BBC's Bill Thompson Hates Being Fingered As a Fraud

Daniel Eran DilgerIn response to the article "BBC Prints Irresponsible Rubbish on Apple," Bill Thompson wrote me explaining that he didn't like being called out on his errors. However, he failed to explain how he was accurate in his rambling diatribe assailing Apple as equal to Microsoft in anticompetitive, market monopolizing behavior.Instead, Thompson referred to me--in the plural--as "excitable Apple Zealots," as he republished my article in his blog with more of his own comments. “I don't want to sign up to your forum, however nice your art projects may be,�? he wrote me in an email. “I'll be posting this on my blog shortly, but you may like to post it too.�?According to readers, Thompson commonly doesn't post the comments they leave on his blog. At his main pulpit, there's not even a pretense of allowing readers feedback. As reader Thomas Olson noted, "What irks even more about the swill he [Bill Thompson] publishes on the BBC website, is that there is no place for public feedback, so us common folk can call BS on his rant in real time for the world to witness. BBC is still a delusional, vertical content gatekeeper, who believes they're somehow 'in tune' because they happen to have a website."Thompson is Still Wrong.I wrote Thompson back, noting that "while I don't agree in key areas, I do admire and respect your willingness to debate, and I don't intend my criticism to to come across as a personal attack."I'm not advocating an "easy ride" for other companies, including Apple. What I stated was that Thompson provided no proof for his wild assertion that Apple was as bad as Microsoft. I indicated the history of Microsoft's troubles with the EU dated back into the 90s, and even earlier in the US. Microsoft has been found guilty repeatedly, internationally; Apple has not. That should factor into Thompson's "just as bad" rhetoric.It's great that Thompson doesn't share the BBC's position on iPlayer, but my article was as much castigating the BBC as it was his article specifically. Thompson didn't even make the headline. So when I talk about the problems of the BBC, he can't take it personally. However, using the BBC as his mouthpiece, and the BBC using him as a way to deliver the message that Microsoft's problems are really common and nothing out of the ordinary and that Apple is doing deceptive, anticompetitive things... are both still examples of hypocrisy. It's a bit like hearing from FOX News that other countries terrorize their citizens and propagandize fascism.The iPod Changes That Break the Third Party Apps.Apple doesn't publish a third party API for the iPod's file system details, nor does it describe the iPod as an open platform. Windows does, yet Microsoft breaks third parties' software to establish its own dominance in new markets. This happened with Office apps, web browsers, media players, developer tools, etc. This is not the same thing as Apple being popular with the iPod. Pretending there is an open market and yet running it as a monopoly is not the same thing as selling a unique, closed product that may be popular.If BMW refined their vehicles in a way that required aftermarket car stereo companies to adapt their products to fit its new cars, you'd have a situation similar to Apple's iPod change for Linux. However, if one company owned the entire market for all vehicles on the road, and decided to destroy the market for car stereos and take that over itself, you'd have Microsoft. There is no similarity here.This Depends On How You See Lock-In.Thompson wrote, "This depends on how you see lock-in: if I can't play music I buy from iTMS, something I'm encouraged to do at many points in my use of iTunes, on any other player, or use any other jukebox than ITunes with my iPod, then once I've made my initial choice to have an iPod I am in an Apple ecoystem that I can only extract myself from with some effort. It's not absolute - IBM mainframe users also had a choice back in the 70's. It just wasn't a realistic chouce. [sic]"Wrong again. You can play purchased music by burning a CD, or directly using iTunes Plus non-DRM music. The problem with DRM is a issue of the music labels, not an iTunes lock in issue. Thompson is again repeating a myth. Jobs railed against DRM, then fought for weak restrictions to appease labels, and is now pushing labels to make music downloads as easy to use as CDs with DRM-free downloads.Thompson doesn't understand what's involved, and ended up making false comparisons. What other source for open music is there? WMA is locked down Windows-only tight (like the BBC's iPlayer), MP3 music is only available from indie labels. You can't get open music downloads from any of the big labels representing popular music apart from EMI's iTunes Plus. By repeating false information, Thompson only serves to cloud reality and turn back the clock.[Top Myths of 2006 - Myth 4: The iTunes Monopoly Myth]I Am Not A Crook!Thompson wrote, "I don't like being accused of being a liar, and that sort of comment undermines any other points you may be trying to make." Well then, he shouldn't represent himself as an expert, while publishing web rumors he doesn't really understand. It's not my fault he is misrepresenting the truth. That's what a lie is. If the truth "undermines points I make," doesn't he understand that lying undermines points he may be trying to make?In weeping over being called on his false comment, Thompson neglected to answer the fact that purchased tracks from iTunes can be effortlessly burned to CD for use on other players, following the most liberal and open fair use rights in the industry. Incidentally, feigning outrage is no way to answer criticism unless your position is indefensibly wrong.What about the supposed iPod accessory lock-in? Apple's dock connector isn't an ISO standard, but there isn't an ISO standard for a connector that pairs USB, Firewire, audio and video on the same cable. At the same time, the dock connector cable is standardized and documented, it does not change with every model, and there is no DRM on it that prevents anyone from building compatible cables. So he's wrong, there's no lock in involved.The Ringtones Monopoly.Thompson suggested I was being hypocritical for noting that "Apple sells ringtones and doesn't support homebrew attempts to copy ringtones to the iPhone. Yes, this is unfortunate. Users shouldn't face limitations from using their own song clips, and they shouldn't have to pay extra to carve out a ringtone from songs they purchased or already own. However, this isn't entirely Apple's decision because it has to answer to the labels. It's also not illegal, and it has nothing to do with anticompetitive monopoly dominance of the music industry."A contradiction? I agree that ringtones are an unnecessarily complex legal issue, and that customers are being held up by the labels' overbearing demands. But Thompson calling Apple's move anticompetitive or an establishment of a monopoly is uninformed sensationalism. Apple's ringtone prices are a fraction of any other providers, and while Apple did cave to their demands over preventing users from easily copying over their own, it did so to win a more significant battle to open up music, not to limit the market or establish more control.Thompson misrepresented ringtones as being something similar to Internet Explorer or Windows Media Player, as if Apple is muscling into a new market to dominate it using an existing monopoly. The assertion is silly and uninformed. Apple doesn't make significant profits on its music sales, including ringtones. Further, Apple isn't in the ringtone making business, and has no obligation to facilitate this for users, just as it has no good reason to lose a fight with movie studios over the overbearing laws that prevent legal ripping of DVDs.[Apple's iTunes Ringtones and the Complex World of Copyright Law]Bundling, Price Fixing, and Monopoly Tying.Thompson can criticize Apple's business model, but calling it a way to expand market dominance is an error of simpleton logic. It's really the opposite: an opportunity for rivals to compete against the iPhone by offering a nicer way to play "My Humps" when their phones ring. So far, the US ringtone industry revolves around $2.50 - $3.00 clips that expire after several months.Thompson suggested I forward this defense to Microsoft for its Windows Media Player bundling. How does he not understand this? Apple competes against other mobile makers and other mobile providers in an open market. Microsoft does not compete in an open market. It holds a monopoly in PC operating systems acquired illegally using anticompetitive and anti-consumer tactics. It is now using its monopolies to expand into new markets. Apple is not. Apple has not created a monopoly in MP3 players any more than Symbian has a monopoly in mobile phone software. There is a functioning market for both; so if Apple does something consumers don't like--such as charging 99 cents for a ringtone, competitors can go elsewhere... but they'll have to pay $3 for one that expires after a year from Verizon, or roll their own solution. Or set their iPhone to vibrate.Windows Media Player does not compete in an open market; it's tied to a monopoly product that exercises complete control over the PC desktop. There are no options for most users. Linux isn't a viable option for the majority of desktop users because of the Office monopoly and file incompatibilities, and the exclusive OEM contracts with PC makers Microsoft uses to support its Windows monopoly.Ringtones are a consumer feature, not a significant, competitive industrial market being threatened with monopolistic takeover, as is the case with media playback and servers, or web browsing and servers, or office productivity application software. Fantasies of Cheap Cables and iTunes on Linux.Thompson wrote, "just as I can go into Game and buy a cheaper third party Xbox cable or controller that has not been authorised by Microsoft so I expect to be able to buy less expensive iPod accessories and if I can't then I see an indication of an attitude towards the market that worries me."But that's wrong; you can buy iPod accessories at any price from a variety of vendors, even no name ones. Compare the price of Xbox cables to what Apple itself sells, then go find even cheaper stuff. There's no monopoly position in iPod accessories because there is no real barrier for competition, as there very much is on the Windows PC desktop. Again, cable manufacturing isn't similar to the media broadcasting industry or the office software market.He suggests freeware alternatives to iTunes might solve world peace or help one achieve Nirvana, but that's irrelevant. Apple doesn't owe anyone a free ride because there is not a free market around "iPod player jukebox software," just as there is no free market surrounding "engines in BMWs" or other component parts of products. I can't go buy a new BMW with whatever third party engine I want, even if I think I want one that does things that BMW's wouldn't offer.In contrast, Microsoft claimed all along that Windows was an open platform, and PCs were sold as an open market for software. That's very different. If Microsoft faced real competition on the desktop, it could bundle anything it wanted to. But it does not, so it can’t.You can't say, 'if Microsoft can't bundle WMP, that must mean Apple can't offer iTunes either;" it's a false comparison because Apple didn't kill off competitors with twenty years of backstabbing and anticompetitive practices, and does not operate a monopoly. You can buy alternatives to the iPod from Creative, Sony, Microsoft, HP, SanDisk and lots of others. You can not effectively buy commercial alternatives to Windows due a variety of barriers in the market.Thompson Advocates Real Network's DRM.Defending his comment that "when it comes to music downloads it [Apple] is just as bad as Microsoft on servers," Thompson wrote, "the behaviour towards Real was appalling and remains indefensible. They [Apple] broke Harmony [Real's Helix DRM] because they could and because they wanted to lock competitors out - what other spin can you put on it?"There is no open market for selling iPod DRM content. Apple said some silly things in the Real squabble ("tactics of a hacker" was particularly stupid) but Real had no right to sell DRM music for the iPod. Apple only forced them to sell open content, and anyone can still sell open content that plays on the iPod, as eMusic does. Defending Real's DRM is just another example of Thompson not getting it.Paul Thurrott is similarly upset that Apple can't be forced to license Windows Media DRM, allowing Microsoft a free ride on the iPod in its efforts to spread its own viciously anti-consumer media software platform. Apple doesn't have to serve the whims of two companies that failed in the marketplace because they tried to exploit consumers and found that their user base ran off to greener pastures.The EU Courts and IP.The EU certainly should fix the problems of the music business in its countries, and demand fair use provisions from music and media providers as I noted. However, trying to spin the complex situation off as proof that Apple is anything like Microsoft is not only disingenuous, it's an outright lie. Using a bunch of half-baked, ignorant web rumors to support a position that Apple should just allow anything and everything is also dishonest.Thompson maintains that's not what he said, writing, "I want Apple to play fair (get the joke?), to be open about interfaces and file structures and to compete in an open market for music players and jukeboxes, because I actually think we will all benefit and even Apple will end up making better, sharper products and making more money."It's fine to criticize Apple over an open source ideology, but Thompson needs to accurately represent himself as a Cory Doctorow waving a communism flag; don't pretend to be defending free markets and attacking monopolization while at the same time insisting that Apple hand away all of its intellectual property to competitors and write anti-iTunes software for the community. Thompson pretends to celebrate the success of an innovative company whilst inciting a communist revolution against it, using the jingoism of busting the trust of monopoly powers that don’t exist. What do you think? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

• RoughlyDrafted Magazine on September 22, 2007
• More Details
• Related News

BBC Prints Irresponsible Rubbish on Apple

Daniel Eran DilgerThe BBC has joined the London tabloid press in printing a series of articles skewering Apple over invented suppositions based entirely upon misinformed speculation and some outright lies. The worst part is that the BBC is being grossly hypocritical in its misinformation campaign against Apple, because the company is up to its eyeballs in the Microsoft-encrusted scandal surrounding its proprietary, Windows-only iPlayer imbroglio.[UK Tabloids Pick Up Zoon Awards for Technical Incompetence]Beyond Spin: Bill Thompson Wades Through BBC Hypocrisy to Spread False Information.It's bad enough that the BBC needs to bend facts to support fear, uncertainty and doubt about the iPhone. Now consider that the BBC--as a public corporation funded by British TV license taxes--is building its web video strategy on failed, proprietary technology propped up by an internationally convicted monopolist. At the same time, its publishing a uninformed rant based on speculation and conjecture that accuses Apple of doing things that approach the gravity of its own activities.This hypocrisy slows from the words of Bill Thompson, who followed the crowd in reporting that Microsoft's failed appeal in its EU monopoly case says less about Microsoft's established, anticompetitive practices spanning the last thirty years than it does about Apple's iPod popularity over the last five. Thompson weeps for Microsoft because "its every move is examined for evidence that it might be making life difficult for its rivals," while noting that "some of its competitors seem to get a very easy ride." One might expect the BBC to make excuses for the crimes of its iPlayer partner as it giggly walks lockstep with Microsoft in using the company’s proprietary and Windows-only DRM for video distribution of its publicly funded content.[BBC's iPlayer's Prospects Looking Bleak - Slashdot]Thompson's Specious Attack on Apple."The best example of this [easy ride] is Apple," Thompson announced, because the company got so much coverage for the iPhone despite it being "closed, locked down and restricted." Actually that's not a good example at all, because Apple doesn't have a market monopoly in mobiles. Apple has also never been convicted of monopolistic behaviors in the UK, the EU, or the US because it doesn't have a monopoly and doesn’t act to stop competition the way Microsoft has. Thompson admits that the iPhone doesn't leverage monopoly control among mobiles, but says "the situation is very different" in the area of music players and music downloads. What is this very different situation?"Apple has spent much time trying to ensure that anyone who buys an iPod is completely locked in to an Apple-centred world," Thompson wrote, "in which they use iTunes, buy from the iTunes Music Store, purchase only Apple-certified iPod accessories and, ideally, abandon their plans to migrate from Windows XP to Vista and instead purchase a shiny new iMac." Yes, Apple does want to sell Macs and serve its customers. However, it's simply a lie to say that iPod users are "locked into" anything, let alone being harmed by not being able to migrate to Vista, which Apple actually supports on the iPod and iTunes.Users are not locked into iTunes Music Store purchases; recall that the wags like to point out that a tiny minority of the music on iPods is purchased from iTunes and the vast majority comes from ripped CDs. Purchased tracks from iTunes can also be effortlessly burned to CD for use other other players, following the most liberal and open fair use rights in the industry. Thompson simply lied.
Saying that iPod users are locked into Apple-certified iPod accessories is also not true at all. Apple tries to earn licensing revenue from putting a "made for iPod" logo on devices in the same way Nintendo puts its "seal of approval" on its games, but anyone can deliver iPod accessories, and there's no way for Apple to stop headphones and boomboxes from working with the iPod. Thompson lied again.
His first idea was that iPod users are locked into iTunes. Yes, Apple sets up a system that's easy to use out of the box, but users aren't forced to use it. The iPod can be used with a variety of other applications, or even wiped clean and used with completely alternative firmware like RockBox. Again, Thompson just lied.[Time for Apple to face the music? - BBC NEWS]Thompson Lies Some More: Ringtones.In order to jump from lying about the iPod with generalities and get into specifics, Thompson announced, "the recent launch of the new range of iPods, including the video Nano and the iPod Touch, has shown just how far Apple is willing to go to make life difficult for its users in order to shore up its dominant position in the market for music players and downloads." He backed up his claim by browsing for some sensationalist headlines, doing zero fact checking, and then printing his findings with an enraptured spin that is simply shameful hypocrisy coming from anyone working for the BBC.First, Thompson complains, Apple now sells ringtones and doesn't support homebrew attempts to copy ringtones to the iPhone. Yes, this is unfortunate. Users shouldn't face limitations from using their own song clips, and they shouldn't have to pay extra to carve out a ringtone from songs they purchased or already own. However, this isn't entirely Apple's decision because it has to answer to the labels. It's not illegal, and it has nothing to do with anticompetitive monopoly dominance of the music industry. It's really the opposite: an opportunity for rivals to compete against the iPhone by offering a nicer way to play "My Humps" when their phones ring. So far, the US ringtone industry revolves around $2.50 - $3.00 clips that expire after several months. Thompson lied with a half story and a false premise that do nothing to support the idea that Apple has a monopoly.[Apple's iTunes Ringtones and the Complex World of Copyright Law]Thompsons Lies Some More: Video Output.His second proof that Apple is "shoring up its dominant position" is that "it seems that the new generation of iPods will not output video through cables or docks that aren't Apple authorized and have a specific 'authentication' chip." It seems? Why doesn't Thompson point out that he read some high pitched conspiracy theory about why older cables and docks don't work with the new models, and is presenting it as a proof of anticompetitive, monopolist behavior without even checking the claim out?The reality is that all the new iPods continue to support the same docks as they did, but their video output has changed due to using different hardware. The Nano and Classic continue to work with old docks and cables, while the Touch and the iPhone will require a new dock connector cable because they now output both composite and component video. They work differently; no conspiracy, no spy authentication chips. The iPhone and the latest generation of iPods will work via a dock connector cable without a dock unit, so there's no chip involved. Even if there were, it would not be illegal for Apple to sell proprietary cables such as those that come with the Xbox, the Zune, the Palm Pilot, and most every music player and mobile phone on the market. The only difference is that Apple has kept its dock connector the same over the last several years so that iPod customers can reuse their old cables. Even if Thompson doesn't understand the issues and didn't bother to look into it, presenting false information as facts to support an idea that they do not support is still a lie. [An in-depth iPod Touch review: Video output differences - AppleInsider]Thompsons Lies Some More: Linux Music Management."The nastiest little change is to the iTunes library itself," Thompson wrote. Apple made minor changes to the metadata database used on the iPod. When this change broke unauthorized music management software, some Linux advocates announced press releases saying Apple was persecuting them and trampling their rights to use the iPod. It turned out that the outcry was simply overwrought, and that a fix was easy to deliver. What Apple had really done was improve how the iPod stores its data so that it would be less susceptible to file corruption. Apple doesn't officially support the small minority of people who use the iPod with Linux or alternatives to iTunes on other platforms, so it bears no accountability for fixing their homebrew software when it makes changes to its products. It might be valid to complain that Apple should offer such support, but ignoring Linux has no relationship to establishing a monopoly or market dominance. If Apple was offering a locked in, anti-consumer product, it wouldn't have open source users buying its product in the first place. Unlike the Xbox and Zune, Apple doesn't stop users from installing Linux or RockBox on their iPods, a difference Thompson can’t seem to grasp. Thompson admitted that Apple "will not limit copying or restrict attempts to strip digital rights management code from tracks" and "will not stop people adding non-DRM files they have downloaded from the internet to their library," but then jumped at the opportunity to speculate that Apple is shutting out Linux users, as if Apple would prefer Linux users to either install Windows or buy a music player elsewhere. Which scenario helps Apple "maintain music dominance?" It's an inane argument.Irresponsible Open Source Mouths.Remember when the EFF irresponsibly announced its speculation that Apple was stuffing megabytes of personal information into iTunes tracks? It later recanted, but didn't apologize for the false accusation. The fact that open source advocates are quick to fire out accusations but commonly shrug off any accountability for what they say makes their comments very hard to take seriously. Thompson's uncritical, uninformed parroting of such accusations is not only stomach churning, but egregious given the BBC's wholehearted support for a video distribution system that unilaterally forces people to use Windows to access content that is not available elsewhere, as iTunes music is.Thompson keeps going, castigating Apple for stopping Real from selling its own flavor of DRM that promised support for the iPod, and impugning Apple for supposedly having "business practices do not stand up to scrutiny." Thompson added, "when it comes to music downloads it [Apple] is just as bad as Microsoft on servers."Oh really? Do you have to pay Apple client access licenses for the right to connect your iPod to iTunes or to access the Music Store? Does your music die after three plays or three days? Do you have no choice in the market for MP3 players apart from devices that run the iPod firmware or use Apple’s iTunes software? Equating Apple with Microsoft would be foolish for anyone to do, let alone some misinformed, generalizing, sensationalist wag writing for a public corporation that ties its video downloads to Microsoft's Windows-only DRM.Thompson's Faulty Conclusion to a Shoddy Article.The great model of interoperability, Thompson points out, is Microsoft's PowerPoint. That's because Apple was able to deliver Keynote with PowerPoint compatibility. "Apple can sell Keynote because it took PowerPoint apart and figured out how the files work," Thompson explained.Perhaps Thompson doesn't get it: Apple's ability to maintain compatibility with PowerPoint is just as tenuous as Linux users' ability to make iTunes-compatible song management software for the iPod. Microsoft doesn't support standards in PowerPoint. It uses a crufty, weird, undocumented, proprietary format that changes with every release. That's why the industry is aligning behind Open Document as an international standard, and why Microsoft stuffed ballots in Cuba, Azerbaijan, and Sweden to fast track the establishment of its own proprietary formats as a false "standard" without having to answer the concerns of worldwide standards organizations who overwhelmingly determined that Microsoft's OOXML format was problematic and technically inferior.Oblivious to all this, Thompson announced, "had Apple been unable to do so [reverse engineer the proprietary PowerPoint format], or found that every time it figured out what was happening Microsoft changed the format, it would have complained loudly." Apparently Thompson has been paying no attention to technology over the last two decades as the world community has complained about Microsoft's doing just that.[Office Wars 3 - How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly][Office Wars 4 - Microsoft’s Assault on Lotus, IBM][Myth 4: The iTunes Monopoly Myth]The reason Microsoft was on trial in the EU dates back to complaints filed in 1998. The independent US monopoly trial followed up on earlier complaints from the FTC and Department of Justice. Similar complaints haven't ever been filed about Apple's iPod business, but rather only about the arcane, territorial pricing of music established by the big labels, most of whom are owned and managed by European companies.The EU certainly should fix the problems of the music business in its countries, and demand fair use provisions from music and media providers. However, trying to spin the complex situation off as proof that Apple is anything like Microsoft is not only disingenuous, it's an outright lie. Using a bunch of half-baked, ignorant web rumors to support a position that Apple should just allow anything and everything is also dishonest. Doing all of this speciously false complaining while standing on the Microsoft-enamored soapbox of the BBC just makes Thompson look even more incompetent and clueless about the reality around him. What do you think? I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

• RoughlyDrafted Magazine on September 20, 2007
• More Details
• Related News

Game Over

The question we were left with two weeks ago was "Why has America lost its broadband leadership?" but it really ought to have been "Whatever happened to the Information Superhighway?" It died. This column has been around long enough that I actually covered terms like "Information Superhighway" and "National Information Infrastructure" back when they were commonly in use and may actually have meant something. That was pre-2000, I'd say, because once the Internet bubble began to burst, followed of course by the 9/11 terrorist attacks, people simply got interested in different things. And just when the population as a whole gets interested in different things is when -- at least in American culture -- a lot of shady business begins to happen. What we are talking about here is the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first real rewrite of the Communications Act of 1934 that established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in the first place. The 1996 Act was primarily the work of Senator and then Vice President Al Gore, who may not have invented the Internet but sure helped push it into commercial operation. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was intended to open up communication services to broad competition on the most basic level, so of course the nation has since 1996 gone from 15 national broadband ISPs to five and a dozen big landline telephone companies to three. When it comes to government policy things hardly ever work out the way you expect them to. In 1996 I had 384-kilobit-per-second (kbps) symmetrical DSL while my TV production partners in the UK had nothing at home and 128-kbps ISDN at the office. America was the top broadband country in the world. But now we're in the middle of the pack among developed countries and there are nine DEVELOPING countries that have more and better broadband service than does America according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). To those who say this is BS and that we're actually ahead of the world if you control for rural populations, family size, the effect of Wi-Fi hotspots, etc., I say that is simply wrong: we are behind and losing ground. And the countries ahead of us, a diverse lot including France, Iceland, Japan, Korea, Switzerland, the UK, and even Canada, are for the most part growing faster than we are in large part because of this IT advantage. There are many reasons for this change of circumstance, but much of it comes down to government policy or lack of it and some of it comes down to pure luck. In large part we've been locked in our own little world where government and business feed on each other in ways that are always symbiotic and often destructive, but this time the rest of the world just passed us by while we were distracted by other things. Two weeks ago I mentioned, for example, that my friend Ira in Yokohama, Japan pays less than $30 per month for 100-megabit-per-second fiber-to-the-home Internet service. Well it turns out that in Japan such plans can cost as little as $10 per month, which is less than what our telephone companies claim it costs simply to maintain their billing infrastructure. If it costs $10 per month per subscriber for our telephone companies to stay in business without even pushing electrons over the wires, how can they charge that little for 100-mbps Internet service in Japan? What do they know that we don't know? Japan is an instance where I believe luck was actually a factor in the country's broadband success. Most things cost more in Japan than they do in the U.S., not less. The country's export-based economy was built on selling the same goods for more in the country where they were made than they sold for in Peoria. Sometimes this price differential was absurd, too. In the mid-1990s I had an Internet start-up (it later failed) and wanted to place one of my PC-based servers in Japan. So I went to NTT, the big Japanese phone company, and asked for space in one of its data centers where the company then maintained most of Japan's Internet resources. It was reasonable for me to do this because NTT was an investor in my company. But they told me that while they would love to host my little server (I was building a content distribution network with features that have still not been matched by any subsequent service), as a regulated monopoly they would have to charge me the full retail price for rack space and bandwidth -- $75,000 per month! What changed for Japan was a new government policy fostering competition in a very similar manner to our own Telecommunications Act of 1996. In fact the Japanese policy was inspired by the U.S. law. But this policy would have been meaningless in Japan, a country even more corrupt than the U.S., had not one ISP decided to push the new rules to their limit. SoftBank BB took a multi-billion dollar risk and began offering broadband service in Japan at ridiculously low prices using the NTT infrastructure. The company was literally throwing money away, which a regulated monopoly could never do but SoftBank could, selling most of its U.S. operations along the way to support this expensive habit. For 2-3 years the company was so stretched by the service that simply paying to NTT the disconnect fees for getting out of the business would have been enough to throw SoftBank into bankruptcy. It was simply luck that SoftBank's broadband ISP turned to profitability before the company was completely broke. And once it was profitable, SoftBank BB suddenly had lots of competitors. Ira has his choice of nearly 20 ISPs willing to pump photons into his apartment in Yokohama. These services are NOT run at a loss. SoftBank BB and Japan set a standard that has been replicated in most of the countries that have better broadband penetration and service than the U.S. The model is a single connection to the home managed by a utility but with Internet bandwidth and services provided over that connection by any of a number of competitors. We had that, too, for a while in the 1990s but the big telcos, the incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs), hated it and worked to undermine their new competitors, the Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs). And none of those competitors had the deep pockets or the willingness to assume risk of a SoftBank BB, which literally broke the Japanese monopoly. Part of the reason why we didn't stay on a similar path is because of the highly developed U.S. cable TV industry, which is unique in its scale. The telephone companies generally didn't care about the cable companies because they were in different businesses. Until one day the cable folks started installing DOCSIS cable modems and suddenly they were in the same business, which the telcos hated, but it was too late. Worse still, by then the cable companies had as much clout with the government as the telephone companies did and maybe more because cable companies had relations with every city and town government as well as with states and the FCC. The cable companies weren't going away, their eyes locked on stealing voice service from the local phone companies. The way the U.S. has embraced ISP diversity is different than in most of the rest of the world. Where the 14 OECD countries ahead of us on the list generally use telco infrastructure to provide Internet bandwidth, we use a combination of telco and cable. There's a problem with that from an efficiency standpoint. In the U.S. we're supporting two completely separate and different technical infrastructures, two billing systems, two service departments, two head offices, two corporate jets. There are economies of scale as our cable and telephone companies consolidate, sure, but they'll never become one and the prospect that the telcos would continue to be forced to share their infrastructure with competitors is being removed by the transition to fiber, because those advanced pipes are exempt from sharing under a subsequent revision of the Telecommunications Act. It is very doubtful, almost impossible, that we'll catch up to those countries ahead of us in broadband penetration. They are too far ahead and our native demand is simply less because our Internet economies are developing more slowly. Absent some miracle, the game is already over. As I wrote two weeks ago, the situation is likely to improve somewhat over the next year or two as the telephone companies sacrifice a little to lock us in before we switch to DOCSIS 3 cable modems and the cable companies, in turn, offer incentives to jump to their voice products. But these companies don't think at all in international terms and they simply don't care about international competitiveness or the growth of our economy. They should, but they don't. And they don't because they have never had to. Though they are required to operate in the public interest and to provide public services, these monopolies have never been forced to consider our place in the world. If there's a solution to this problem it isn't wireless. U.S. mobile carriers are as far behind their foreign counterparts as U.S. ISPs are generally. For all the companies' talk of unlimited mobile broadband, three Slingboxes can take down an EVDO cell. What would happen if AT&T gave every iPhone as much bandwidth as it could easily use? Gridlock. And WiMax is effectively useless too, because the sweet spot in cell size is so large that no ISP can provision enough bandwidth to serve even a quarter of the people who might potentially sign up. They could do it with smaller cells, but then the companies wouldn't make money. These are moving targets of course, but nothing is going to change without a dramatic new policy or the entry of a deep-pocketed competitor with a death wish like SoftBank, and I don't see even them ever doing it again.

• I, Cringely . The Pulpit |... on August 3, 2007
• More Details
• Related News

★ The Fear

The NDA is dead, yes, and good riddance, but there remain serious problems with the way Apple is managing the App Store. It boggles my mind that there remain so many people who don’t see this. This piece by Dan Kimerling at TechCrunch is one example; various of the reader comments on Jason Snell’s piece for Macworld last week are another.1 One factor, perhaps, is the tendency to see everything in terms of extremes. Black or white, good or bad. But this debate is not about wanting Apple to make radical changes, such as, say, changing the iPhone from a closed platform to a more open platform a la Android. There are reasonable arguments to be made that a more open iPhone platform would be good not just for iPhone developers, but for Apple and its shareholders. But those arguments aren’t what this debate is about. This debate is about wanting Apple to make minor changes — a slight but very significant course correction. Put another way, this is not about the big picture scope of what kind of hypothetical App Store (or Stores, plural) Apple should have created. That train left the station long ago. This is about the specific details of the App Store that actually exists, and the rules that govern it. I believe that a closed, controlled App Store can work, but by definition that requires developers to place trust in Apple. The problem is that Apple is managing the App Store in certain untrustworthy ways. And I mean trust more in the sense of stability than honesty — like in the way you need to trust a ladder before you’ll climb it. Here is a complete list of what Apple must do to increase developers’ trust in the App Store system: State the rules. Follow the rules. That’s it. This is so clear that even those who are arguing the other side — that Apple’s App Store stewardship is just fine as it stands today — have jumped through hoops in an attempt to argue that Apple’s exclusion of Podcaster was in fact in accordance with the iPhone SDK Guidelines. Kimerling, in his “Stop Complaining About Apple and the App Store” piece, writes: When you create the platform, you set the rules. If Apple wants to restrict iPhone applications to those that do not compete with features built into the iPhone, well, they can go right ahead and do so. It is right in the SDK’s user agreement. That’s just not true. The iPhone SDK Agreement, at least by the standards of legal contracts, is written in clear, straightforward English. (Apple’s lawyers, in the opinion of yours truly at least, are good writers.) The rules it lays down are clear. And Podcaster doesn’t break any of them. Given any set of rules, there will always be edge cases. Judgment must be rendered, and, inevitably, some will feel edge cases were judged the wrong way. But the reason iPhone developers (and prospective iPhone developers) are appalled by Apple’s rejection of Podcaster and MailWrangler is that neither app was near any edge defined in the SDK guidelines. Podcaster was rejected for duplicating the podcast features in iTunes and the iPhone “iPod” app. MailWrangler was rejected on the following grounds: Your application duplicates the functionality of the built-in iPhone application Mail without providing sufficient differentiation or added functionality, which will lead to user confusion. The word “duplicate”, in any conjugation, does not appear in the iPhone SDK Agreement. Not a word about it. And there is clearly no general rule about third-party apps duplicating the functionality of the iPhone’s built-in apps. PCalc, along with a handful of other calculator apps, duplicates every single feature of the built-in Calculator app. There are dozens of note-taking apps that compete with Notes; MagicPad goes so far as to use the same icon as Apple’s Notes app, just with different colors. There is an entirely category in the App Store — an entire category — for weather apps, several of which “duplicate” the entire functionality of the built-in Weather app. So, not only judging by the rules set forth in the iPhone SDK Agreement, but also by the existence proof of hundreds of apps currently published in the App Store that duplicate (which is really to say compete with) built-in iPhone apps, no reasonable person would have expected Podcaster or MailWrangler to be rejected. So their rejection is problematic on three fronts. First, the submission process is such that an app rejected at the conceptual level — one that cannot be tweaked or fixed to gain entry upon resubmission, but whose fundamental premise is rejected by Apple — such an app is only rejected after it has been written. The developer does all of the work to produce the app and only then finds out it was all for naught. Second, there are clearly rules which are not listed in the SDK guidelines. Third, in its explanations for the rejections, Apple is not stating what these actual unpublished rules are, and is instead offering as the reason this “it duplicates a built-in app” rule which, given all the aforementioned counterexamples that have been accepted into the App Store, isn’t actually a rule at all. The explanation is clearly false. Taken together, these three factors lead to The Fear, which is that developers cannot trust the App Store process. You can spend all of the time and effort it takes to build an app, follow every known rule, and still get rejected. From Apple’s perspective, especially, say, in upper management, it may be all too easy to look at what’s going on with the store — thousands of published apps, a ton of money changing hands — and not see the problem. In the big picture, from both a technical and marketing perspective, the App Store is a grand success. The problem is that the apps that are the most interesting, the most important, are the ones that take the most work to create. And the apps that take the most work to create are the ones that are most likely not even to be made in this environment, because the risk is greater. The more work it takes to create an app, the more you lose if Apple rejects it. Going back to the ladder analogy, the higher you’re trying to climb, the more you need to trust the ladder before you start. It’s not about a handful of developers who’ve had their apps rejected. It’s about all the other developers who are now spooked, and that the ones who are the most spooked are the ones who harbor the grandest, boldest, most innovative ideas. Interpolation Regarding a Theory on Which Apps Apple Won’t Allow Developers to Compete With In the absence of revised iPhone SDK Agreement from Apple, we can attempt to guess what the unpublished rules are. With Podcaster, for example, the “follow the money” rule of thumb leads to the conclusion that Apple will not allow any competition with iTunes, because iTunes is a profit source. This is why MailWrangler’s rejection is the one that puts The Fear in my heart. As unjust as the Podcaster rejection appears, if Apple really wants to prohibit competition with iTunes, even anti-competitively, you can at least see the thinking behind the decision. It’s foolish and unnecessary — the fact that iTunes is wide open to total competition on both Mac OS X and Windows hasn’t hurt it at all — and it also quite possibly invites some sort of legal challenge, but at least there is a logical idea behind it. But Mail? Why on earth should Apple care if some third-party email client for the iPhone becomes wildly popular? It makes no sense. iPhone users who use the built-in Mail app don’t pay extra to do so. Mail doesn’t tie users to Apple’s own MobileMe service. In fact, Mail offers specific setup help to work with Gmail, the service MailWrangler is optimized for. If you can make a replacement for Notes and Weather and Calendar, why not Mail? I have a theory. It is more, well, emotional than logical. But it’s the only theory I can think of that makes any sense at all and fits the available evidence. The theory is that there is an unpublished rule that Apple — and in this case, where by “Apple” I really mean “Steven P. Jobs” — will not publish third-party apps that compete with or replace any of the four apps in the iPhone’s default “dock”: Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod. Go back to Jobs’s original iPhone introduction at Macworld Expo 2007. It was a masterful presentation. Carmine Gallo, writing for BusinessWeek, calls it Jobs’s greatest presentation; I agree. Gallo describes the moment it was unveiled: After laying the groundwork, Jobs builds up to the new device by teasing the audience: “Today, we are introducing three revolutionary products. The first is a wide-screen iPod with touch controls. The second is a revolutionary new mobile phone. And the third is a breakthrough Internet communications device.” Jobs continues to build tension. He repeats the three devices several times then says, “Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device … today Apple is going to reinvent the phone!” The crowd goes wild. This “three revolutionary products” pitch was inordinately effective. For one thing, live, in the hall, Jobs completely fooled the crowd, yours truly included. But then as he repeated the three product ideas over and over, while icons representing the three products rotated behind him on screen, faster and faster, it started dawning on us how we’d been tricked. By the time Jobs came out and said that it was just one device that encompassed all three products, everyone in Moscone West had come to that conclusion on their own — a nifty little way of making the crowd feel clever, as though we’d figured out a riddle. But this pitch also worked because it was true. All three of those products sound good on their own. All three in one device sounds insanely great. Jobs was introducing the iPhone simply by describing precisely what it was. A phone, a widescreen video iPod, and a breakthrough Internet communicator. The icons in the iPhone’s default dock represent the core functionality of the device. Phone, Email, Web, iPod. With nothing other than those four apps, the iPhone still would have been a hit. Not as great, but, still, great. Everything else the iPhone’s built-in apps do could be done, to some extent, through Safari: notes, calendars, weather, maps, stocks. There are a few minor exceptions. SMS is one example, but that’s really just an adjunct to the Phone app. Anything that relates to the phone network — voice or SMS — is unavailable through the third-party iPhone SDK anyway. You couldn’t write your own SMS app even if you wanted to. (Apple clearly has no problem with competing chat apps — there are several IM clients available in the App Store. That’s the same basic concept as SMS, but using IP networking.) And so my guess is that while there may not be any logic, there’s at least a notion, if only in Jobs’s mind, that these four apps are sacrosanct because they define the iPhone. Everything else, both from Apple and from App Store developers, is piffle, secondary to those four apps. Harry McCracken’s recent iPhone user survey indicates that iPhone users agree that those four apps comprise the most-used features of the iPhone. But the least essential of the four is Mail. You cannot place phone calls or play music and video from your personal iTunes library using a web browser, but can read and send email through it.2 Millions of people do just that every day, including, I’m sure, many of you reading this essay. And Google’s iPhone-optimized version of Gmail shows just how well it can be done. It’s not just good for web-based mail, it’s just good, period. And so this idea that Apple seems to have that Mail is particularly special is misguided. The Phone and iPod apps are special, because at a fundamental level they perform tasks that cannot be duplicated in a web app. But there’s nothing any more special about Mail than there is about, say, Calendar. Calendar, if anything, is more closely tied to Apple’s proprietary and commercial MobileMe service — Mail works great with any IMAP server, including Gmail, but Calendar only works for online syncing with MobileMe or Exchange. But Apple doesn’t seem to have any problem allowing Calendar competitors into the App Store. Notes Calendar is a $3 Lotus Notes calendaring client. Exchange Remote Calendar is a $10 is a $10 calendaring client for Exchange. If these are OK, why not a dedicated Gmail email client? The only explanation is that Mail is deemed untouchable and Calendar is not. The real test would be for someone to write a dedicated Google Calendar iPhone app — but given what happened to MailWrangler, it might be hard to find someone willing to try it. In short, my theory is that Mail is on the do-not-compete list not because there’s any strategic reason for Apple to do so, but simply because of a vague notion that Mail is one of the iPhone’s defining apps. This notion is wrong. Mail is important, but there’s nothing about it that needs to be protected from competition. End of Interpolation, Back to the Three Problems, Which, Due to the Grotesque Length of the Above Interpolation, I Will Remind You Are: (1) App Ideas Are Rejected Only After the Apps Are Actually Built; (2) There Exist Secret Unpublished Rules Regarding What Is Allowed; and (3) When Apps Are Rejected for Violating the Unpublished Rules, Apple Refuses to State Just What These Rules Are One thing that would make a difference would be a submission process whereby developers could submit their application ideas to Apple in advance, to find out if they’re OK. That’s how it works on game platforms from Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft — developers submit a detailed proposal and wait until they get the green light before actually building the game. That sounds good, but there are problems with the idea. For developers, it would require an additional level of trust in Apple. Ideas are less valuable than actual implementations, but the more original an idea is, the less comfortable you are to share it. And for Apple, it would require significantly more work. They’d still need to examine and approve the actual shipping applications, but now they’d also have to examine and consider application proposals. The world’s hard drives are littered with abandoned unfinished software projects — there would surely be far more proposals submitted for consideration than there are actual iPhone applications. As it stands today, Apple is already struggling mightily to keep up with the work of approving new and updated application submissions — the typical turnaround time is between one to two weeks. Perhaps Apple could offer this as a service limited to ADC Select ($499) or even Premier ($3,499) members. The service is needed most by the developers who are considering the biggest apps, most of whom either are already paid ADC members or wouldn’t bat an eyelash at the cost of joining. It wouldn’t be democratic, but it might make it feasible. Platforms like Wii and Xbox ship maybe a few dozen titles a month, tops. The App Store has published 3,500 titles in just three months. (And it costs far more to join the developer programs for gaming consoles than the $100 iPhone SDK fee.) More important, though, is for Apple to address problems 2 and 3, by publishing in the iPhone SDK Agreement all of the rules they’re using to evaluate applications. If we’re not allowed to write email or podcast clients, say so. If something unforeseen comes up, Apple should make a decision, and then publish the new rule. Rules you disagree with are frustrating. Rules you don’t know about are scary. I will also note that, to my knowledge, not a single published iPhone developer has spoken out in favor of the App Store’s current rejection policies. Those developers who have spoken are against it. Those who see no problem are not themselves iPhone developers.�↩ Even if Apple were to come to its senses and allow third-party developers to write competing email clients, the built-in Mail app would hold one significant technical advantage, which is that it runs in the background. In fact, background processing is the one factor that unites the four dock apps. Phone, Mail, Safari, and iPod all continue running the background; no other apps, including those from Apple, do.�↩

• Daring Fireball on October 2, 2008
• More Details
• Related News

When Elephants Dance

My friend Ira, who lives in Yokohama, Japan, has 100-megabit-per-second fiber-optic Internet service in his home. This costs Ira less than $30 per month. What the heck is up with that? Ten years ago, the United States had the fastest and cheapest residential Internet service in the world. Today U.S. residential Internet service, especially broadband, is among the slowest and most expensive. I'll explain next week how I believe we came to be in this bandwidth mess, but this week I get to predict that the situation may (finally) be changing. Get ready for a substantially faster and somewhat cheaper Internet. While your broadband service may be labeled as faster than it used to be, there has been very little that is really new happening in Layer 2 Internet services. Cellular G3 data has been dormant. For all the talk of G4, G2.5 is still the standard. Cable modems with Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications version 2 (DOCSIS-2) have been standard for years. DSL has s-l-o-w-l-y moved to 6mbps/768kbps IF you are lucky to live close to the DSLAM. For businesses the big technology has been Multi Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) over T-1 service, which is not really a Layer 2 improvement at all. Metro Ethernet is coming along but too slowly for most. And Internet rates for businesses are still around $500 per month for a 1.5 megabit-per-second T-1, which is lousy compared to many parts of the world, some of them supposedly a lot less developed than the U.S. Here are some clues to what has just started happening to change the Internet service status quo. Alltel, a national mobile phone company, was acquired by Silverlake and TPG Capital, two private equity funds. Avaya, a maker of IP telephony systems for business, was also acquired by the same Silverlake and TPG Capital. T-Mobile now offers in the U.S. a pair of mobile phones from different vendors that will allow free calls from WiFi hotspots. Apple's iPhone has WiFi support. DOCSIS-3 cable modems have been demonstrated operating at 150 mbps with deployment to begin next year. Verizon is rolling out fiber service to homes and businesses. For customers who can't get fiber, Verizon recently increased DSL speeds with no price change. Sprint is becoming the dominant wireless Internet service for businesses through aggressive pricing, which is especially hurting AT&T (formerly Cingular). And AT&T has taken 30 percent of MCI's (now Verizon's) business customers through aggressive T-1 pricing. In short, everyone is poaching from everyone else in the business market, which points to a looming price war for business Internet service starting this fall. Here is the first shot -- Verizon's FiOS Business Internet prices to be rolled out this fall in the northeast U.S., bypassing Metro Ethernet, Frame Relay, and point-to-point T-1's with asymmetrical fiber service: Dynamic 5M/2M $ 40/mo. Dynamic 10M/2M $ 40/mo. Dynamic 15M/2M $ 60/mo. Dynamic 20M/5M $ 60/mo. Static 15M/2M $ 100/mo. Static 20M/5M $ 100/mo. Dynamic 5M/5M $ 170/mo. Static 5M/5M $ 210/mo. Dynamic 30M/5M $ 350/mo. Static 30M/5M $ 390/mo. Dynamic 35M/10M $ 170/mo. Static 35M/10M $ 210/mo. Dynamic 50M/10M $ 350/mo. Static 50M/10M $ 390/mo. So business Internet prices will drop in the northeast, where Verizon is king, but the impact will be felt nationally because Verizon will have established pricing levels that other competitors will have to meet. Now let's get back to Silverlake and TPG Capital. Their Alltel mobile phone network will provide VoIP to Avaya PBX's, effectively creating for businesses (at first) a PSTN bypass. Then the same people will provide Vonage-type phone service over local broadband using Avaya PBX's, creating yet another PSTN bypass. WiFi will become standard for the cellphone industry after years of being blocked by cellular providers. Verizon fiber pricing will force AT&T and others to lower prices in the northeast, but AT&T can't have two national pricing plans so costs will fall everywhere. Part of this will be driven by Comcast's pending roll out of DOCSIS-3 cable modem services. AT&T's response will be to try and lock in clients for multiple years BEFORE the DOCSIS-3 deployment, causing even more downward pressure on prices. By now we're talking about not just business prices but also residential. At this point expect the state utility commissions to push for rate normalization between fiber and non-fiber territories, meaning more downward pressure. Business model changes involve so-called "triple play" services where ISPs hope to make money from providing not just Internet service, but also telephone and television. The cable TV companies want to steal from the telcos basic phone service while the telcos want to steal television service from the cable companies. Since either possibility requires advanced data services and more bandwidth, users benefit. U.S. telcos, notably AT&T and Verizon, are aggressively building out their fiber plants, though AT&T is taking its fiber only as far as the curb while Verizon is taking fiber directly into the home. This ostensibly limits AT&T to XDSL speed limits, though the company can use channel bonding (more than one pair of copper wires per service) to increase speeds if forced to do so by competition. Verizon is rolling out residential fiber service from 30-50 megabits per second but its equipment can jump to 100 megabits per second if needed without requiring another truck roll. An important secondary motivation for this fiber roll-out is that telcos are not required to share such facilities with competitors as they have been required to share copper infrastructure under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. So while there may be competition in the neighborhood from cable modems, once the fiber is in and the copper is out the telcos need never again fear competition from Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs). While the number of U.S. residential broadband users is continuing to increase, the rate of that increase is slowing according to several surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Extrapolating these numbers suggests that ultimate broadband penetration will be comparable to cable TV or around 85 percent absent some total coverage solution like BPL. This slowing of growth may be inspiration for the growing telco vs. cable battle over triple play digital services, with the idea that some telephone users (where market penetration is already 97+ percent) will be induced to buy broadband service to lower their telephone costs. Who is the big winner here? Well I'll count myself a winner if my Internet pricing comes down a bit (I pay $168 for 8/1 cable service with five static IPs) but the REAL winner is Cisco Systems, whose largest market is service providers. With Comcast and Verizon pushing AT&T toward offering new technologies at lower prices, EVERYONE is going to need a new router.

• I, Cringely . The Pulpit |... on July 20, 2007
• More Details
• Related News

Will Google's Android Play DOS to Apple's iPhone?

Daniel Eran Dilger Today's broad array of smartphone operating system contenders are offering lots of potential answers to a problem that only requires one. It appears the market has two options ahead: either pool generic hardware makers behind a single operating system and deliver a smartphone marketplace that resembles the Windows PC market, or watch them fall to a dominant leader and have a smartphone market that resembles Apple's iPod ecosystem. This decision isn't going to be made by a class of intellectual elite, or by government mandate. it's going to be made by the market itself. Here are the factors that will influence the outcome, either marginalizing Apple's iPhone into a niche as the company has twice experienced previously at the hands of DOS in 1981 and Windows in 1991, or positioning it as the dominant leader as Apple has achieved for itself with the iPod since 2001. The third segment in this series looks at Google's Android and the Open Handset Alliance as a possible “DOS-attack” against Apple's iPhone. Subsequent segments will look at Nokia's newly opened Symbian and other mobile contenders challenging the iPhone. Will the iPhone Meet its Match from a Modern Day DOS? Will Windows Mobile Play DOS to Apple’s iPhone? Will Google's Android Play DOS to Apple's iPhone? Will Symbian Play DOS to Apple's iPhone? Google Acquires Android. In 2005, Google purchased a startup named Android, which had been in business for nearly two years. The secretive startup was known only to be working on software for mobile phones. It was being run by a who's who of mobile industry veterans, including Andy Rubin, the founder of Danger. Rubin had earlier worked at WebTV along with Chris White and Andy McFadden, both of whom had also joined Android. Richard Miner of Orange and Nick Sears of Tmobile also brought their mobile provider experience to Android. At the time of the acquisition, Google didn't announce any plans for Android and instead only told BusinessWeek, “We acquired Android because of the talented engineers and great technology. We're thrilled to have them here.” It appeared that Google was only going to be expanding its search services for mobile phone users, along the lines of the Google SMS answer system it had recently released. Google Buys Android for Its Mobile Arsenal - BusinessWeek Windows XP Media Center Edition vs Apple TV: The Fall of WebTV The GPhone Myth. As reports began to leak out about talks between Google and hardware makers throughout 2007, rumors began to fly about “the GPhone,” a competitive offering that was supposed to take on the iPhone. Some phone enthusiasts hoped Google would jump in to rescue the struggling OpenMoko project and turn it into a viable project that could attack Apple's new smartphone. In October 2007, I printed the Great Google GPhone Myth, taking apart the idea that Google would be directly competing against the iPhone, and describing that Google was really working on a free alternative to Windows Mobile as a conduit for getting its search and related services on a broader variety of mobiles. Google's services were already on the iPhone. In November, Google played its hand: it had organized a consortium of companies called the Open Handset Alliance to develop open standards for mobiles. The first product from the group would be Android, a mobile operating system built on the Linux kernel. Google wasn't getting into the phone handset business at all; it was only making sure that its mobile search products would not risk being marginalized by the threat of Windows Mobile on phones in the same way Microsoft had been working to leverage its PC monopoly to push Google search off the Windows desktop. The Great Google gPhone Myth Introducing Android: Leader of Linux. Two weeks later, Google released an early version of the Android software. On top of a Linux kernel, Android uses a specialized version of a Java Virtual Machine that takes Java language code and turns it into what Google calls “Dalvik bytecode” rather than Java bytecode as a standard JVM would. This allows Google to leverage existing and familiar Java language tools without paying Sun for a Java license. Like Mac OS X and its fraternal iPhone OS, Android includes a variety of open source libraries, including SQLite and WebKit. On top of that, Google developed a series of frameworks that handle the tasks Cocoa Touch does on the iPhone. Android also bundles a set of applications. While Apple adapted its existing Mac OS X to work in a mobile environment to create the iPhone OS, Android is more like a customized Java environment running on a specialized mobile Linux variant: elements of maturity in an otherwise experimental new platform. What is Android? -Google Android was by no means the first mobile OS using Linux. Both Palm and its amputated ACCESS software arm have Linux-based mobile platforms. Nokia has Maemo, which it uses in its Internet Tablets, and also recently acquired Trolltech and its Qtopia mobile Linux platform. Motorola has teamed up with MontaVista Software to use its Mobilinux. Intel created the Moblin project for mobile Linux, aimed at Internet devices. Google's OHA also isn't the first consortium to attempt to standardize a mobile Linux platform. The OSDL started the Mobile Linux Initiative to define requirements for hardware; the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) then worked to define various phone profiles aimed at the Japanese market; the Linux Phone Standard (LiPS) Forum tried to do the same thing in Europe. In 2007, LiPS was folded into the new LiMo Foundation, along with the OSDL. All of these committees have had some overlap and some complementary features. Several of Google's OHA partners are also LiMo members, including NTT DoCoMo, Wind River, and Motorola. So why didn't Google just join LiMo? “LiMo, very candidly, wasn't moving fast enough,” OHA board member John Bruggeman told CNET. Google hopes to herd the Linux cats into a progressive, structured platform that can battle against Symbian and Windows Mobile to succeed as the new DOS of smartphones. Will Google fracture or unify mobile Linux? The Presumption of the Necessity of DOS. The previous segment examining Windows Mobile pointed out how the PC industry as a whole assumed that Microsoft's desktop Windows monopoly would easily take over dominance in the MP3 player market, pushing Apple into a niche position. This was expected because DOS had pushed Apple's early computers into a reduced role starting in 1981, and Microsoft had repeated this again in 1991 when the DOS world migrated to Windows, effectively pruning Apple's Macintosh into a Bonsai platform. The inability of one company to dominate any product category has been frequently repeated by PC industry pundits as a given, despite the fact that history is full of examples of this happening. Sony dominated personal music players for two decades under the Walkman brand even while equally large competitors tried to push it from this position; Nintendo has similarly owned handheld gaming despite ill-fated efforts to grab a piece of its pie by products running a generic platform such as Microsoft's WinCE (Gizmondo), Linux (GP32), and Symbian (N-Gage). In fact, outside of the Windows/DOS PC, there are actually few examples of a generic platform taking over an industry. Nearly every other consumer-facing product uses proprietary platforms: car makers, stereo equipment, appliances and so on typically all use designs custom to their maker. The paradox of the Windows PC market has been that Microsoft's broadly licensed software supposedly saves hardware makers from investing in software development while ensuring compatibility, when in reality it adds significant costs to PC makers while limiting their ability to differentiate themselves. That explains why PC makers have been perpetually merging together and going out of business while Microosft has rolled in money over the last two decades. Parallel efforts to copy Microsoft in broadly licensing an operating system have regularly failed: IBM's OS/2, Apple's Mac OS, Palm's PDA OS, even Microsoft's own efforts to duplicate Windows dominance in other markets, from copy machines to PDAs to smartphones to SPOT watches to music players. The closest copy may be Symbian, but its customers are partners, not simply consumers of a generic third party's operating system as Windows licensees are. That indicates it is not necessary to duplicate the dominance exercised by Microsoft over the PC industry in the smartphone market. Google's Android and Symbian exist more as technology sharing pacts among manufacturers, but both aspire to take Microsoft's DOS role among smartphones. However, the idea that Apple's iPhone must be dethroned by a modern-day DOS, whether Windows Mobile, Android, or Symbian, is not just debatable, but does not sync with the reality of more recent events. Apple's recent history of the iPod further refutes the idea that a software analog to Microsoft is needed. The iPod Emergence: Apple & Pixo vs IBM & Microsoft. Apple's iPod in 2001 made no effort to clone the DOS business model; it actually did the opposite. When Apple entered the market, there were a number of existing MP3 devices using custom software, hardware designs, and DRM codecs. The iPod used off the shelf components to deliver a custom MP3 player using third party software, but Apple also added its own technologies: easy to use sync with iTunes, a fast Firewire interface that made uploading music far faster than the prevailing USB 1.0, and an attractive industrial design. With the iPod, Apple played the role of IBM in 1981, using Pixo's embedded operating system to enter the market quickly, just as IBM had used DOS. The difference was that Apple didn't direct any market attention toward Pixo and added a lot of value on top of that core embedded OS. A modern day Compaq couldn't simply clone the hardware and license Pixo to run on it in order to compete against the iPod, because the iPod was much more than just generic hardware running Pixo software. As the iPod developed, Pixo's role diminished and was eventually displaced. Just like IBM, Apple jumped into a new market just as demand was beginning to explode. Apple made MP3 players far more attractive to a general audience by delivering greater playback capacity than most entry level devices offered, along with an ease of use that encouraged buyers to jump in at the higher end of the market. That left Apple with not only the lion's share of the market, but also by far the most profitable segments of the market. Two decades prior, IBM badly fumbled its play with the early PC and ended up irrelevant in the PC world by the late 80s, sideswiped by Microsoft's DOS and the cloners who were licensing it in parallel, notably Compaq and later HP and Dell. Steve Jobs had witnessed that happen, and was determined to not let it happen again to Apple. Rather than being manipulated by a software middleware vendor as IBM had, Apple worked to incrementally develop the iPod market itself. After consuming the hard drive-based player market, Apple took on the Flash RAM-based market with a tiny hard drive system used in the iPod Mini, and followed up with Flash-based devices of its own in the Nano and Shuffle. This allowed Apple to progressively serve an increasingly wider market, incrementally growing upon an established foundation. With the iPod, Apple became, in effect, an IBM with its own internal Microsoft. Microsoft's Failure Despite Features. In contrast, Microsoft entered the music player market by promoting music player hardware reference designs around WinCE. However, it was unable to ship a finished design until the iPod had become firmly established around 2005. Later branded as PlaysForSure, the devices were sold by various hardware makers and all purported to support the same DRM and the same music subscription services while also offering a broader array of hardware that presented video before the iPod did, supported wireless before the iPod, and so on. Despite these unique features, all of those PFS designs still failed. Microsoft blamed the failure of PFS upon its music store and hardware partners and decided to take Apple on itself in 2006. It relaunched a Toshiba PFS player as its own device under the Zune brand, adding WiFi music sharing features and a larger display than the current Pods had. It failed dramatically as well. Did Microsoft's attempts to float a new DOS among music players fail because of Apple's success, or due to Microsoft's own problems? The failure of the Zune, which followed the iPod model rather than the DOS model, seems to suggest that Microsoft itself was to blame. Consider too that Microsoft's Windows Mobile phones, which use the same underlying operating system as its failed PlaysForSure music players and the Zune, had similarly flopped even before Apple could release a charismatic phone equivalent to the iPod. Of course, when the iPhone was released, it hit Windows Mobile hardest. The iPhone made Windows Mobile Smartphones look ridiculous and underpowered, and made Windows Mobile Pocket PC phones look clumsy and awkward, despite the fact that they both supported a variety of features the iPhone didn't, including the ability to edit documents, capture video, send MMS, and so on. Simply adding on features did not enable Microsoft to compete against Apple. The only conclusion that can be drawn from all this is that competing against Apple requires more than just having a feature arsenal. Microsoft's failures in themselves do not necessarily mean that Google's Android will fail in its attempts to float its own smartphone platform. Why Microsoft’s Zune is Still Failing Microsoft’s Zune, Vista, and Windows Mobile 7 Strategy vs the iPhone Will Google Succeed where Microsoft Failed? Microsoft's demonstrated inability to successfully enter consumer markets for MP3 players and smartphones has given observers little faith that the company will somehow turn things around in late 2009 when its next generation of devices are expected to be released. However, prior to that the first fruits of Google's efforts to build its own smartphone operating environment will arrive. Will Google's Android take over Microsoft's crown as the “DOS vendor” among smartphones? Supporters of Google's Android project point to some parallels between Android for smartphones and Windows on the PC: Android will allow hardware makers to differentiate in ways that can offer features Apple can't (or doesn't want to); it should allow software developers to offer features Apple does not allow on the iPhone; it embraces open, hobbyist experimentation in ways that Apple currently isn't; and it opens the potential for content providers that Apple is not interested in allowing. Openness is Android's key competitive feature. Will all this openness allow Google to unseat the iPhone to become the primary platform developers want to participate in, and subsequently soak up the market for third party hardware makers that Windows Mobile serves? While Google currently has no market share due to the fact that no Android phones have yet shipped, it does have broad vocal support from a variety of the same kinds of hardware manufacturers that supported DOS and Windows and helped to make those platforms successful in the desktop PC market. HTC and Android. The first Android phone is expected to be the HTC Dream; Taiwan's HTC (High Tech Computer) also manufactures Palm's Treo Pro phone as well as many of the most visible Windows Mobile devices. In addition to models produced under its own name, HTC also sells Windows Mobile devices under the Dopod brand, as well as no-name phones branded by providers, such as AT&T, Orange, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Vodafone, and others. HTC will also be building the XPERIA X1 Windows Mobile phone for Sony Ericsson. HTC was quick to throw its support behind Android despite its long term alliance with Windows Mobile. Why would it so enthusiastically support an unproven platform from a company that has no experience in consumer hardware platforms? One can only assume that HTC is not happy with the current state of Windows Mobile, and desperately wants another “DOS” to succeed where Microsoft's has so spectacularly failed. As an Original Design Manufacturer for Palm, HTC watched as Palm adopted Windows Mobile in place of the Palm OS and subsequently fell even deeper into crisis. Palm's only successful phone since has been its Palm OS-based Centro. HTC undoubtedly sees Android as its ticket to becoming the next Dell, but without a similar dependance upon Microsoft. Android for mobile phones is essentially playing the role of Linux for PCs, except that it has the backing of a major company behind it. Can Android Take on the iPhone with Openness as its Feature? As great as this sounds, it's important to consider that Linux on the desktop has made no significant progress in eating into Windows dominance after a decade of trying. Being open, free, flexible, and decentralized hasn't been enough of an advantage to get consumers to migrate from Windows to Linux in any fraction of significance. Similarly, in the music business, Linux-based MP3 players have had no impact on the iPod, despite offering more features, flexibility, support for additional codecs, and so on. In the mobile phone area, Linux enjoys a sizable portion of the smartphone market, but this is almost entirely due to phones sold by Motorola in China, where the advantages of Linux' openness are void. Motorola's Linux phones offer nothing to users in terms of openness or flexibility, and are really no different in terms of features than other appliance 'feature phones' based upon closed operating systems. And again, a key problem with assaulting Apple in a feature war is that neither the iPod nor the iPhone became popular by being “highly featured.” They both delivered perhaps 80% of the functionality found in all other devices in the market. Rather than trying to match every feature and cater to every niche as Microsoft had with Windows Mobile, Apple's devices did a few things very well at launch, and incrementally developed into full featured devices that still lack some of the more unique features of their competitors. Further, in terms of openness, the demographic that embraces Linux' characteristic freedoms is not the same as the demographic that buys smartphones in quantity and then pays for data service. This is a critical fact to consider because a big part of the iPhone's success stems from the fact that it is being pushed by mobile providers who want to capture the cream of the market willing to pay a premium for data services. The Frankenphone. Combining the fractured aesthetic of HTC's Windows Mobile phone hardware with Android's software, based upon Linux' perpetually unfinished DIY openness and Google's Java-like development platform, will not result in a product similar to the iPhone. Instead, it will look a lot like phones that have already failed in the market. Apple's advantage comes from slick hardware designs with a close attention to detail, combined with software that purposely does less so that it can do what it does better. Even Apple's own conservative attempts to broaden its software capabilities with iPhone 2.0 have resulted in instability problems that can be blamed upon both Apple's early releases of its phone operating system and software from inexperienced third party developers new to the platform. Would the current frustrations with iPhone 2.0 be somehow mitigated by additional openness that also embraced all kinds of variables from different hardware makers with less quality control than Apple, a loose committee of additional cooks working to serve up operating system features targeted at every possible conceived need, and a wider third party software group with fewer constraints on illegal behaviors? The Failure of Open. While it is politically unpopular to criticize the well meaning efforts of open source contributors, the failure of Linux on the desktop, the failure of the vaporware Indrema game console, and the failure of the OpenMoko project to deliver a workable phone within a year of its deadline all underline the serious problems open development faces in the world of consumer oriented devices. Open has simply failed to deliver on its promises in the world of consumer hardware. OpenMoko was supposed to release its first mobile phone to consumers for $250 several months in advance of the iPhone. When the iPhone shipped, the group then announced new plans to get its phone out by the end of 2007. Instead, this spring the group announced new plans to move to an entirely different development platform, and ship its phone mid year for $400 with limited functionality and incomplete software outside of basic GSM phone features. Linux's notable successes, from Motorola's Linux phones to the Tivo DVR to Linksys Routers, have often come without any associated openness or freedom, and were instead delivered simply to provide their manufacturer with a free kernel to build upon. This indicates that while Linux may find its way into an increasing number of smartphones, it will likely not be accompanied by the glorious freedom of an open development environment Google has said it would offer with Android. Apple iPhone vs the FIC Neo1973 OpenMoko Linux Smartphone Can Google Succeed Where Open Has Previously Failed? Despite “openness” being Android's strongest competitive feature compared to Apple's iPhone, Google recently revealed that its wide-open development model is intentionally gravitating towards a closed association of top tier partners due to practical considerations. In July, Google accidentally sent out a notice that revealed that it had been seeding private SDK updates to only a subset of its contributors, angering those who believed that Android would be as open as Linux on the desktop or the OpenMoko project. Further, Google has restricted initial development to higher level APIs just as Apple did, further indicating that Google itself realizes that being wildly open to impress a minority of hobbyists will not result in the commercial success of its new platform. That serves to neuter Android's primary advantage over the iPhone. Without delivering on the premise of being wide open, Android is really just a less mature set of Java libraries used to create a specialized binary that runs on a Linux foundation. Unlike Apple's iPhone, Android phones won't have a slick user interface developed by professional artists, nor the iPhone's legacy of mature software development frameworks crafted over the last thirty years, nor the iPhone's tightly integrated hardware with award winning industrial design, nor its marketing power tied into the iPod and Apple's retail stores. Android won't be an open iPhone, it will only be a Windows Mobile phone with a better kernel that runs specialized Java software instead of Win32 or .NET code. Don't expect consumers to be impressed by that. The Biggest Missing Feature. There is one remaining factor that strangles to death any last remaining hope that Android might assassinate the iPhone and assume the crown of the “DOS of smartphones.” That is: Android delivers zero price advantage to consumers. In 1981 and 1991, consumers who wanted Apple computers faced the sticker shock of a somewhat arrogant price tag. Apple sold its computers, as it still does, at the higher end of the market, but there was simply far more range in prices available. In 1981, that meant the Apple II was $2600 and the new Apple III was $3500, even before you added a monitor. On the low end, Commodore sold its far less powerful, but “still a computer” Vic-20 for $300, while IBM entered the market with the IBM PC at $3000. Over the next few years, Apple focused on delivering additional sophistication at the same price, releasing the $10,000 Lisa and then the $2,500 Macintosh. IBM continued selling PCs in the same $3,000 to $10,000 range, but other DOS PC vendors began selling machines at prices that ranged as low as $1500. That left Apple with a roughly $1000 price premium over low end PCs. The products weren't really comparable, but consumers only saw the huge price difference. In 1991, Apple was still selling moderate to high-end Macintoshes for $3,800 to $10,000; the crippled Mac LC was $2500, and obsolete-at-birth Mac Classic ranged from $999 to $1500. Windows allowed PC makers to ship a functional $1500 PC and claim a rough approximation to Apple's $2500 entry level system, maintaining that apparent $1000 price premium. Today, pundits are lucky to find a Dell or HP system that is even a couple hundred dollars less than a comparable Mac. However, in the smartphone business, the iPhone 3G is now the same price, if not less, than generic competing phones on the market. Even more significant is the fact that the price of the phone hardware is nearly nothing compared to the cost of the service plan. This fact simply eases any price premium that could cause buyers to flock to a smartphone running a generic operating system over buying the iPhone 3G, regardless of whether it runs Windows Mobile or Android. 1990-1995: Planting Software Seeds Android Partners Have Already Failed. That same pricing principle similarly prevented buyers from considering many of the alternatives to the iPod. While Apple's original iPod models were more expensive than many of the first MP3 players on the market, they were price competitive with models offering similar features. By 2004, it was Apple who was undercutting MP3 competitors on price. Microsoft offered zero price advantage when it began selling the Zune, a major factor in its failure, but Microsoft simply couldn't out-price the iPod; it was already losing money offering the Zune at the same price as the iPod. Apple now has tremendous market power in buying RAM and other components that will prevent any competitors from being able to offer a huge discount over the iPhone's $199 price tag. Even if competitors were to give their phones away, they would only offer a $200 discount to users who would then still need to pay the same mobile fees to use the phone. Android's other partners, including Samsung and LG, have already failed to capture any significant market share in the music player market. Are they going to maintain their position as smartphone makers now that they face similar competition from Apple, its iPod ecosystem, its iTunes Music and Apps Store, Apple's retail store experience, and other factors that are pushing the iPhone? If they can, it is not obvious how partnering with Android will help. Other Problems for Android. Android was announced in early November 2007 and was followed with an early preview SDK within a couple weeks, a month ahead of Apple's initial announcement of the iPhone 2.0 SDK. However, between March and July 2008, Apple delivered nine progressive releases of its SDK, opened its App Store, and sold 60 million apps, raising $30 million to support iPhone software development in just the first month. It has since released three more SDK updates to developers related to iPhone 2.1, which is expected next month. Android just published its first open SDK beta update earlier this week, warning developers that “applications developed with it may not quite be compatible with devices running the final Android 1.0.” Additionally, Android still has no phones available. By the time the HTC Dream is expected to launch, Apple will have an installed base of around ten million iPhone (and iPod touch) users supporting software development through iTunes. The business model for selling Android apps is no better than that for selling jailbreak iPhone apps: there is no iTunes Apps Store to promote them, so users will have to track them down on their own. Android developers also have no real freedom that jailbreak iPhone developers lack. The only difference is that there are ten million iPhones to sell jailbreak apps to, and currently zero Android phones. If selling a jailbreak iPhone app sounds like more trouble than its worth, imagine trying to sell Android apps to a non-existant audience. Now add the official iPhone App Store into the mix, where publicity, promotion and profits are booming. What platform is going to have the most applications? How many users will flock to a smartphone platform with no apps? The wisdom of releasing a desirable phone and achieving a significant installed base before releasing an SDK makes a lot more sense in retrospect. Additionally, while Apple has a decade of experience in shipping regular updates to Mac OS X and its Xcode developer tools, Google has only shipped a random assortment of web-oriented SDKs (a number of which have been abandoned) as a tangent to its core business of selling advertisements. When the Android SDK 1.0 is finished later this year, developers will not only lack an installed base to sell their apps to, but will also have no high profile market for selling their apps in, and subsequently no financial incentive to develop applications that add value to the Android platform, just like Linux on the PC desktop. Around the same time, possibly within the next month, Apple will be shipping its second major OS release: iPhone 2.1. Apple will also be upgrading its entire user base to the new software so that developers will have a cohesive platform to target. This mirrors the efforts Apple has taken to upgrade its Mac OS X users to the same reference release. Mobile developers will be seeing money pouring in via iTunes while crickets chirp in the Android section of various mobile online stores. Apple’s iPhone Vs. Other Mobile Hardware Makers: 5 Revenue Engines Same Same, But Different: DOS Model Problems. Android developers will also have a series of other problems to manage. Like Windows Mobile, Android is intended to support everything, from BlackBerry-style keypad phones with a small touchscreen to the simple Windows Mobile Smartphone form factor lacking a touch screen to iPhone-like full size touch screens. Also like Windows Mobile, Android phone makers will have the option to leave off Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS location services, graphics hardware acceleration, and so on. Each Android phone will also have unique camera hardware, support for different video and audio codecs, and varied support for other differentiating proprietary services demanded by mobile operators. This will force developers to to make complex decisions regarding the lowest common denominator they choose to support. So while the iPhone will have a cohesive feature set, a managed software environment, and a functional market, Android will be a loose federation of hardware makers selling the same random features found on Windows Mobile today, with a chaotic development environment that lacks any central market for users or developers. And it will be run as an experiment by a company with no experience in consumer hardware or platform development. The Missing Tap. One specific example of the “DOS model problem” is that Android currently does not support multitouch. It's not touched on in the API, and Google quietly tap dances around its omission. Why no multitouch? Because multitouch screens are expensive, and most OHA hardware members are more interested in making a profit in a competitive phone market rather than impressing consumers as Apple did with the iPhone. Most existing smartphones, even those trying to directly rival the iPhone, use a stylus driven, pressure sensitive tap screen or a simpler, cheaper touch technology that lacks support for sensing multitouch. The iPhone's screen can actually sense up to five fingers at once, but the primary feature multitouch offers on the iPhone is the two fingered tapping and the pinching effects everyone associates with it. Android could certainly support multitouch if there were a demand for it, but that's the point: Google knows that its hardware partners are cheap and unlikely to put out hardware that actually competes with the iPhone. Instead of using expensive technologies that deliver clever yet largely invisible functionality, OHA members, just like PC makers, are far more likely to add flashy, impractical gadgety fluff that's cheap to tack on, such as slide out keyboards, neon tubes, and scratch and sniff stickers. That's how you impress gullible nerds on the cheap. Google itself is blowing smoke and erecting mirrors to distract from the reality that it being a “DOS vendor” means supporting bargain basement hardware from penny pinching duplicators. Android has been demonstrating some “wow” features such as a Street Maps app that pans around based on an internal compass in the demonstration phone. The problem is that that kind of thing only makes for a fun demo. Nobody needs to twirl around their phone in the air to see a view of the other side of the street, but everyone who has used an iPhone will wonder why they can't pinch to zoom out. Even worse, most Android phones aren't going to have a compass built into them, so Google is demonstrating features most Android users won't be able to use. That Sounds Like Microsoft… Google's design decisions are beginning to look a lot like Windows Vista; rather than actually working to make laptops boot faster, Microsoft came up with the idea of adding a small screen to the back of Vista laptops so users could check their email without having to wake the system up. But this was a stupid idea for a number of reasons, the most obvious being that most users just want a laptop that boots up quickly. Few laptops got the mini screen, but every user who tries Vista on their laptop will wonder why it doesn't boot up as fast as Mac OS X Leopard. In the same way, Google is advertising features for Android that most users won't ever see in their actual phones while ignoring things people will expect based on their exposure to the iPhone. Android is simply selecting the wrong features. Android will offer the advantages of supporting MMS, recording video, and the list of other features Windows Mobile already supplies. Those features didn't stop Apple from firing past Microsoft in the smartphone arena however, just as the Zune's highly touted WiFi and screen didn't phase iPod buyers. Incidentally, just months after the Zune, Apple had not only demonstrated a larger display but a higher definition multitouch screen, and not only WiFi, but functional WiFi that could be used to browse the web or check email. This suggests that Apple, with its faster release schedule, won't stay behind any of the leading features potentially offered by Android for very long. Android partners, however, will find it as difficult to catch up with Apple's unique features, just as Microsoft has been stymied to keep up with Mac OS X, the iPod, and the iPhone. The underlying reason: both Google and Microosft are tasked with maintaing support for a huge variety of hardware options demanded by all their partners. Apple has the unique circumstances to do only what it needs to do itself. Android in Windows Mobile's Shoes. Like Windows Mobile, Android faces a difficult market. In the US, it competes against the popular BlackBerry in corporate markets and the iPhone among consumers. Worldwide, it competes against entrenched market leader Nokia. The difference is that Google, unlike Microsoft, has no in. Windows Mobile was adopted by Windows-bound IT shops despite its weaknesses. Nobody has any preexisting reason to try an Android phone apart from hobbyists and open software enthusiasts, a demographic that has done little to move Linux on the PC desktop. Google also lacks Microsoft's installed base; it's starting from zero. The smartphone industry initially doubted Apple's chances of making much progress with the iPhone, despite the company having the Mac platform, the iPod, retail stores, platform development experience, marketing savvy, industrial design prowess, and so on. Google doesn't have any of those things. Mobile Providers vs Android. Apple also started with an exclusive partnership with AT&T, a three legged race that demanded effort from both. Google is hoping that hardware makers handle the hardware details and that mobile providers will be excited to sell its Android phones. While hardware makers such as HTC clearly appreciate having found a free alternative to Windows Mobile, it's not obvious why providers would be excited about Android, as it promises an openness that most mobile providers strongly oppose. AT&T took a big risk in getting behind the iPhone, as the phone encouraged users to use email rather than fee-based SMS and MMS, it supported WiFi for data access, and it bypassed AT&T's MEdia Net services to plug into iTunes instead. Verizon refused to parter with Apple and grant it those kinds of concessions. Is AT&T going to take a similar risk to partner with a phone that is not exclusive to it, and is Verizon now going to open its arms to support phones that do not exclusively support BREW, VCast and its other proprietary services? While Android may well eat into Microsoft's Windows Mobile business by stealing away its hardware makers, it seems unlikely that Android will ever serve as more than free alternative to Windows Mobile in a market where Windows Mobile is increasingly irrelevant. Android may have the dubious distinction of swallowing Microsoft's mobile business the same way Microsoft ate up the Palm OS, but even if it accomplishes that goal, Google will likely find itself unsustainably hungry immediately afterward. It will also find itself swimming in a shark tank of hungry rivals, including Nokia's Symbian, RIM's BlackBerry, and Apple's iPhone. Symbian is the final generic platform vying for the opportunity to play DOS in the smartphone market. The next article will examine Nokia's chances in its bid to match Microsoft's PC dominance in the mobile market while setting out in a new venture to copy Android's open software model. Did you like this article? Let me know. Comment here, in the Forum, or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast (oh wait, I have to fix that first). It's also cool to submit my articles to Digg, Reddit, or Slashdot where more people will see them. Consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

• RoughlyDrafted Magazine on August 24, 2008
• More Details
• Related News

Myths of Snow Leopard 8: It's Just An OS.

Daniel Eran Dilger Apple's limited comments on Snow Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X due in about a year, have opened the playing field for rampant speculation. Here's a look at a series of myths that have developed around the upcoming release. The eighth myth of Snow Leopard: Snow Leopard is Just an Operating System Stretching the Meaning of OS. The definition of “operating system�? has grown dramatically throughout the history of personal computing. In the 70s, CP/M was little more than a boot loader. In the 80s, Apple's SOS, the “Sophisticated Operating System�? developed for the ill-fated Apple III, introduced the novel idea of a modular driver architecture for printers, disks, and files systems. After the company returned to making Apple II models, much of SOS was salvaged in ProDOS. Apple's parallel development of the Lisa not only delivered an operating system, but also a full suite of productivity apps as part of the included Lisa 7/7 Office System software, the first consumer office suite. It would be another half decade before Microsoft bundled its Word and Excel apps with its newly acquired PowerPoint to release Microsoft Office for the Macintosh, followed by a Windows version. In a 1987 interview with Dave Ottalini, Andy Hertzfeld said, “I did the Macintosh Operating System and I was very familiar with the Apple /// and especially in the I/O system of the Macintosh, I was influenced by the Apple /// [SOS] operating system.�? The Mac's System Software in 1984 added in the concept of developer Toolbox that enabled applications to share one set of code for drawing window controls, managing print and file dialogs, and later dealing with multimedia. Apple bundled fewer apps with the Mac than the Lisa due to complaints from third party developers. Instead, the company partnered with Microsoft to deliver the Mac's key productivity apps, a move that turned out to be Apple's worst decision ever. In the late 80s, NeXTSTEP built upon the idea of the Mac Toolbox; NeXT delivered high level, object oriented frameworks and visual developer tools for rapidly building applications on top of a Unix foundation. Steve Jobs' new operating system went well beyond just booting up the machine. It included speech-enabled email messaging, DSP audio processing, PostScript color and transparency, a documentation reference library, dictionary, and even the complete works of Shakespeare. Apple III FAQ File Lisa GUI Prototypes Office Wars 1 - Claris and the Origins of Apple iWork Office Wars 3 - How Microsoft Got Its Office Monopoly The Expanding OS at Microsoft. Throughout the 80s and into the 90s, Microsoft continued to sell the simplistic DOS, largely based upon the 1970s CP/M. The company started to bundle DOS with a Mac-like environment it called Windows, which started to become popular with Windows 3.1 in 1991. Microsoft shipped Windows primarily to port its Macintosh apps to the IBM PC in order to abandon its software partnership with Apple on the Mac. After similarly backing out of efforts to work with IBM on a DOS replacement called OS/2, Microsoft next attempted to deliver Windows NT as an entirely new operating system for PC users, based loosely upon concepts from AT&T Unix-rival VMS, after Microsoft acquired Digital's VMS developer team in the late 80s. Despite touting NT in the early 90s as the next Windows, Microsoft was unable to ship NT as a replacement to DOS for mainstream users until Windows XP 2001. However, Microsoft's greatest contribution in expanding the definition of the OS came from its efforts to tie products together to leverage its monopoly DOS position in order to advance its applications business. Prior to transitioning DOS users to Windows, it told developers to target OS/2. That left a vacuum for Microsoft's own new Windows Office apps, which had not been wildly popular until then. By 1995, Microsoft was licensing Windows and Office together to PC makers as tightly integrated products, cutting out competition from third party apps. Starting in 1996, as the Windows platform began to face the threat of the Netscape Navigator web browser paired with Sun's Java, Microsoft began to insist that its acquired Internet Explorer was an integrated part of the OS, enabling it to expand its monopoly and stifle any competitive pressure. It has since tied in the Windows Media DRM architecture, and has also tightly integrated Office and the Outlook Exchange client. While sold separately, both have become very close to being an extension of Windows. The company is now working to sell Windows, Office, and the requisite OneCare security software updates as a $70 per year subscription package called “Equipt,�? basically making all consumer Microsoft software an über-OS for Windows PC users, and again shutting out the third party developers who have been flourishing in the vibrant niche of servicing Windows' malware, viruses, and other security problems. 1990-1995: Microsoft's Yellow Road to Cairo Microsoft’s Outrageous Office Profits The Unavoidable Malware Myth: Why Apple Won’t Inherit Microsoft’s Malware Crown Five Factors Shifting the Future of Malware and Platform Security Enter Mac OS X. By the time the Mac OS X beta emerged in 2000, a desktop operating system was expected to include everything from an email and web client to audio/video playback and Office functionality. In order to compete against Windows, Apple had needed to partner with Microsoft to deliver Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and Office on the Mac. As Mac OS X began reaching a mainstream audience in 2002, Microsoft pulled the plug on Mac development, putting Internet Explorer and Outlook Express into maintenance mode and making minimal advancement to the Mac version of Office apps. For Apple to keep up with Microsoft, it would need to develop its own applications. Mac OS X's NeXSTEP legacy gave it a leg up on putting together an application portfolio. Apple had already adapted NeXTMail, a pioneering email client, into a decent email program simply called Mail, and shipped a central Address Book and later iCal scheduling client with Mac OS X. In 2003, Apple shipped Safari as its own standards-based web client. It later shipped iChat instant messaging and other supporting applications that rounded out the OS. At the same time, Apple also began assembling a suite of multimedia apps in iLife: iTunes, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and GarageBand. It has also put together an alternative to Office in iWork: Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. While both are sold separately from the OS, iLife ships for free on new Macs and iWork comes bundled as a trial that can be ordered online. Why Apple Bounced Back AppleInsider | Road to Mac OS X Leopard: Mail 3.0 The Future of the Web: Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer Mac OS X vs Mac Office? The expansion of Mac OS X means something particularly interesting for Microsoft Office. Apple is describing Snow Leopard's key feature as being support for Exchange Server messaging, a role formerly delegated to Microsoft. That makes it the next step in the company's incremental independence from Microsoft's software on the Mac, following its banishment of IE, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, and MSN. Snow Leopard promises to obsolesce Entourage. That being the case, it would make sense for Apple to bundle its Exchange savvy, Snow Leopard version of Mail, iCal, and Address Book into the next version of iWork for sale to PowerPC Mac users and others who don't meet the minimum requirements for Snow Leopard. That move would also directly position iWork against Office and expand iWork's user base on the Mac platform. Current Office users sometimes argue that Apple needs to allow Microsoft to maintain its monopoly position in Office to prevent Macs from being shut out of the corporate world. Businesses do prefer to train employees in one set of software; iWork does not work like Microsoft Office, forcing companies to settle on one or double their user training efforts. However, Microsoft has already began work to ensure that Office on Windows does not work or look the same as its Mac version. The Windows edition was given a Ribbon UI for marketing reasons, with a Start Button-style user interface branding to tie it into Vista. That wouldn't work on the Mac side, so Microsoft gave Mac users an oddball, clownish user interface that is neither Mac-like nor immediately familiar to Office users. Because iWork works like the rest of Mac OS X and is both consistent and intuitive, users will pick it up faster than having to learn the quirky, lipsticked pig that is Office 2008 for Mac. Even Windows users are likely to find iWork easier to figure out than Microsoft's Mac version of Office. Apple's iWork still has a ways to go in matching every feature of Office, but it offers a much stronger foundation to build upon than the current version of Mac Office. Safari on Windows? Apple and the Origins of the Web The Web Browser Renaissance: Firefox and Safari Microsoft's Scorched Earth Office Policy. Microsoft is radically changing the Office user interface on the Windows side to force companies to adopt Vista while also attempting to stave off the advance of the free OpenOffice productivity software, which is also sold by Sun as StarOffice and by IBM as Lotus Symphony. OpenOffice (and other competing suites, including some online productivity offerings) have worked hard to copy the look and feel of Microsoft's Office to facilitate adoption by companies while requiring minimal new training. Microsoft's response is to take Office 2008 in a patented new direction that competitors can't follow, a trick it used to kill competition in the DOS market when it released Windows as a product that only appeared to work with MS-DOS, and subsequently Windows 95, a product that integrated MS-DOS. With iWork, Apple didn't try to copy the old Office look and feel, which has made little progress since the late 90s. Instead, it has fleshed out its own productivity software interface with direct feedback Inspector panels; Mac OS X-native, customizable toolbars; and close integration with other OS features from advanced graphics compositing to media library browsing to native font and color selection panels. Office Wars 4 - Microsoft’s Assault on Lotus and IBM This All Happened Before. While Microsoft's strategy of driving Office into a unique, proprietary direction makes sense as a way to disrupt compatibility and familiarity with open software, it is also leaving the door wide open for Apple to enter. This is exactly what happened five years ago when Microsoft dropped Internet Explorer on the Mac, creating a vacuum that resulted in Safari, which is now teamed up with Firefox in an effort to eat into IE market share and break open Microsoft's proprietary hold over web development. With advances in Javascript and HTML5-style sophisticated web applications, Safari is now helping to erode not only IE's control over the web, but also break up Windows' hegemony in application development. MobileMe demonstrates how rich, open web applications can provide familiar email, calendar, contacts, and other features using the cross platform web rather than a proprietary development platform. While Apple hasn't announced plans to to deliver iWork apps on MobileMe yet, their current availability for the Mac not only makes up for the weaknesses of Microsoft's Mac Office 2008, but also directs attention to the Mac platform and its unique set of productivity apps. By offering Snow Leopard and “iWork 2009�? with Exchange 2007 support as well as integration with MobileMe and Snow Leopard Server's push messaging services, Apple will be able to aggressively push Mac OS X and the Mac into new territory long held hostage by Microsoft. Myths of Snow Leopard 4: Exchange is the Only New Feature Apple’s Mobile Me Takes On Exchange, Mobile Mesh Snow Leopard Server Takes on Exchange, SharePoint Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore WWDC 2008: New in Mac OS X Snow Leopard Myths of Snow Leopard 1: PowerPC Support — RoughlyDrafted Magazine Myths of Snow Leopard 2: 32-bit Support Myths of Snow Leopard 3: Mac Sidelined for iPhone Myths of Snow Leopard 4: Exchange is the Only New Feature! Myths of Snow Leopard 5: No Carbon! Myths of Snow Leopard 6: Apple is Out of Ideas! Myths of Snow Leopard 7: Free?! Myths of Snow Leopard 8: It's Just An OS. Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore Apple’s other open secret: the LLVM Complier Ten Big New Features in Mac OS X Snow Leopard I really like to hear from readers. Comment in the Forum or email me with your ideas. Like reading RoughlyDrafted? Share articles with your friends, link from your blog, and subscribe to my podcast! Submit to Reddit or Slashdot, or consider making a small donation supporting this site. Thanks!

• RoughlyDrafted Magazine on July 9, 2008
• More Details
• Related News

The Next Killer App

Any successful information technology requires a killer app — an application so compelling that it can, all by itself, justify the purchase of a given device. When it comes to personal computers, there have been many killer apps, starting with the spreadsheet, but there haven’t been any new ones in a long time, which is a problem. This column is about a potential new killer app for the PC platform, perhaps its last one. What do you know about telepresence? I have for the last several months been shooting for Maryland Public Television a new PBS documentary about how information technology has transformed our lives and businesses. It is an esoteric and very close look at a few technologies. Some, like the rise of office automation and the personal computer, are obvious: secretaries and telephone operators have disappeared while all the rest of us learned to type. Others, like RFID (radio-frequency identification) chips, are harder to see but just as transforming by creating a real-time distribution system in which we can know where everything is moving all the time, taking just-in-time inventory from a goal to a reality. One of the most striking of these technologies, which has yet to achieve wide use, is telepresence — high-definition video conferencing as a substitute for business travel. Telepresence is not far from being here on a wide scale and the effects — even beyond business — should be profound. I see telepresence shortly invading our homes. The way vendors tend to implement telepresence today is fairly uniform if inconsistently interoperable. A special conference room is built that is actually half a conference room, half of a table set against a wall that is all video screens. Typically three big projection or LCD displays are side by side in landscape mode with a third landscape screen mounted higher on the wall above the middle lower screen. The three lower screens are used to show the remote participants in the meeting. Sometimes all three screens are devoted to participants at a single location, but up to four locations can be linked if needed. The top screen is used for meeting materials like PowerPoint presentations or videos intended to be seen by all the participants. A couple weeks ago I used a system of this type (in this case it was from Hewlett-Packard but there are similar systems from Cisco and other vendors) to interview the people who designed it. I was in Palo Alto and they were in Corvallis, Oregon. In addition to the telepresence system (called Halo, whatever that means) I had a camera crew at both ends to record the action in each room. These rooms are not cheap to build or run. The HP systems cost either $249,000 or $349,000 to build, depending on the model, and $18,000 per month to operate. This gets you a DS3 connection (45 megabits per second) to a low-latency global network and 24/7 support. Each of the lower screens uses six megabits per second, with the remaining 27 megabits per second for that fourth upper screen. If this seems like bandwidth overkill for PowerPoint, understand that this HP system was co-developed with the Dreamworks movie studio specifically to allow dispersed groups of executives to review 1080p HD footage from upcoming films and for dispersed editors to actually work together to edit films without having to be in the same city. With feature film production budgets now averaging $50 million, $18,000 per month for editing support is nothing. With just over 100 such rooms now in operation for HP, part of the high price is also simply investment recovery. If HP were selling 10,000 of these rooms per month the price would be substantially lower. Video conferencing has been around for a couple decades, but telepresence is different from that. You can see the entire other side of the conference table, for example, and the people who are sitting across from you appear to be life sized. They can see you and you can see them. When another person speaks to you they can look you in the eye. Body language and emotions are easy to detect and the sound of each participant seems to come from his or her direction. You can watch the people who aren’t talking to see if they are even paying attention. It really is tele-PRESENCE and the fact that you are looking in a video screen is forgotten after a minute or two. Here are some lessons I learned from the experience. For one thing, size really does matter. The big screens changed for me the entire experience, though I think a home telepresence system could do fine with a single big HD screen instead of three. Eye contact is important, too, and that is generally accomplished through two techniques — mounting the camera as far as possible from the subject then using some subtle video morphing software to make it seem as though the camera was actually mounted behind the screen. For a home system I believe most of this effect could be achieved by simply increasing the distance from subject to camera, reducing the angle at which the camera is seen above the screen. This is the major failing in video chat systems where the camera is mounted on the display. Using the system I quickly came to understand that the real power wasn’t in bringing together groups of big shots for huge powwows at which sweeping global decisions would be made. The quintessential telepresence meeting lasts 10 minutes and involves a group of people at any level who simply need to come to a concensus. Nobody flies 10,000 miles for a 10 minute meeting yet everybody walks down the hall for one. Being able to hold such a meeting is what can make a widely distributed group of workers function like people in the same building, which has been one of the nagging problems of global development and outsourcing. The fact that it already has eight rooms up and running in India may give HP some advantage in that respect. We’re early in this process,