisfaction with the rejection of the Readability app for reasons related to Apple’s new subscription content policy. I’ll leave aside for a moment the interesting study of whether or not Readability is a content app or a utility and focus on something more abstract. In their letter, Readability accuses Apple of being greedy. I believe it’s far more insidious than that. Apple has stepped beyond greed and wholly in to corporate narcissism.

Let’s step back for a moment and look at iOS apps and the iTunes App Store business structure. If I decide to develop an iOS app, I know that Apple is going to want a 30% cut. I structure my business around this model, and it works out well for a few reasons. Many iOS developers are independent developers that would normally have to rely on typical publisher distribution channels, which actually makes Apple’s 30% plan look attractive. Big players have been forced to re-adjust a little bit. For example, in the game market, EA has been forced to lower their price, but you’ll notice that many EA titles only dip in to the indie price-point realm of $0.99 when they’re on sale. Traditional big-name titles retain their higher price point. The distinguishing factor is that Apple has not placed any price constraints on app publishers’ price points outside iOS and the App Store. The developers of Angry Birds are able to offer their app on Android for free. The contrasts are less apparent in other app categories, because iOS software has a natural tendency to be iOS exclusive. This is owed to other constraints, such as the requirement that apps remain authored in Objective-C and Cocoa Touch from their inception. Apple has written their rules in such a way that cross-platform apps are discouraged. This is by design, and arguably, developers and users have benefited by having access to well-written applications at a reasonable price.

The rules of the “app” game are set up in Apple’s favor, but native apps were Apple’s first step in to the broader development pool. Moving in to more current events, we can see how Apple is taking the lessons learned — well, some of them anyway — and applying them to their new “content” fee scheme. I use the word content, rather than subscription, explicitly because of the Readability case. Readability is not a publisher. They’re strictly a facilitator. I was called a little bit crazy for bringing up Flipboard in my last example, but I believe it is now more relevant than ever. Flipboard may not have any plans to build a subscription model, but anyone eyeballing their platform as a possible candidate for subscription content now has to accommodate Apple’s 30% cut.

Back on topic, I posit that Apple doesn’t really care about traditional media at large. A lot of the outcry is centered around the fact that Apple’s rules make it hard to structure a business that crosses boundaries. If I build a subscription content model that sells to iOS users, as well as the internet and traditional print media, I have to account for Apple’s 30% cut of my subscriptions that sell through the iOS ecosystem. This dilutes my margins outside the iOS world, effectively forcing me to “subsidize” my iOS users at the expense of everyone else. In simple terms, I will be forced to charge everyone more, because I can’t pass the Apple content tax on to iOS users alone thanks to Apple’s price consistency stipulations. Apple doesn’t care about that because they’re not in the business of helping you sell content. They’re in the business of building the iOS ecosystem

Apple’s goal is to fill their App Store with exclusive content; content designed specifically for iOS, and available nowhere else. “The Daily” is a prime example. “The Daily” is a new media property. Take in to account that Rupert Murdoch’s company, News Corp, is the third-largest media conglomerate in the world, yet they did not select an existing property to bring to the iPad. This is not a coincidence. Apple wanted an exclusive property, and News Corp is willing to try anything to save their struggling model. Don’t get me wrong, there are good reasons to make this a new property. By doing so, News Corp side-steps any pre-conceived notions users might have about what the content should cost, how it should be purchased, and with what frequency it should arrive. When you make something new, you get to set the rules. Sound familiar? Yes, News Corp took a page right out of Apple’s playbook, and I’d be willing to bet that Steve Jobs handed them an annotated copy.

As the picture forms, you realize a couple of things. First is that Apple is acting without regard for the larger market. That’s pretty typical for Apple. When given the opportunity, most companies target a small slice of the bigger pie. Something about “capturing just 2% of the market” makes the job sound easier, even if 2% represents millions of users. Apple eschews this thinking and attacks the small pie viciously. Have a look at Apple’s laptop strategy. Apple doesn’t sell to the low-end laptop market, but they dominate the high-end. Small pie, huge chunk. Based on that business philosophy, it would stand to reason that Apple doesn’t place a high priority on enabling apps like Readability, because they offer no iOS exclusivity. Apple would rather incentivize content like “The Daily”.

What’s striking about all of this is that there is only one benefactor in this strategy: Apple. There is one other possible benefit: that indie content creators will be empowered, much like indie app developers. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the same rules apply. Apps and games often go deep, but rarely wide. For example, look at Delicious Library. An excellent app developed by an independent developer. The problem of cataloging and organizing your personal media was thought about very deeply by its author, but where the problem gets wide, Delicious goes elsewhere. It relies on Amazon.com to provide details about the content. App developers have no problem going deep because they can simply work on the problem linearly, but going wide is difficult to serialize. Media is a “wide” problem. You can build a fantastic content publishing system that thinks of every conceivable angle and still have a commercial flop if you lack content that is high quality and diverse in interest. You need a lot of good content to make a media publication work, and that content needs to be current. Tools for creating content have never been more within reach, but there is still the question of editorial talent. Blogging, for example, still occupies a different space in my media view than a publication like The Economist. One is unfiltered, while the other is streamlined and concise. The latter takes far more resources.

For these reasons, I believe Apple stands alone in reaping the benefits of their business model. This steps across the lines of greed and into corporate narcissism. When it comes to corporations, being narcissistic might not be unethical, but it doesn’t win you a lot of friends, and ultimately hurts you over the long haul. Apple views the value of their platform from one direction only. iOS and the App Store are Apple’s gift to developers, content creators, and users. Nevermind the fact that an iPad devoid of applications is completely interchangeable with products from competitors. No value there. Apple would do well to strike a balance here.

Apple’s 30% vig is bad for innovation

business, technology,

Let me start out by saying that I believe Apple is well within its rights to enforce these policies as they are. This isn’t a question of “right” or “wrong” in my mind. People framing it in this fashion are living in a false dichotomy. Apple’s actions fall on the continuum of incentive, just like everything else. The assertion I’m making is that Apple’s decision to apply a 30% commission across the board for in-app subscriptions is too aggressive and will stifle innovation, leading to less choice for iOS customers, unsatisfied customer experience which inevitably will lead to softening iOS device’s attractiveness to consumers.

Let’s back up for a moment and address what is probably the most defensible position for Apple’s 30% cut. Apple has hit one out of the park with iOS and all the associated devices. Between the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, Apple has sold over 160 million iOS devices [1]. Even if a large part of that number are users replacing old devices, the number of iOS users remains _not insignificant_, to say the least. Apple has cultivated an audience who expects a seamless purchasing experience. iOS users expect to click a button and purchase content without going through any checkout procedures or creating new accounts. Along these lines, Apple wants to accomplish two things:

* Preserve that experience throughout iOS
* Be compensated for cultivating an engaged and free-spending user base

Stated simply, publishing an app or content on the iOS platform puts you in front of millions of users who buy content frequently. That puts Apple in a position not dissimilar to a publisher with a huge readership. If half of those 160 million devices are still active, that gives Apple 80 million eyes. The NY Times circulation is 1.4 million on a Sunday. That number is less than 1 million on weekdays [2].

So, we clearly have a situation where Apple deserves compensation for what it has built. But what should that number be, and how is a 30% cut bad for innovation?

In the publishing world today, there are content creators who have their own “go to market” (to borrow from Steve Jobs) strategies, and there are content creators who rely on delivery facilitators. These two classes are not mutually exclusive. Popular Mechanics, for example, is available in the iTunes App Store as an app, as well as through Zinio. Popular Mechanics is a publisher, and Zinio is a facilitator. Zinio doesn’t create any of their own content, but they have solved a problem, and publishers (a.k.a. content creators) want to make use of this solution without reinventing the wheel, so to speak.

Zinio is a pretty weak example of innovation, but you don’t have to go far to find a much more interesting example. Have a look at Flipboard. Unlike Zinio, who simply converts magazine pages to images and text, Flipboard brings a lot of new ideas to the table, but eventually, they’re going to have to carve out a piece of the compensation model. With Apple in the equation at 30%, that doesn’t leave much room for Flipboard. What about the user base that they have cultivated? What about the value they bring to to iOS as an exclusive application?

By capturing 30% of all subscription revenues, Apple is squeezing companies like Flipboard out of the equation. By consequence, Apple is moving customers “closer” to the creators of content. This sounds like a good thing, but when you look at innovators like Flipboard, you really have to question the value of this closeness. Publishers are frequently monolithic organizations that don’t adapt well to change. Their business is developing content, not mobile technology. If Flipboard is any evidence, pushing the delivery facilitator role out to smaller, more agile companies is a good thing. Apple would clearly prefer to work directly with publishers, as we can see by looking at “The Daily”.

By pursuing 30% of all in-app subscription revenues, Apple is creating a strong disincentive for facilitators. Even if you assume that publishers will hop on board with applications like “The Daily”, consumers still lose when companies like Flipboard never come in to existence, and that is how Apple’s mandatory 30% take stifles innovation.

1 – “Apple sells 160 millionth iOS device as average iPhone price grows to $625”:http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/01/18/apple_has_sold_160m_ios_devices_average_iphone_price_grows_to_625.html

2 – “Newspaper Circulation Falls Nearly 9%”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/business/media/27audit.html

Google WebM: Who will think of the users?

technology, , ,

A quote:

bq. That is all well and good for Google, but what does that mean for me, the guy who just wants to lay on his sofa and watch cute kittens? At this point, pretty much nothing.

This is a short excerpt from an otherwise “well balanced article”:http://blog.andrewhubbs.com/?p=87 explaining the players, roles, and technologies involved in Google’s decision to remove H.264 support from their HTML5 video tag implementation in Chrome. The sentiment expressed is that it doesn’t matter much to us mere mortals. That couldn’t be further from the truth. If Google is successful in pushing WebM as the standard means of encoding video on the web, it will render millions of devices obsolete, impacting the millions of consumers who own those devices. How?

In many articles on this topic, you’ll find passing mention of something called “hardware decoders”. Since my goal is to explain what Google’s actions mean to the Average Joe, I’m going to go through the trouble of backing up a bit and explaining a few things about video, and how it is played back on various devices.

All this talk about video codecs, what does it mean? A codec (short for coder/decoder) could be thought of as a process definition. Say you had a letter that you wanted to send to a friend, but the post office charged based on the length of the letter. You have two choices: you either shorten your message, or you find a method by which you can reduce the number of characters required to communicate the same information. Expressing the same information using fewer characters is something computer scientists call compression. In addition to compressing the message to save on costs, you’d want to make sure the letter was written in a language that the recipient understands. And what about his ability to open it and access the contents? You need to make sure the envelope is accessible and allows the recipient to easily access what’s inside. That sounds like a silly requirement, but it’s relevant when you look at the details. You could think of all these details as a “codec” for writing and delivering a letter†.

† I’ve lumped codec together with file format here, which is technically incorrect, but trivial for understanding this issue from an end-user perspective.

So how does this relate to web video? All of the seemingly inane details expressed above are the type of things that computer scientists think about when they design a video file format. Interestingly, codec is just one aspect of a video format. I won’t go in to the others, but it’s worth understanding that the problem is very complex and covers many different areas of knowledge. For the moment, let’s look at the compression part.

Inside your computer is a very, very powerful microprocessor called a CPU. Your CPU is capable of computing solutions to a very wide variety of problems. Because of this, we call it a general purpose microprocessor. It is possible, however, to build a kind of CPU that is optimized to perform a very specific task. In the various articles written about Google’s WebM decision, you’ll find mention of an “H.264 hardware decoder”. What does that mean?

H.264 hardware decoder: a specialized microprocessor that is purpose-built to decode the target codec.

Examples of H.264 hardware decoders:

* The video card in your computer probably has one
* The iPhone has one
* The iPod has one
* Most Android phones have one
* If your TV can play video from an SD card or computer, it has one
* If your digital camera shoots video, it probably has one
* Your digital camcorder probably records in AVCHD (incorporates H.264)
* Virtually every video production suite on the market can utilize an H.264 hardware encoder-decoder

So what does an H.264 hardware decoder do for you? In short, it allows you to watch high-resolution video while using far less battery than it would if you used your device’s CPU. When sitting at your desk, you’d think this wouldn’t matter, but playing back a 1080p video encoded using H.264 can peak even modern processors at 80%-90% utilization. That means the loud fan in your computer is going to turn on and make noise while you’re trying to watch your movie. On laptops, the consequence is even more severe. You can lose hours of battery life by not using H.264 hardware decoders. On mobile devices, it’s game over. Your phone doesn’t have a powerful dual-core CPU. It has a tiny mobile CPU that simply doesn’t have the horsepower to decode high-resolution video on the fly. You’ll be stuck with lower resolution, larger-size video that requires less computing power.

Feel that pit developing in your stomach? Yeah, I’m right there with you.

Let’s look at some numbers:

* 50 million iPhones [1]
* 450,000 iPads [1]
* 220 million iPods (as of Sept 2009) [2]
* 8.5 million Android phones (as of Feb 2010) [3]

That’s close to 280 million devices with H.264 hardware support, and I haven’t scratched the surface. There are no televisions on that list. Remember CES and all the hype over Android tablets? None of them have WebM hardware decoders. On every one of these devices, the cost of WebM video playback will be:

* Greatly reduced battery life
* Larger file-sizes (less compression will be required for smooth playback)
* Lower resolution

We’re talking about falling back from every major milestone met by mobile device manufacturers in the last three years, and millions of devices rendered obsolete for video encoded in WebM. What happens if Google goes WebM-only for YouTube? Right now, Apple supports H.264 exclusively on their mobile devices? Why is that? Because Apple considers user experience to be first priority. Even if Apple were to implement WebM on their mobile devices, the consequence would be jittery video playback that sucked your battery dry in no time. That’s not a good user experience.

So, what does this mean for the Average Joe? If Google is successful, it means that your user experience will be significantly degraded on any device you own that contains H.264 hardware, but no WebM hardware. Have a look at the specs for your phone, portable media player, television, and home theater media devices. Any of them that rely on H.264 hardware are at risk for becoming obsolete.

1 – “TechCrunch”:http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/08/apple-has-sold-450000-ipads-50-million-iphones-to-date/
2 – “World of Apple”:http://news.worldofapple.com/category/world-of-apple-events/
3 – “Numberof.net”:http://www.numberof.net/number-of-android-phones-sold/

Kitty Hawk 2.0

technology

One of my favorite quotes from a great video titled “The Future of Money”:http://vimeo.com/16025167.

bq. “The Wright brothers weren’t thinking about all the infrastructure required to make commercial aviation happen, they were thinking ‘How do we make this thing fly?'”

It’s easy to look back over the industrial revolution and believe that somehow, this time things are different. Then you hear someone say something like this, and you realize that we’re all standing around Kitty Hawk, just trying to get this thing off the ground. The truly great things are yet to come.