Stupid Idea - Latest Comments

Re: On Google

pollack — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:22:17 -0000

Again, I think I'm inclined to agree with your overall analysis (and your sympathy for Google/Android), while also thinking you're under-analyzing and underestimating Apple.

You write, apparently as an illustration that Apple's "corporate DNA won't allow them to secure [market dominance]," that they built a "successful" music store BUT went on to block non-Apple hardware from using it. Well, going on a decade since launch, that music store has been more than merely "successful": Apple today is reportedly the largest music retailer in the world. Not just the largest online retailer. Like, surpassed Wal-Mart and kept right on growing. From a competitive/philosophical stance, you and I might prefer that they played nice with off-brand devices, but it sure hasn't hurt them that they haven't. (And those off-brand devices make up, what?, 1/4 of the market?) They are nothing if not the "default option," and what's really remarkable is that they established this position when the only prior "default option" was piracy. And all along, they were doing it despite (I might argue BECAUSE) of the very corporate swagger that you find so distasteful, dragging the recording industry kicking and screaming the whole way. Recall that when all the groaning about their DRM reached its high point, Jobs posted an open letter to the front page of apple.com saying, Yeah, we think the DRM sucks too, but the labels won't let us sell their music without it; several of those labels responded in "petulant ways," going DRM-free with Amazon and other online retailers, while sticking Apple with DRM for as long as they possibly could. Nevertheless: still the biggest music retailer in the world.

This isn't to say that I think they'll hold onto that position forever. I'm just not persuaded by your cultural-incapacity/corporate-DNA argument.

Your other example is making an awesome phone and ensuring that most people in the US can't buy one. I'm not sure what you mean, unless you just mean the AT&T exclusivity; and certainly everybody except AT&T is in agreement that that deal sucks. There are plenty of indications that Apple too is dissatisfied with that arrangement, not least of which that the iPad was announced with surprisingly inexpensive and come-and-go-as-you-please no-contract plans. The WSJ printed rumors just today that Apple might be making a Verizon iPhone for the fall quarter. I think everybody expects exclusivity to evaporate just as soon as legally possible. I suspect it was only there to begin with because Apple was fundamentally changing the way equipment manufacturers deal with carriers, and they had some non-negotiables that would require some serious commitment from a partner. Surely it's not part of their "corporate DNA" to be beholden to another entity, or to suffer so much from its incompetence, so I think the relative unavailability of the iPhone was a pragmatic concession.

I also don't understand how you could argue that they are "watch[ing] their position slowly or not-so-slowly erode," when clearly their position is not eroding by any non-relative metric: only a relative decline in market share (coincident with absolute growth) in a market that they created, where they enjoyed a long period with no real competitors, and which is probably nowhere near saturated. In other words: obviously Apple sees a potential threat in Android, but the threat is right now purely potential, as there's still plenty of room in this new market for Android in addition to Apple: iPhone unit sales are not eroding— they are continually growing. Nor am I aware of evidence of any but negligible numbers who are switching FROM the iPhone to its competitors; in fact most publicized accounts of such switching are followed shortly by a switching-back. I suspect that most Android users so far are people who won't go to AT&T, people who want a cheaper phone, or people who are averse to Apple in general and were just waiting for a non-Apple phone that could compete. Which is to say, people who wouldn't buy an iPhone. That's not meaningful erosion; it's a wide and open market that Apple created and that no one is likely to occupy alone.

As for Android gaining the majority in the next year, I actually wouldn't bet against that; I thought you were making a rather more extreme claim. I was taking you literally when you wrote: "the current norm that you develop an iPhone app and then you think about developing an Android app will most likely be reversed," and thought your were saying that in the next year Android would so dominate the market that development for the iPhone would be the sort of secondary consideration (perhaps not even pursued) that development for the Android is now. That's what I thought was crazy. If you just mean they'll reach 51% market share, well, I wouldn't count on it but don't think it's impossible either, and I would welcome it as an overall excellent state of affairs. I'd like to see Apple loosen its grip on app approval and think not much else is likely to make it happen but exactly that sort of pressure, which pressure is currently negligible.

(And it's a quibble, but in my view the Droid commercials did not say, "everyone who wants an awesome phone, buy this one," but something more along the lines of, "iPhones are for pansies and effeminate men, Droid is for real [heterosexual, badass, etc] men." All of the ads I saw were brazen; some of them were unconscionable. Which presumably contributed to Android's demographic problem.)

And lastly, I wasn't really trying to make a point about Apple's revenues (though that's valid one, too); I was actually talking about installed bases, as you were, but emphasizing not just the simple numbers but something of the context to those numbers, or to the particular situation of the installed bases.

I think the typical Apple-hater line about its being a company that produces "niche products" for a "narrow audience," and the typical Apple-fanboy line about their being "premium" or "luxury" products, like the BMW or Porsche of personal computing, are both similarly misguided and misleading.

I mean, those words have pretty broad meanings I guess, so they could all be literally true. You could call cable TV a niche product; or HBO; or ESPN Tennis or something. "Niche" is a relative term. Likewise, the tea I buy is called "premium" because it costs 2.25 an ounce instead of 1.50, or because it comes in tins instead of individual bags. But we're not talking air-conditioned seats, here.

What I'm saying is that buying a >$50,000 car is not analogous to buying a >$1,000 computer; and in the latter category Apple is either competitive or utterly dominating, depending on whose estimates you listen to. Yeah, the vast majority of computers sold are Windows PCs, so you've gotta make your websites compatible with IE6 or whatever. But Apple exerts an influence that is wildly out of proportion to its barely-double-digit (or less) desktop market share, and to understand why you have to understand the distribution of the market. A huge portion of those Windows PCs are basically junkers, sold to companies or to schools to fill out cubicles or computer labs, or are bargain-basement junk bought for the kids' room in a 3 or 4 computer household. The BMW-of-consumer-electronics line creates a self-congratulatory and fictitious aesthetic elite; the niche-product-for-people-who-can't-be-bothered line attempts to marginalize a deeply influential company that makes products with a very broad appeal.

I'm totally with you in preferring that Google dominates the Internet. I think you're right-on about the unusual way they've aligned their interests with the Internet's. But it should also be said that they produce a ton of junk for every great thing they do, and also routinely ride roughshod over issues of privacy and information-ownership. Apple has a destructive obsession with control, but they also have an uncanny ability to see what matters and what doesn't, and to redefine the way people interact with machines. I think it's fairly clear how their failures are married to their strengths.

It's instructive to look at the claims of skeptics at pivotal moments. In the case of Apple it's a fairly humorous parade of commentary about the madness of shipping computers without floppy drives, of the iPod being a technologically inferior novelty, of iTunes being doomed any day now, of the iPhone being all hype and surely a boondoggle. Those claims all look embarrassingly shortsighted now. Conversely, look how the tune has changed on Google Wave; which went from the twitter/facebook/everything-killer (a few sheepish voices: "I don't get it"), to, well, it's technologically cool, and totally open. Yeah, it sure is open.

Okay, I'm rambling, and I need to go to bed— my main point, if I actually have one, is that Google and Apple are both for-profit companies, both opportunistic, both motivated by making money and self-preservation, but both also strangely committed to a peculiar ideal: Google to a notion of information, its importance, its power, and the way it should be handled; Apple to an aesthetic experience of the machine, and to a particular relationship and a particular mode of interaction between man and object. Both companies may be prone to do stupid and/or destructive things in service of these ideals, which is strange, and also maybe admirable. Google's particular commitments make it generally better for the Internet; Apple's make it generally produce vastly superior products. The world would be worse off without either one of them, and I'm rooting for both.

Re: On Google

method — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 13:53:00 -0000

By "[carry] the majority of technology users in the long term," I mean be the default option, the way that IBM was the default option and then Microsoft was the default option. You're right that iPod is the default option for PMP, but the iPod is a strange product in that in order to make it successful they had to make it available on Windows. It doesn't necessarily lead to a Post-MIcrosoft world; it just makes Apple into a PMP manufacturer.

You make a point about how Apple makes a lot of money by selling premium products to a lot of people, more than if they sold many more products at commodity prices. I'm only talking about installed bases, not revenues; I doubt Google has turned a profit selling its Google Experience for Android devices. Desktop Mac OS will never able to dictate technology standards, because it only targets a relatively narrow demographic and refuses to formulate strategies for going after other segments. Apple is simply okay with this; remember how Jobs' first act after returning from his wandering in the desert was to get rid of all the iMac clones?

The iPod and the iPhone are unique in Apple's history because they went and seized most of the market. This is a high-water period for Apple where dominance is within reach, but their corporate DNA won't allow them to secure it. They do things like build a successful music store, but then they block other music players from synching with it. They make this awesome phone that has this incredible cultural cachet, and then in the US they make sure that most people can't buy one. Then as they watch their position slowly or not-so-slowly erode they respond in petulant ways: they try to block music distributors from cutting deals with Amazon or they try to sue HTC out of existence.

I think that the prediction about Android gaining the majority this year is less crazy than you think, as in I-would-bet-some-money-on-it. I do admit that I was reading the adMob numbers from this link (http://androidandme.com/2010/0... wrong. I didn't see that the impressive numbers only referred to the US market. Still, the momentum is all with Android, because it has multiple options, lower pricing and is available on every carrier. Droid had a *huge* impact on the mobile market and that was all added in the last half year. There are other phones coming out on other carriers that are going to be pushed just as hard as Droid. A lot of these phones are going to be marketed like the myTouch, as devices for people who haven't owned smartphones before, and there are Android handsets that are only being marketed in China, etc. In that respect, iPhone's potential market may be saturated, with only room for upgrades (obviously I'm just speculating).

Even if the year prediction is off there is no question that there is a qualitative change happening. It used to be that "business phone" meant a Blackberry and "phone that lets you do more than read email" meant iPhone. The "Droid Does" campaign was aimed at changing that basic perception.

Obviously, the shy-guy thing appears to be off, although Google probably started throwing more resources at the project after Google Voice. I put an update into the blog post, plus I added those links about Jobs. The first Daring Fireball link seems pretty dated. It's written before the Droid released with the new fancy 2.0 firmware, and the advice is like the advice an enemy would give: "So aim high, and set your goals such that you can smugly claim victory with just a fraction of Apple’s unit sales. If Apple is BMW, you can be Porsche." Instead the Droid commercials said, everyone who wants an awesome phone, buy this one.

Re: On Google

pollack — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 01:25:47 -0000

I agree with most of your analysis, but your Google fanboyism is nowhere more apparent than a short-sightedness on Apple. (Disclosure: I'm in different ways a fanboy of both.)

I don't know what it means to "[carry] the majority of technology users in the long term," (what's the long-term with consumer electronics and Internet technology?) but consider that Apple introduced an mp3 player in 2001 (maybe you've heard of it?) to a resounding "meh" from the usual chorus of tasteless dweebs ("come on, less storage than a NOMAD, and no wifi?"), and almost nine years later it enjoys by most estimates something between 2/3 and 3/4 of that market.

Also consider that Apple's market share in desktops and laptops, which appears fairly trifling, jumps to an easy majority (by some estimates 2/3) when looking at systems priced above $1000. And that it is growing, frequently by double-digit percentages year-to-year. And that it has reached ubiquity-levels in certain demographics (including the very desirable: young, affluent, educated).

Also, your shy-guy-gets-pushy-with-Google chronology is suspect: the Voice app was rejected last summer; Android was announced in late 2007, a few months after the iPhone hit the market. As Jobs was recently paraphrased (from an internal meeting): "We did not enter the search business, Jobs said. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them, he says."

To say that Google is on the way to making the iPhone a niche product, that "[w]ithin the next year[!!!], the current norm that you develop an iPhone app and then you think about developing an Android app will most likely be reversed," seems to me downright crazy, like I-would-bet-large-sums-of-money-against-it crazy. The next year? Google is making a huge push (reportedly even doing ad revenue sharing with carrier and handset partners), and is MAYBE going to MATCH iPhone unit sales this year. MAYBE. Apple has a pretty big head start, and depending on what improvements they unveil this summer, could get a big bump, as they usually do. (Be wary of statistics showing an Apple lull in the spring; we all know when new products are announced.) Apple also has an advantage in that an iPhone is an iPhone: Android phones are variously branded and have various hardware, which is a marketing problem and means no performance guarantee.

It may be the case (in fact, I hope it is) that in the next year or two the iPhone will no longer be the de facto mobile platform for all development—but it won't be in Android's current position of afterthought either. I think the most Google-bullish possibility is that both will be vital platforms, maybe skewing differently for different demographics. Google has done something really remarkable (and beneficial) in fairly rapidly making the iPhone no longer the ONLY player in this market—but they aren't taking users away from Apple, and they also have demographic disadvantages (about 3/4 of Android users are male, according to Admob; and the iPod Touch (i.e., iPhone OS) has 2/3 of the market on under-18-year-olds).

The best take on Apple usually comes from Gruber; I don't want too many links to send me to a SPAM bin, but two brief and worthwhile reads are:
On Android: http://daringfireball.net/2009...
and
On the rivalry with Google: http://daringfireball.net/2010...

Re: Critical Mass

SD Rider — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 17:53:31 -0000

Critical Mass is a bunch of misguided fools.

So it was real nice to ride your bike without cars around. Good for you.

It would be real nice for me to drive a car without other cars around, but you dont see me turning into a self-important moron, breaking the laws and instigating anarchy.
I am biker too, but I happen to live in the real world. There are ways to affect change, and breaking laws and forcing your way through "Mob Rule" is not one of them.
I submit that Critical Mass does more harm to bikers (like me) than good.
To quote a Vancouver police officer when asked by a biker who was NOT participating in CM what was going on, "Well, these guys are using today to make the rest of the city hate you bikers the other 29 days out of the month too."

Motorcyclists have long had issues with cars as well. They formed A.B.A.T.E. to much success, working WITH officials and the public, not against them.
To make fun of Critical Manners shows that you are more interested in either:
1) breaking the law and being able to get away with it (which is what many of the drunken riders here in San Diego seem to be doing), or
2) Simply "having a fun ride" rather than participating in an action that would benefit bikers as a whole.

There is no need to argue against option one if you are a mature person who wishes to live in a peaceful society. And if option two is where you are coming from, then you should ask yourself why you think agitating others is acceptable for YOU to have your fun.

I find it amusing that so many blogs and website site the "rude behaviour of motorists". As a biker myself, I find the exact opposite to be true.
I have never seen a car nonchalantly blow right through a red light or stop sign like I will see my fellow cyclists do on the streets of San Diego on a daily basis.
I have had motorists wave me ahead, and stop for me when clearly the car had the right of way and I was prepared to wait for them.
Yet San Diego Critical Mass has a reputation as one of the worse in terms of its treatment to the motorists that it is affecting. That is no way to win people to your cause.

I am in the process of having a bright orange shirt made that reads in large letters upon its back: "Critical Mass Sucks: If you ride with them, so do you." So I can wear it on my daily ride to work, so that drivers to do not mistake me with the misguided fools who participate in this travesty towards cycling.

Re: As I Avoid This Sleep

Duane — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:16:23 -0000

Hey Joey joe joe. Are you the same Joseph Method from Kumamoto, Japan back in 1999?

Re: Weird Spam

method — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 03:43:34 -0000

Okay, well, try to imagine it was written by the crocodiles from Pearls Before Swine. Anyway, the moment's passed. Now it, like this post, is just an artifact.

Re: Idea Quickie: Event Wiki Site

method — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 20:14:01 -0000

I got this idea from a phrase I saw on another blog, "open source evidence collection", which apparently meant something else.

Re: Idea Quickie: Event Wiki Site

hb — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 13:57:06 -0000

Okay, sorry to be late to this, but this idea is not stupid (unless in your technical sense, which I can't recall) but brilliant. Damn it, someone needs to do this. The existing crime maps are woefully inadequate. I know our local neighborhood blog has lots of readers and would be a great candidate for implementing this wiki, if you or someone else could make it happen.

Re: Weird Spam

hb — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 01:08:16 -0000

Didn't. But then I sort of figured it wasn't intended to be hostile but instead to appeal to that segment of the male population that, if Savage Love is to be believed, actually wants to have other men copulate with their wives.

Re: About Rails Checkboxes

Ed Spencer — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 08:07:31 -0000

@shawn

That's a pretty ridiculous point to make, unless:

a) You're on such a low bandwidth connection that a few hundred bytes of transfer causes noticeable delays (in which case certainly don't use Ext JS!)
b) You're paying for your bandwidth by the byte (again, don't use Ext JS)

Are you seriously suggesting that <> will have any noticeable impact on page load speed? That string of text can be represented using 72 bytes, which will easily fit in a packet along with a lot more page data. As a percentage of the size of the Ext JS library - which is of course required to even run the example - this comes to about 0.013%, depending on whether you load the full library or just cherry pick features to save bandwidth.

In any case this was a post about Rails checkboxes, and this is precisely how Rails expects checkbox data to arrive.

Nice post. Buried deep in my todo list is to write a ux to allow this to be added in one component. e.g.:

{
xtype: 'rails_checkbox',
fieldLabel: 'Field Name',
name: 'model_name[field_name]'
}

Which would be equivalent to:

{
xtype: 'checkbox',
fieldLabel: 'Field Name',
name: 'model_name[field_name]',
inputValue: '1'
},
{
xtype: 'hidden',
name: 'model_name[field_name]',
value: '0'
}

Re: Another City Story

josh — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 10:19:25 -0000

As another completely random person I wanted to let you know this amused me as well.

Re: A Crash

hb — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 01:56:22 -0000

This was right on my level. Thanks.

Re: About Rails Checkboxes

method — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 12:48:13 -0000

I see your point, Shawn, but there are a lot worse ways to waste user's bandwidth (I'm pretty ashamed of the html + redundant javascript in my other post). I think the Rails guys felt they were "fixing" html form posting. Sending the "0" is sort of the equivalent of an onUnclick event. I admit that it's just pushing code around, though.

Re: About Rails Checkboxes

shawn — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 18:33:52 -0000

thats hideous! They surly could have done something easier peoples bandwidth. If it can tell you and pass that zero only if the check-box has been interacted with then great but otherwise its just some bloat because people dont want to have to deal with it on the server side

Re: Critical Mass

hb — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:58:47 -0000

Yeah, taking over the big avenues near the Mall wouldn't be that fun. My experience with 14th Street is almost uniformly negative, so telling those Virginians to shove it seems like it would be fun.

Re: Passion

hb — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:57:07 -0000

I had no idea that such a thing existed.

Re: Critical Mass

method — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 15:28:29 -0000

Yeah, check it out and report back. The DC one might have a different style.

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any awesome streets to take over in DC, although I used to have fun going down Massachusetts on the sidewalk. Bigelow is almost equivalent to riding around on the Beltway, maybe more like New York Ave coming into the city.

Re: Critical Mass

hb — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:25:18 -0000

This was a beautiful description of what sounds like an extremely pleasant experience. I especially like the concepts of crossing guards/Tienanmen Square bicyclists, although the rear and front guards have to be pretty cool. Looks like I'll miss the next one in DC (it's July 4), but I'll try to do the August one.

Re: A language game

hb — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 00:27:12 -0000

I remember making essentially the same joke when I was five, and my brother was one, or at some stage pre-language. I knew that the worst thing one person could say to another was "you're a bad person," so I would get in his face and say it, hoping for a rise from my mother. I can't remember whether I got one, but I do recall how pleased I was with my cleverness and how I felt simultaneously really guilty about the possibility that he would understand me and, of course, not get the joke. I think he just smiled and laughed at the attention.

I hope.

Re: A gag for a Ben Stiller movie

hb — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 11:32:50 -0000

I think I can speak for everyone here, when I say: ha ha.

Re: Mos Def

method — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 12:52:48 -0000

Nietzsche has a couple lines of thought (at least) that seem applicable: first, he sees sentiment and propriety as being in conflict with the will to truth (simple enough). Then he has a line about how everyone wants this guy Cesar Borgia to be unhealthy and psychologically tormented, but he could have been a "tropical monster". Finally, he says that the noble man desires for enemies that are worthy of himself, while the modern (or in his genealogy "Christian") tendency is to try to lower your enemies so you can defeat them.

Re: Mos Def

hb — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:39:50 -0000

It's a good metaphor. Perhaps it's one that some people would consider to be in bad taste, but here's where a little of Nietzsche's side of the philosophical insight can come in handy.

Re: Mos Def

The Black Sunn — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 15:34:55 -0000

This is nothing but the truth...nothing to be ashamed of at all

Respect

Re: Update

method — Sat, 24 May 2008 12:30:48 -0000

So he traveled onwards or onward, or he traveled to Mexico and onward.

Re: Update

hb — Sat, 24 May 2008 12:18:39 -0000

A little googling produces some interesting results. From Bartleby: onwards is an adverb, while onward is both an adjective and an adverb. I had thought it would be similar to "towards" vs "toward," where I already knew that the rule is nonexistent because it's just an American vs. British usage question.

I think I agree on whether there should be philosophy students. Have to hear more about that to be sure.