Yet there is something unsettling about all the celebrating in the Mac blogosphere. We're losing sight of what's really important.

I've been using Apple products since the late 1980s, and I've forked over thousands of dollars to the company over the intervening years. I fought to use a Mac when I ran the website for a government agency, and had to go all the way to the CFO to gain approval. I created a blog devoted to helping Mac-using law students, back in the days when such a blog was necessary. You could say Apple is in my blood.

That said, I think it's important for those of us who use Apple products to be mindful of what we're celebrating. Are we celebrating the fact that Apple has a staggering $97B in cash? Or is it that the company has a higher valuation than every other company on the planet? Are we rooting for the football team that got pummeled for years and has finally become unbeatable?

In a sense, we are. After years of hearing about how I was a bit weird for using a Mac, there's a certain satisfaction in watching friends switch from Windows to Macintosh. I get a kick out of going to parties and noticing that even the Apple naysayers now have iPhones. The little band of outcasts has become a globe-enveloping swarm, and I was there in the beginning.

This sort of tribal affiliation should come as no surprise. We are, after all, just humans. I'm sure there are some people who are happy to use Apple products because it helps them feel hip and sophisticated. But in my experience most people fork over their hard-earned cash to Apple because they want their personal technology to work in a way that is comfortable and reliable.

For a time, if you wanted that kind of ease of use and quality, Apple really was the only game in town. Apple still holds a strong lead. By building the hardware, software, and cloud services themselves, Apple can maintain a strategic advantage that is difficult for competitors to overcome. As long as Apple stays on its game, no mix-and-match set of hardware, software, and services can provide a comparable user experience.

But Apple's success has forced even the most sluggish of its competitors to realize that the total user experience is of paramount importance. Android v4 marks a leap forward for the mobile OS in style and polish. Windows Phone demonstrates that Microsoft is capable of producing an exceptional user interface without mimicking Apple. Nokia continues to ship hardware of outstanding quality. There is no shortage of companies learning from Apple's success.

One could argue that Apple came first, and that Google, Microsoft, and Nokia are mere copycats. But that discussion invariably devolves into a useless tit-for-tat comparison. The big players in consumer technology are all busy innovating. They're all learning from each other's successes and failures. That's the nature of any market, and that's as it should be. What matters is not that one company succeeds or fails, but that I am well served.

If Apple continues to deliver an intelligently designed, well-implemented array of products and services, they'll get more of my money. But at the end of the day, the reason I have supported Apple for so long is that they have made my life better by producing tools that are valuable to me at work, at home, and on the move. If Apple loses its focus and stops delivering value to me, and another company is able to step in with a better approach, I'll gladly turn coat.

Steve Jobs wouldn't have it any other way.

Ω

Trolls are a different breed. While counterpunchers actually seem to believe they are performing a beneficial service, trolls revel in disruption for its own sake. They know they're providing nothing meaningful, and that's the whole point. Annoying, disturbing, and (if they're really good) angering strangers gives them a thrill.

Every day we spend online we put up with counterpunchers and trolls. They infest the comments sections of news sites and blogs. They lurk in discussion boards, ready to pounce. Like the slow drip of a leaky faucet, they're ambient noise. We've learned to accept them, to tune them out, to go about our online lives as if they did not exist.

But they do exist. And we, the people who build websites, keep them alive. We build houses for them by creating websites with social features that don't include robust reputation and moderation systems. We feed them by writing linkbait content that is designed to score eyeballs and create controversy. We get them into a frenzy by responding to them.

There would be far fewer counterpunchers and trolls roaming the highways and byways of the Intergoogle if we stopped building them houses, if we stopped feeding them, if we stopped coddling them. Reducing their numbers simply requires that we step back from the social features flypaper for a moment and recognize that giving every participant the ability to add their $.02 to the conversation is not necessarily a good thing.

I believe that in many if not most cases the addition of comment functionality does more harm than good. I say this having run sites with and without comments enabled. There's a way to do comments right, but it takes ongoing effort. In the best case scenario most comments are still chaff, and readers will still have to work to find the meaty bits. In the worst case scenario, which is far more prevalent, the inmates quickly overrun the asylum and comments sections become spleen-venting areas where the hostile, the ill-informed, and the self-righteous take center stage.

The nice thing about running your own website is that you can do as you please. But when clients are paying you to build a site, they call the shots. And these days most publishers want social interaction because they've been told over and over again that it's the right thing to do. Hey, everyone's doing it, right?

Unfortunately social features have also been sold as a fire-and-forget exercise. Spray on some social and you'll get that genuine interactive flavor without the hassle of creating inherently compelling content! Publishers have also been sold on AdSense and affiliate links, so they can't help but equate time on page to increased revenue. If visitors are commenting, they're staying on the page longer!

When taken to its logical extreme this approach leads to sites like the execrable Business Insider, which treats its readers as if they were Pavlov's dogs, clicking from one inane story to the next and occasionally hitting an ad link along the way.

With ad revenue firmly lodged in the minds of site owners as the only way to make money, or at least as a means of making money that is worth ruining the user experience for, how do we get out of this mess?

John Gruber, who writes Daring Fireball, has built a dedicated readership and brings in revenue from three primary sources: a syndicated RSS feed sponsorship, a single ad spot from The Deck, and t-shirt sales. He may not be getting rich off Daring Fireball, but he charges $6,500 a week for RSS feed sponsorships. He's doing all of this without employing any social features on his site.

Gruber is able to pull this off because he is an excellent writer who puts in the work. He produces a great deal of original material and provides commentary on a larger stream of linked content. There is no foolproof get rich quick scheme at play, just a guy showing up every day and creating something he believes in. Whether you agree or disagree with his opinions, the way he has structured the reading experienced makes it obvious that he respects his readers.

Unfortunately the Daring Fireball approach is the exception to the norm. Social features have increasingly become tools that are cynically deployed against site visitors. Instead of helping, they hinder. Instead of making the Web a better place, they are have become just another manifestation of the manipulative, lazy attitude that so many online publishers have adopted because of reliance on the AdSense/affiliate links shell game, rather than on great writing.

Must Reads

Joe Wilcox takes Gruber to task for his no comments policy, and Gruber responds.

Ω

twitter: @erikschmidt

08 November 2011

Freddie deBoer's The Resentment Machine is a scathing critique of the current Internet as a vehicle for the aggrandizement of consumption, driven by the competitive forces inherent in our society. It is well-argued and worth a careful read.

DeBoer's analysis focuses on the "postcollegiate, culturally savvy tastemakers" of the Internet and the ultimate triviality of their online discourse. It's easy to agree with him that "buying an iPad does nothing to delineate you from anyone else." That said, I think he's missing the larger context.

When the popular Internet arrived I was already an adult. I can testify without reservation to the fact that competitive consumption was already a way of life in America well before Internet hipsters showed up.

It can be difficult to remember now, but in the 1980s the television reigned supreme. It told you what to wear, what to eat, what was cool, what was out of style, and how to act. And people wanted so badly to do what their televisions told them to do. Most of the people who bought K-Tel disco albums had never set foot in a dance club, but they'd seen plenty of disco on TV, and they knew they were supposed to like it.

Before the television, radio told Americans how they should think. Before that it was newspapers. Now we all just tell each other how to think and what to consume. We argue about it. I'm not sure if that's better or worse than simply being told what to consume and how to consume it by broadcast boxes.

Are we unable to create meaningful self-identity because we are too busy blogging, tweeting, linking, and liking? In those musty pre-Internet days we didn't assemble our identities online, but we didn't create them from scratch either. DeBoer seems to believe that you can either be a consumer and critic, or you can engage in some sort of artistically meaningful and authentic endeavor of your own.

But authenticity is a will-o-the-wisp. Every time you think you've got a handle on it you realize you've just grabbed hold of a nascent trend or reconfigured artifact from the past. Today's earnest striving is tomorrow's ironic nod, and today's irony is tomorrow's deeply held conviction. The pieces from which we assemble identity are not unique; it's the manner in which they are assembled that defines us.

DeBoer does an excellent job of laying out the grim reality of an unexamined life. He merely misses the larger truths: The Internet did not create nor did it necessarily magnify competitive consumption, and the quest for an authentically-constructed self has always been and will always be difficult.

Ω

twitter: @erikschmidt

It's been 2 1/2 years since our last interview, so I asked Carlos if I could get his thoughts on bringing any indie film to market and the larger movie industry. Calling him a road warrior is like saying Lance Armstrong is a cyclist. I caught up with Carlos as he and JT zoomed up I-5 en route to a Judas Kiss screening in Salem, Oregon:

The last time I interviewed you it was May of 2009. At the time I asked, "In 2012, Carlos Pedraza is doing what? And this nascent industry of independent video producers is where in relation to that?" Here's the money part of your answer:

"I would like by 2012 to have figured out at least one avenue for that talent to be harnessed, and to have done that successfully one or two times, so that people say, 'Here's a system. Let's buy into it. Let's refine it.' Let's have some examples of how that's being done effectively, and share that knowledge, because it shouldn't be secret."

Well, I feel like I'm still on schedule, even with so much of the economic landscape having changed since then. Not just in terms of the recession but in how business models around independent film distribution are changing even as we speak. That conversation you and I had 2 1/2 years ago informed the way we negotiated all our distribution contracts for Judas Kiss.

What is changing?

Revenue streams, ancillary products, and how to structure new media venues for distribution. For example, YouTube now offers downloads and rental for films, majors and indies. Hulu is doing the same thing. Netflix's shift from DVD distribution to instant streaming and its attempt to divest itself of its DVD distribution business then retrenching.

So not only did you have to be forward thinking about distribution, you had to be agile enough to adapt to changes.

Yes. Things are changing so fast, even within the time frames in which we've been negotiating our contracts with various distributors here in North America and overseas. For example, we see iTunes as a big potential revenue source for us, and we are fully capable of making the film available in that venue without having to rely on a distributor as a middleman. So we've retained iTunes rights for ourselves.

But we also planned on piggybacking the marketing and promotion of our iTunes version of Judas Kiss on top of the DVD marketing and promotion that's being paid for by our distributors. Because, of course, the challenge for an indie filmmaker isn't merely making your film available online, it's getting people to know it's there, and whether it's good enough to spend their money to download it. iTunes also gives us the opportunity to offer the film for sale in parts of the world where there isn't a reliable distributor to really take the film under its wing.

This requires, of course, our having to take on a lot of the work a distributor would normally take care of, like translating and subtitling. All our marketing and promotion is designed to dovetail between what our distributors — especially in the US and UK, as well as Germany and France — are doing with the social marketing we've been doing for years now via our own website, judaskissmovie.com, and Facebook.

That's one thing I've been really impressed with — your engagement with your audience up front has been targeted and seemingly very effective, even well before production started.

The secret to independent film success is branding and relationship-building with existing and new fans.

Problem is, most indie filmmakers just wanna make movies. We don't live in an economy anymore where you can simply do that, and hope that distributors take care of the rest. We're lucky in that we've been able to merge the old-school distribution models with new-school social media.

It seems that a huge amount of your work is what a traditional filmmaker would consider as ancillary, stuff that is handled by someone else.

We were able to raise the critical development funding for the film, early in conception, thanks to the fans we had built relationships with during our days with our Star Trek web series. They followed us to this new project and have stuck with us right up to purchasing their Judas Kiss DVDs.

Major studios know that there are plenty of other revenue streams for a film beyond the film itself: merchandising, adaptation into novel or comic formats, and so on. The Internet offers marketplaces for all these kinds of products to independent films, too, now. For example, we are planning on publishing the shooting script for Judas Kiss as an ebook, along with annotations, embedded video files, and so on. We've also talked to a traditional publisher about adapting the script into a novel.

None of these things by itself, including even the film, turns the project into a huge moneymaker. But taken together, the long tail can in fact offer revenue that eventually positions us to make our next film, to further build on our brand, to offer new products to the people who believe in our work, to encourage them to recommend the work to others.

It's definitely like running a marathon, whereas I think most filmmakers think of their work as wind sprints.

It seems that the start point doesn't really matter any more. Whether it's a book or a comic or a movie initially, the story is the thing. You're telling the story in film, and there is potential for others to help you tell the story in other forms. The trick is to think of it as a much larger fabric than the movie itself.

That's so true! And isn't it ironic that story seems to be the thing that Hollywood films are given short shrift to these days? I think I remember reading a recent interview with a Disney executive who said story wasn't important, branding is. I thought, "Bullshit! Story is how you build and extend your brand. It's at the heart of what your brand means!" I mean, look at the difference between Pixar's original Cars and the pathetic sequel. Clearly, Disney took a turn there toward the cynical — "Think of all the merchandise we can sell the kiddy-poos!"

I get that big films make the most money, and minimizing risk is prudent, and going with "known quantities" is prudent. But that's ultimately a losing proposition. It's a stopgap measure from a creative standpoint. All the studios are doing is creating a niche for more nimble, more innovative and more creative people to tell new and more engaging stories. The key thing is keeping costs down. Which of course is the thing that has painted studio pictures into a corner.

Hollywood studios, who are in the business of storytelling, are abandoning it in favor of gimmicks like 3-D and incessant remakes of old properties. Frankly, the studios are totally at sea when it comes to the delivery vehicle. They've bungled every new delivery technology, from TV to VHS, to DVDs, Blu-Ray only a little, and now digital delivery. They have to learn to stop relying on gimmicks.

The studios' dirty little secret is that most adults rarely go to the movies any more. Rather than thinking, "Hmmm, our audience is consuming our products in other venues, maybe we should make it easier for them to find us there," studio instead say, "The only people at movie theaters now are teenage boys. So let's make all our tentpole movies for them!"

Now that I've made my first feature film, I'm confident that there are ways to make films that people will buy that don't cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. There will always be a place for big tentpole movies, for sure. I'm not against them, but that shouldn't be the only economic model for filmmakers to follow, or even to aspire to. Smaller projects, more creative ones, well-targeted to narrow demographics offered in multiple venues with a focus on user-friendliness: That's actually the formula to independent filmmaking success in the digital world.

Smaller films entail less risk. Keeping costs down minimizes that risk, but it maximizes creativity. There are things need to change. The actors' unions, for example, offer breaks to indie filmmakers who want access to their talent but at lower cost than studios and TV pay. Lower pay has to become the new reality for a lot of film professionals. But more projects mean more work, and isn't that what we really want to be doing — making more movies?

Would you say that the funding approach you used for Judas Kiss could be considered a patronage model?

To some extent. But like most everything we've done so far, it's a mix of traditional and new. We raised development money from fans and friends we made through a Web series. But our financing for production and post-production has largely followed a traditional model, with an LLC as the legal entity behind the film. The structure of the investment model is pretty textbook for indie films. The difference is that many of the investors are people with whom we built relationships over time.

Even though the old ways may be changing or dying, they may still be with us in some form for quite some time. In the meantime, new technology and social media offer new venues to find support for a film and to make it available for sale.

We're also seeing some potential legislative changes that may make crowd funding for indie films a more tenable financial proposition. The SEC has rules designed to keep small investors from being fleeced by unscrupulous "film producers" seeking to deprive them of their life savings. Things like Kickstarter prove that by spreading financial risk around to a much larger number of people, producers don't have to rely on a small number of investors for a large amount of money. Small investors can pitch in on financing a film without having to take on a big financial risk. The talk in Congress from both Republicans and Democrats is that a change like this is necessary in order to free up capital that would otherwise stagnate. And we need capital moving toward innovative projects to jumpstart our economy.

Over the course of the last five years or so, as you've worked on Judas Kiss, what portion of your time would you estimate has been working on licensing, legal matters, and all those things that in the old era would have been handled by someone else?

Just in dealing with licensing and promotion has been a full time job for me since we wrapped the film in September 2010. Most filmmakers turn over that kind of work to a distributor, but distributors don't do it for free. Believe me, they take their cut. The reality is that most independent films don't make their money back. So the traditional model, where a filmmaker hands everything over to a distributor is not tenable.

In that scenario, the distributor makes money guaranteed. Filmmakers don't. But filmmakers mostly aren't business people. They want to be artists, so they don't always make the best business decisions.

So your advice to filmmakers is…?

Learn to be strategic about what aspects of the business you need to remain involved in. Learn enough of the business so you know what to negotiate away and what you should retain. Think of the brand you're trying to build – your brand, not your distributor's.

That brings me to the marketing of Judas Kiss. Obviously there's a core audience you're going after, but it's also clear that the film is not confined to that audience.

We knew what we were selling was a story with broad appeal, but we also knew that targeting a market is the best way to make money. At this stage in our careers, we need a track record that says: 1) We can tell a story, 2) we can sell that story, 3) people want to see more stories from us. That's what attracts new and more diverse investors.

I think of it as a form of inkblot strategy. Hit that well-defined target, and you'll likely also have the impact grow beyond the initial audience as people spread the word to friends who might not otherwise be exposed to the film.

Yes. An inkblot strategy. I like that metaphor. May I use it?

Use it!

Thanks!

A good story is a good story. The challenge is not to tell it in a way that says to potential customers, "This isn't for you," but still allows you to tell specific markets, "This is your story, too." That is a big challenge, but good films should be big challenges.

Ω

twitter: @erikschmidt

Being only 15 years old, I wasn't exactly flush with cash. Neither were my folks, for that matter. But they both worked, and our house was off the beaten path. I lived a mile from school and two or three miles from my closest friends. So if I was to have any sort of life out side of the house, a bike was required.

My dad offered to pay half the cost of the bike. He built houses, so I scraped up my portion helping him at job sites on the weekends. I gathered scraps, moved lumber, helped on concret pours, dug a lot of ditches, and generally did whatever needed doing. After a few weeks I'd accumulated my half, and we went to the bike shop to scoop up that Miyata.

I was rather excited to have this sterling piece of machinery at my disposal, so I told my dad I'd meet him at home. What kid with a new bike wouldn't immediately want to break it in? After tearing all over Aptos, I arrived at the house with a ravenous hunger and a grin a mile wide. "So what's the dollars to miles ratio?"

He'd caught me off guard with that one. "Uh, I guess it's something like 175 to 10. So that's $17.50 per mile or so." He just nodded.

A week later he asked me the same question. "Let's see, I've been riding it to and from school every day, and I went to Scrub's on Saturday. I'd say it's 175 to 36." It took me a moment to calculate that one in my head. "That's almost $5 per mile." He lifted his eyebrows, but said nothing.

This became a game with us. I rode that bike for years. For most of my college existence there was no car, only the Miyata. When my parents came to my apartment on graduation day, Dad saw the Miyata and grinned. "Hey, what's the dollars to miles ratio now?" I did some quick guesstimating. The figure had to be on the order of 4 cents a mile, and that included the cost of a replacement wheel and tires and inner tubes over all those years. Not too shabby.

I've incorporated the dollars to miles concept as a yardstick when I'm thinking about making a large purchase. It helps me frame how something will actually be used. Is this something I'm buying on a whim, or will it be used and enjoyed long enough to make it worth the money? Most of the time the actual measure is dollars to hours of use.

This is particularly helpful for entertainment purchases. I tend to use going to the movies as a baseline. On a per-hour basis going to the movies is rather expensive. Assuming you take in a matinee and don't buy much popcorn, you're still easily looking at $7 or $8 an hour. My current favorite iPhone game is Zombie Gunship. It cost me $1 and I've probably put 10 hours into it so far. That's 10 cents an hour.

Using the dollars per hour metric, paperback (or electronic) books almost always provide great bang for the buck. A good book also may even get read twice, which doubles the value.

One of the things I like about the dollars per hour approach is that as long as you're looking at the value of something that requires your attention (such as a book, a bike, a computer, or a game), you can compare one purchase to another in a relatively straightforward fashion.

For example, I could spend $300 on the complete Battlestar Galactica on Blu-Ray (67 hours if I watch every episode once), or for $80 I could buy The Lord of the Rings on Blu-Ray (11 hours if I watch it once). That's about $4.47 an hour versus about $7.27 an hour. But after watching every single episode of Galactica I doubt I'd be in the mood for a re-watch any time soon. The Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, deserves a full viewing once a year. Let's call it three viewings for the sake of argument. That makes $4.47 an hour versus about $2.42 an hour.

Even $2.42 an hour pales in comparison to a good meaty book, even one you blaze through. It probably took me five hours to read David Benioff's City of Thieves, but the book only cost $8, so we're looking at $1.60 an hour.

None of these calculations takes into account any sort of qualitative measure. Even if someone paid me $4 an hour to watch Laverne & Shirley, I'd feel cheated. Looking at the value of a purchase in terms of hours of enjoyment isn't something I take too seriously, but it's a fun way to apply a sanity check before making an impulse buy.

Ω

Steve Jobs lived his own life. He didn't care where the herd was going, and he didn't settle. While everyone else worried about taking too many chances, he was afraid of taking too few.

The technology industry needs more leaders like him. America needs more leaders like him.

You'll be missed, Steve.

Ω

twitter: @erikschmidt

A small overturned white truck came into view. Bodies, some moving, some still, lay fanned out from the vehicle. Thick, deep red arterial blood flowed on the gray pavement. The shambling, dazed movements of some of the survivors indicated that the accident had occurred only moments earlier.

As the humvee rolled to a stop, the captain got on the radio and called headquarters. The lieutenant jumped off to investigate. There were no flames, but a broad swath of gasoline poured out of the truck. The wheels of the vehicle still spun slowly as it lay on its side. One of the tires had been completely shredded. The lieutenant looked up and saw a large group of vehicles approaching slowly from further up the road. He counted at least half a dozen of them – small, open-bed trucks, medium-sized covered cargo trucks, and a rickety bus.

As the humvee driver watched for other signs of approach, the captain stepped carefully among the bodies, trying to determine who was dead and who was merely injured.

The lieutenant signaled to the rifleman next to him. "We have to keep them from getting up to this wreck," he said as he walked toward the approaching vehicles. The interpreter and the rifleman followed. The ragged convoy stopped, and a loose collection of men jumped out, shouting and running toward the crash.

The agitated men stopped running at the sight of drawn weapons, but they continued to approach. The interpreter translated the lieutenant's words. He told the men they could not pass until a helicopter arrived and the wounded were evacuated. To cement the point, the lieutenant drew an imaginary line on the road, directly in front of rifleman. He motioned and said, "Do not cross this line." He gestured with his rifle emphatically.

"I've called in a medevac. Mark the LZ," the captain ordered. The lieutenant moved to the side of the road. As he looked for a good spot for a helicopter to land, he saw two bodies. They were lying in strangely contorted positions, glassy eyes aimed at the sky. He looked around. Though two or three men were still trying to get up, the rest lay inert, dead or dying. A low moan emanated from one as the lieutenant moved quickly away.

After a couple of minutes of casting about, he found a spot and marked it with yellow smoke flares. As he popped the last of them he could hear the helicopter, screaming in low and fast, a giant red cross on its side. Dust was still blowing from the giant main rotors as the battalion surgeon bounded out of the helicopter and ran up to the carnage.

The lieutenant turned and saw that the crowd had swelled. The rifleman was having difficulty persuading them to maintain their distance. A man slipped past him, cigarette in hand, jauntily walking toward the truck, smiling mirthlessly and surveying the situation.

He was thin, but not emaciated, and he was sweating as much as the Americans. He hesitated as the lieutenant approached rapidly. He smiled broadly, as if innocent and uninformed. The lieutenant's face reddened. With one arm he pointed his rifle at the man, then at the crowd.

The man's smile turned knowing. He languidly found his way back to the group behind the imaginary line. On the way he took the cigarette from his mouth and carefully, deliberately flicked it onto the faded pavement, so that it fell just outside the puddle of gasoline that spread from the truck's remains.

The lieutenant squashed the cigarette with his boot, then ran after the man, who heard his footsteps and broke into a run. The lieutenant stopped and shook his head, then returned to the truck.

Two more young men had slipped past the rifleman. The interpreter angrily shouted at them to no effect. They rushed to the remains of the truck. A bearded old man lay next to it, a pool of blood beneath him. His white robe was dirtied and blood-soaked. The surgeon was cradling his head, shining a small light into his eyes.

"This man stole this truck from me!" one of the two interlopers shouted as his friend grabbed at the dying old man, catching his shirt for a brief moment before the lieutenant yanked him roughly away. Turning back, he saw the life disappear from the old man's eyes. "He's dead," the surgeon sighed.

Jaw clenched, the lieutenant hauled the men back across the line, one in each arm. "If any of you try to get past us again, we will shoot you. Do you understand?!" the murmuring crowd stood its ground, wordlessly reabsorbing the men.

The helicopter whined as it lifted the dead and wounded into the sky. The captain walked up, putting his hand on the lieutenant's shoulder. "Let's go," he said.

The Americans and the interpreter jumped back into the humvee. Three still shaken but relatively unharmed men stood near the truck, holding on to its battered frame for support. The crowd parted and the humvee moved slowly down the road. Looking back, the lieutenant saw the crowd surging toward the three survivors.

Ω

twitter: @erikschmidt

I'm reminded of that paper because of a New York Times article that shines some light on the atrocious state of broadband in Idaho. The most revealing bit is actually a map that shows residential Internet download speeds across the nation. While Idaho is at the bottom, the rest of the country still fares poorly.

Got infrastructure?

Ω

twitter: @erikschmidt

24 August 2011

You're developing a mobile app and are conducting some on-device testing. You encounter unexpected behavior from the app, and you want to show this behavior to other members of the development team rather than try to explain it in words. The mobile device you're using isn't rooted or jailbroken, so you don't have access to a video screen capture app. Thankfully you do have a Dropbox account and an iPad.

Here's a quick and easy video rig that gets the job done:

I set the mobile device on black craft paper, because it's non-reflective. Lighting is actually the trickiest part of this exercise. Ceiling lights can really create a lot of glare, so I turn them off.

The iPad is set on books piled six to seven inches high. Be sure the orientation of the iPad's camera app matches the orientation of the app on the mobile device, or you'll wind up with a recording that is 90 degrees off.

Hit the record button, then carefully recreate the unexpected app behavior on the mobile device. Stop recording and move the resulting file into Dropbox. Share the video with whomever needs to see it.

Since I can't show the app I'm working on at present, I used LocaJot to demonstrate this rig setup. It's a spiffy tool for taking location-based notes created by my friends at ecmodeyo.

Ω

This is about more than just patents, though. Google has been given a free pass for years on the basis of their free-at-face-value services, their "open" approach, and the famous "do no evil" motto. That pass has expired.

First, "free" online services are never really free. There are hidden costs in ad-driven services, the first being user experience. In Google World you're never free of ads. They may be in your face, they may be tucked out of the way, but they're always there creating cognitive overhead, making your online life just a bit more cluttered, bombarding you with distractions. I won't even get into the privacy aspects of Google knowing so much about its users. When you use Google, you truly are the product being sold.

Then there's Android, the "open" mobile platform. What does open mean in this context? Let's ignore for a moment the litigation surrounding Android. On the ground the Android flavor of "open" means that handset vendors and mobile carriers are free to do with it what they will. The vast majority of Android users will never even root their phone, because they're not among the small percentage of humans who find the internal workings of mobile devices interesting. In the mean time handset manufacturers and carriers control when users get OS upgrades.

Finally, and of primary importance, Google is a publicly traded company. When they first proclaimed they would "do no evil" it sounded like typical Silicon Valley naiveté. Every Valley company that rockets quickly to the top of the heap goes through a period of giddy American hubris, in which it assumes immense profits and unmitigated human good must as if by law of nature go hand in hand.

Then the reality hits. The company falls on tough times. The giveaways to the education sector dry up. The talk of using remote videoconferencing technology to save the world is quietly put to an end. Slowly it sinks in: We are here to make money for shareholders. All else is window dressing.

The reality has not hit at Google, but it will sooner or later. Maybe it already has, and perhaps that's why Eric Schmidt is no longer CEO. If that's the case, the rhetoric coming from Mountain View hasn't caught up with the times. Google still presents itself as a company that truly believes everything it does is for the good of humanity at large. When it was a charmed startup that quaint notion looked like youthful optimism. Now it looks at best like willful avoidance of reality and at worst like an attempt to trade on half-truths.

Ω

I don't believe there is some sort of universal truth about my father, a kind of objective story that can neatly summarize his life and who he was. All I can do is share with you a small slice of how I see him.

I first met Lee Schmidt one night in a hospital. The details of the meeting I've long forgotten, but something clicked between us. He seems to have taken a liking to me at that moment, and me to him. There were a tumultuous first few years in which it was an open question whether I'd live with him or with my birth mother. The early 1970s were not an era in which fathers often won child custody battles, but my dad fought to have me in his home and emerged victorious. It may sound like an exaggeration to say that in so doing he saved my life, but to me that's exactly what he did.

He worked six days a week in the lean years when construction had slowed to a trickle in Santa Cruz County. We'd throw the baseball in the yard, or play Frisbee. Then we discovered the Wham-O Track Ball and our moments together became even more exciting. He built me an epic tree fort on top of a mammoth redwood stump behind our back deck. He taught me how to play chess, and how to get in front of a grounder.

As I got older his desire to keep me from turning into a jackass and my desire to act like a jackass frequently clashed. We frequently exchanged unpleasant words. I went away to college and joined ROTC. The hostilities quickly ceased. We became amigos again. I had made choices almost diametrically in opposition to those he'd made at my age, but that didn't matter to him. He was happy that I was becoming my own self.

Over the years we shared adventures on the San Juan River and the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal. But mostly we shared words. By phone, by the US Postal Service, by email. The topics ranged far and wide, but the ideas were always central. There was an exploration, a care to avoid presumption and dogma. Even if there was no one true meaning to this life, the mere fact that I could explore all its facets with him gave me a secret joy.

The cancer came and he fought it. He fought it hard, like a warrior. I don't use that term lightly. It was personal combat - him against that implacable foe. As it slowly became obvious that he was not going to prevail, he opened himself up in an astounding display of grace under pressure. At the time in his life when he was most vulnerable and physically weakest, he was mentally and emotionally strongest. And he gave. He shared his thoughts. He created the best writings of his life, full of emotion and wit and always, always honest.

My dad never presented himself as an exemplar of anything other than, perhaps, endurance. He just did what he felt he needed to do. Instead of telling me what I should be, he told me to be my own man. He told me he was proud of me. He told me he loved me. He left nothing unsaid. And when I saw him for the last time, he smiled through tears.

I know I lucked out that night in the hospital.

Ω

The primacy of iOS is evident in Lion, the latest iteration of Mac OS X. Many of the new features in Lion are designed to bring OS X in line with the more rapidly-evolving iOS. The expanded array of multitouch trackpad gestures in particular look like an attempt to mimimic in an indirect interface what comes more naturally in a direct one.

For many uses multitouch on a touchscreen is more intuitive and powerful than anything that can be found in OS X or any other desktop operating system. Image editing apps like Photogene and Snapseed provide a deft, hands-on quality that desktop applications costing 100 times as much can't match. The iOS versions of iMovie make editing video even easier than before. OmniFocus on the iPad is superior to its OS X progenitor. All kinds of iOS apps are showing that multitouch on a touchscreen can provide a better user experience than the WIMP (Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing Device) approach.

None of this means that design studios are going to drop Photoshop in favor of Snapseed next month. But the raw computing power of iOS devices is increasing, and it doesn't take a crystal ball to imagine a day when, for example, professional video editors will ply their craft using an iOS version of Aperture on an iMac-sized touchscreen. A generation weaned on mobile devices will see WIMP interfaces as relics of the past.

Mac OS X has already been superseded in importance by iOS. The real question is how long OS X will be included in Apple devices. In January, 2010 I opined that "Apple has shown a willingness to set fire to its ships in order to conquer new territories." That desire to avoid stagnation certainly hasn't gone away. I'm guessing Apple won't kill off OS X as long as Mac sales continue to grow, but the moment those figures start to flag, don't be surprised if the product release cycle for Mac hardware and software slows radically. That'll be the giveaway that the Mac is being eased into the sunset.

Ω

The hardware is good but the design and build quality don't meet the standard set by the original iPad, much less the iPad 2. The webOS operating system is beautiful and clever, but slow. The web browser is solid most of the time, but occasionally it produces weird text rendering glitches at the edges of a page. The TouchPad plays Flash, but you can't scrub video in YouTube, and some Flash sites bring the tablet to its knees.

There is no easy integrated way to purchase, download, and manage music and movies, much less sync them with other devices. There is a Kindle app for books, but it's only a placeholder – there is no actual functional Kindle app ready for the TouchPad yet. There are plenty of apps for the TouchPad, but most of them are scaled-up versions of apps designed for the Pre phone, and unlike the App Store there is no profusion of webOS apps for every imaginable niche.

All of the above notwithstanding, HP could still turn the TouchPad into a viable competitor. WebOS shows all kinds of promise. Wireless charging, touching one device to another to transfer data, system-level Dropbox integration, integrated social contact management, and a clever notification system are all quite nice.

HP could take the lead in creating a world where devices automagically share data. Notes made in a handset are instantly transfered to a project file on a tablet. Printer configuration disappears. I can slide the photo I'm editing from my touchscreen to yours so you can drop it into your project. HP can make all of these things happen.

But first HP has to commit to releasing no product before it is ready. Whether the company positions the TouchPad against the iPad or not, purchasers will compare the two. Hardware has to be great, not just good. Software lag has to be exorcised. A half-second delay on a touchscreen device just doesn't cut it. There need not be hundreds of thousands of third-party apps, but there have to be some killer apps that are unique to the TouchPad. "Me too" releases of the latest Angry Birds games won't cut it.

Music, movies, and books are primary to a tablet. It's no secret that iTunes has grown bloated. HP could create a more streamlined, cleaner approach that seamlessly ties into Amazon and other services, allowing consumers to use one gatetway to an array of retailers.

HP has to present a compelling case to developers, improve hardware quality, speed up webOS performance, and create a seamless media platform. That's a tall order, but making a tablet isn't easy.

Ω

Which CEOs got it, which didn't, and which still don't? Play Guess That CEO to find out!

1 - In October, 2008 while introducing a touchscreen smartphone, this CEO declared that Apple had done the industry "a big favor" by introducing the iPhone and thereby heightening consumer expectations.

2 - In March, 2009 this CEO declared, "[Our operating system] has touch on it. The way Apple does touch drives cost. The way they do it on the iPhone is not an inexpensive component. We'll do it in a way that you can afford to do it on most phones."

3 - In April, 2010, when approximately 40 million iPhones had been sold, this CEO revealed, "We're finding — if you look at the surveys, you can see that large amount of the customers that have purchased touchscreen devices in last two years, they intend to get a device with the QWERTY keyboard on it now, right. I mean, they've got into a point where they've realize that a touchscreen alone is not enough; so that's important."

Answers

1 - He could see Apple had changed the game, but he couldn't figure out how to get his team back in it. This CEO is now out of a job.

2 - He didn't really realize that the game had changed but seems to be learning. This CEO still has his job.

3 - He still doesn't even know what game is being played. This CEO may not have a job for long.

Ω

Broadly speaking, the patrons behind the five most discussed mobile OSes make money in distinct ways:

• Apple (iOS) - We make money when people buy our devices.
• Google (Android) - We make money when companies buy advertising from us.
• HP (webOS) - We make money when people and companies buy our devices.
• Microsoft (Windows Phone 7) - We make money when manufacturers license our operating system.
• RIM (BlackBerry) - We make money when companies buy our devices.

Looked at this way, the numbers provide new meaning:

• Operating system marketshare is less important to Apple than continued increases in device sales.
• If Android is unsuccessful as a vehicle for increasing Google's ad revenues, no amount of marketshare gains are intrinsically useful to Google, other than as a defensive measure against Apple.
• Even if HP maintains a miniscule slice of the mobile OS market, if sales volumes increase at a healthy enough clip, webOS will stay in the game.
• Talk of 25,000 apps for Windows Phone 7 is interesting, but for now there are only a handful of licensed handsets. It's no wonder they struck a deal with Nokia.
• Lower total sales volumes are less important for RIM than wholesale abandonment by corporate purchasers.

Ω

DRM-based music stores can provide music for rent, something the labels have been pushing since the earliest days of online music sales. But although predictions of the demise of ala carte pricing have been rife for years, music for rent hasn't caught on in a big way. The top two online music stores, accounting for 82% of the market, are built around a la carte pricing. Apparently while some consumers are fine with renting music, most of them want to own it.

By far the best response came from Manu Sporny, founder of the DRM-free Bitmunk service, who focused on the key question:

Subscription is what large corporations want because it guarantees a stable revenue stream for a company - once you have a subscriber, you don't have to try as hard to keep selling to them. It's automatic once they're hooked and it takes quite a bit for them to stop subscribing.

Unfortunately for the large corporations - subscriptions work best with resources that you consume on a regular basis. The jury is still out on whether or not music falls into that category. I agree that it doesn't look like people want to rent music right now - but we're still too early in the process to make the call.

In the hours since Apple's iTunes in the Cloud service was unveiled, there has been some gnashing of teeth about how Apple should have rolled out a subscription option. But why should Apple or anyone else create another online subscription music service? The Internet is littered with the dead bodies of subscription services, from the labels' own PressPlay to Windows DRM failures Ruckus, SpiralFrog, and Yahoo! Music.

Yes, Rhapsody lives on, and eMusic provides a subscription service. But by the RIAA's own methodical count [PDF], subscription services accounted for a mere $200M in revenue, against $828M for downloaded albums and over $1.3B for downloaded singles. Revenue for subscription services actually decreased by 5.7% from 2009 to 2010.

What about Spotify, you ask? The service has over a million paid customers, but has yet to launch in the United States and has yet to turn a profit. The RIAA so far isn't playing ball with the Swedish upstart, and may never, if history is any guide.

Maybe someone will finally dial in subscriptions just right and in four years we'll all have abandoned iTunes. Or perhaps in 2015 downloads will still dominate, and the subscription-powered future will still be just around the corner.

* TechLaw Forum was archived and moved to a horrid ColdFusion setup after I left, hence the embarrassingly mangled formatting.

Ω

05 June 2011

Apple has been at this cloud thing for a long time. Born in 2000, iTools became .Mac in 2002. Six years later the service was again rebranded, this time as MobileMe. Along the way much has changed. Many components have been dropped; iCards, iReview, McAfee Virex downloads, HomePage, Slides Publisher, Groups, and Web Bookmarks are all long gone. I'm sure there are others I've forgotten.

In fact, without looking at the MobileMe site, I couldn't tell you everything MobileMe currently provides, even though I've been using the service since it was called iTools. That's because I primarily use MobileMe for one very important thing: syncing. My personal computer is no longer the center of my digital life. Between work, home, and on the go I routinely interact with several different communications and computing devices. Whenever I touch one of those devices, I want updated calendar data, synced email, all of my Safari bookmarks, and access to my most important files.

While iDisk is handy, I don't use it any more. Dropbox simply does synchronized online storage far better than iDisk. It's dead simple. It does not cause Finder to hang. It does not chew up resources. It just works.

The combination of MobileMe and Dropbox performs so well for me that I almost don't even think about it any more, which is a far cry from the iTunes experience. I've moved iTunes libraries from one Mac to another. I've removed iTunes permissions from Macs. I've gone to the hassle of creating shared libraries on the iMac that my wife and I use for music and movies. I've accidentally deleted movies and albums from libraries because I didn't realize iTunes had moved files around when I performed a minor version update. I've performed the frantic Spotlight search and seen the blank results window. To say iTunes provides a suboptimal media management experience is an understatement.

Regardless of what other features are to be found in iCloud, Apple needs to bring the seamlessness of MobileMe app syncing and Dropbox file syncing to media purchases. Let me buy it once and play it on any of my Apple devices. I want to manage playlists, not libraries. If Apple can make that happen, I'll be happy with iCloud.

Ω

HP

I have a soft spot for webOS. Palm did many things right. They pushed digital assistant technology into the mainstream of business life. They created some exceptional products. Then they withered away and were acquired by HP – but not before they created webOS. Now HP is rolling out the Veer and Pre3 smartphones, with the TouchPad tablet arriving later this summer. HP controls the hardware and the OS. Because the webOS was designed to make development easy the sticking point won't be building the apps.

The Veer hasn't been showered with praise, but perhaps the Pre3 and TouchPad will do better. I hope so, because the OS has potential. But I'm concerned. The Pre3 has a slide-out touchpad, which is a warning light that usually indicates user experience problems ahead. It's up to HP to build slick devices around it and create the kind of consumer momentum that will entice developers.

HP has a strategy, now they need to execute it flawlessly. They are doing a good job making the platform accessible to developers, but they're off to a mixed start with their hardware.

Research in Motion

RIM has embarked on an odd and almost embarrassing marketing campaign, touting the "professional grade" PlayBook tablet. There are accusations that less than 500k Playbooks were sold in the month and a half following a disappointing launch. It's not enough that the requirement of a software bridge between PlayBook and BlackBerry turned off many potential buyers, but it seems there have been quality control issues with the very hardware RIM has touted as superior.

Apparently RIM's plan is to roll out incremental upgrades to the OS, and key apps, while working on a new version of the hardware. This is an odd approach for a company that built its reputation by creating a bulletproof, quick, easy, secure system for mobile mail. There be a large enough reservoir of good will left in RIM's customer base to wait for them to get their tablet working properly. The larger difficulty will be enticing developers.

Most iOS developers did not start life as Macintosh developers. They came to the iOS platform because it represented the best opportunity for them to make money as mobile developers. Similarly, Android gave developers the ability to develop for a massive app-centric platform.

RIM has a reputation for making it life difficult for developers. Apple's app approval process can be tricky at times, but the company makes it easy for developers to get up and running on the platform. Google and others provide many Android development resources, and while Microsoft may be playing catch up, they have always been at the top of the class in developer support.

RIM is at a crossroads. The company got it fast, rather than getting it right. In the halcyon days when BlackBerry was the king corporate communicator, apps could safely remain an afterthought. That's not enough now. Even if RIM gets the hardware right, it needs to figure out that the software landscape has changed.

Ω

© 2011 Erik Schmidt

If you consider the GSM version of the iPhone 4 a separate product, Apple has released five iPhone models over the last four years.

Every time Apple rolls out a new iPhone, it is betting the farm. It is putting everything it can into that one device. This intense focus provides an unfair advantage against companies that develop phones on the basis of market segmentation and product differentiation.

Ω

© 2011 Erik Schmidt