Apple relies on apps way too much

There's a good read over on Gawker about the firing of a Wall St Journal employee who apparently pissed off Steve Jobs. An interesting point is brought up a couple of paragraphs in:

In a Q&A session with the assembled executives and managers, including Journal editors, Jobs railed against the apps newspapers like the Journal have created for his iPad. Their interfaces are terrible, he said, and their content is all too often limited . That the Journal's archrival the New York Times was among those singled out for criticism — Jobs hates the limited NYT Editors' Choice app — must have helped take the sting off. And Jobs did praise the WSJ's iPad app as very attractive. But the CEO also said the app was too slow, essentially calling it a clunky reading experience.

The choice part there is the comment about the NY Times app.

Leave Steve Jobs ALONE!

Priceless article from Gawker where Steve Jobs bitches like Perez Hilton about being harangued by a college journalism student. I'm waiting for Gruber  to go all Chris Crocker on the world now.

Facebook as a platform a bad thing?

Within this excellent article about Zynga's rise on the back of other companies innovations is a mention of the dangers of facebook as a primary platform. It seems that the investors and stock insurance company involved with Zynga decided that a major downside to their otherwise very lucrative business was their reliance on facebook which funnels the vast vast majority of the traffic to their site.

The question: is relying on facebook for your platform a bad thing? It would seem the answer is yes and the pitfalls many and obvious: lock-in to single platform and userbase, privy to the whims of the owners of facebook, and no guarantee of service. However I think if you look beyond the surface level concerns, using facebook as a platform might be a smart, and stable, decision.

Although being restricted (if only by user preference) to a single social network would seem bad, you couldn't find a better platform to be locked in to. Facebook boasts over 500 Million active users, or roughly 1/2 the expected internet population of only a few years ago, and is posed to remain an active and important part of life on the internet well into the future. Even if facebook crashes and burns tomorrow the concept of the social network will continue to live on and Zynga would have no issues moving over to another platform. This is of course dependent on the 3rd party platform stance of the next hypothetical social network company, but it's a good bet to assume that a similar infrastructure would be required to cerate a successful enterprise.

And while Zynga is thrall to facebook's whims and decisions, it is not itself without clout. When facebook decreed that all micro-transactions within it's network must be made with facebook credits, of which facebook would get a 30% cut, Zynga threw their weight around and worked out a solution that was more amenable to it's bottom line and facebook's desire for their traffic. Other companies, much smaller companies, are much more susceptible to this issue but have little choice in the matter; for them it's play ball or go home.

The main point is that facebook is no longer just a website or a social network, it's a parallel internet and along with that designations comes all of the bad and good. It's continued survival depends on cultivating a 3rd party platform that remains open (within their specifications) and creating an ecosystem with consistent and relatively fair rules. It very much like the internet itself, except viewed through money-colored glasses. That's not necessarily a bad thing either. Social networking is clearly here to stay. Like forums, e-mail, IM, and blogging it will likely hit a peak and then recede into a comfortable and profitable level of use that provides a large enough platform for several players to develop. If facebook dies tomorrow another network will spring up in it's place and take with open arms the users, developers, and yes Farm Games that make up Zynga's bread and butter.

Sony's PSP Go Failure

News came out today that Sony's upper management has conceded that the PSP Go has not been very successful. This shouldn't come as any surprise as the PSP platform was never the mega-hit that Sony was hoping for, instead playing second fiddle to Nintendo's DS (half fiddle actually, with a little less than 50% the sales volume of the DS), and the PSP Go did nothing to change that competitive landscape. In fact I think it could be pretty well argued that the PSP Go hurt the brand.

The main difference between the Go and the standard PSP is the exclusion of the UMD optical drive; in its place is a relatively large capacity memory stick capable of holding at least a handful of games. On paper that sounds very forward looking; by ditching physical media Sony should have been able to leverage the strength of modern digital distribution to create a platform with a winning combination of superb hardware and App-Store like access to stunning video games. Except it didn't, and instead Sony lost a golden opportunity to change their fortunes in the portable gaming marketplace. With digital games being released days or weeks after their physical counterparts, full-retail prices for all games (including older games which were widely discounted elsewhere), and a user-unfriendly purchasing system (compared to the App Store), the downloadable dream crumbled away into mediocre sales and upset customers. I didn't even mention the redacted promise of old PSP owners being able to get downloadable copies of games they already purchased.

The previously mentioned Sony execs noted that they had learned much from the Go debacle, but I doubt that they've learned enough. When a company is so notoriously bad at creating user-friendly software and platforms (see PS3's Home and current system update mechanism), and continues to make bone-headed decisions, it's apparent they're probably missing a few things. In no particular order:

1.   Day and date releases are a must, and every piece of software must be made available digitally. I chalk this up to narrow-thinking and strong, deeply bred feelings amongst the Japanese gaming industry, but that's no excuse. Sony should have strong-armed their partners into this.

2.  Value. Not only were brand-new digital games selling for the exact same as their physical counterparts, but older, discounted titles were selling for much more than street. Game prices need to be tied to street prices and need to update in lockstep. Sense a theme? Co-ordination between both sides of the platform is very important.

3.  Promotion and backwards compatibility. Sony should have stuck through with their claim to allow upgrades to get digital copies of their game plain and simple. Sony also should have offered a $5 rebate for the first 5 games bought on the PSP Go during the first wave of sales. That would stimulate sales and show Sony's commitment to the platform.

The thing to keep in mind is that these lessons will become increasingly important. The next generation of video game consoles will be moving towards direct download alongside the existing physical media. Playstation fans should hope that Sony won't screw it up this time too.

Apple flunked math

During the last Apple announcement Steve Jobs made some interesting claims:

1. the iPod touch is outselling the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined
2. Android might have 200,000 activations a day, but Apple is activating 230,000 devices per day

Right away both of those numbers should have set off some alarms. First off, the Nintendo DS alone has sold 132 MILLION units, making it the bestselling video game platform of all time, compared to Apple's ~125 million iOS devices. The Sony PSP itself has sold more then 60 Million units, and I don't know anyone who actually plays that thing. Anyway, it's pretty clear that Jobs was basing his claim on some arbitrary and undefined period of time of their choosing (but since when is that new?).

On the activation front it's also clear, and becoming clearer, that Apple was fudging the numbers. I've personally wondered if the iPhone sales numbers (on a per day basis) weren't abnormally hiked by the initial release of the phone. They sold 1.7 Million phones in the first 3 days of sales, enough to goose the average up for quite some time. Now a site, which was reblogged by AppleInsider, MacRumors, and Gizmodo, has indicated that a significant portion, over 1/3, of iOS devices sold are iPod Touches. A commenter on Gizmodo went ahead and did some basic math and estimated the current sales rate of iPhones to be just around 100k units per day, i.e. a sustained rate 1/2 that of Android.

A lot of people and fanboys will say "so what?", trot out arguments like the iPhone is a single device on a single network, or take up Jobs' spurious claim that Android activations include updates/upgrades. The fact of the matter is this: Android is growing as a platform and its rate of growth exceeds iOS's, and if you remove non-iPhone devices and Android appears to be outselling the iPhone at a 2-to-1 rate. The iPhone's biggest competitive advantage, the App Store, will stick with Apple for some time, at least another full year until Android irons out its SDK issues (especially for gaming). But after that point, and after some of the App Store momentum slows down, I predict more and more developers will be looking at the rapidly expanding Android user base and decide to invest more of their resources with that market. Time will tell. But if current trends are any indication Android will only benefit from a little more time.

Apple Live Stream

I'll admit, the quality of the Apple Live stream is quite good. Watching it on the iPad right now. I feel so...conflicted. Updates as they're warranted.

Stores
The second Paris store looks beautiful, especially with the architectural columns. The Shanghai store...little derivative of the 5th Avenue store (which is pretty cool inside).

iOS

• 230,000 iOS activations (iPod touch, iPhone, iPad) compared to 200,000 Android (phone) activations. The big question is how quickly Android will match that rate. Come Christmas, I wouldn't be surprised to see Android besting activations a day (if they aren't already).
• HDR Photos is just a feather in their cap and shouldn't be hard to replicate (see Camera 360 on Android), but is a nice built-in feature.
• Gaming: I still dislike on-screen controls, but that Unreal engine looks pretty sweet. Game center...we'll see, it's X-Box live derivative.
• Printing: I guess I'll quit putting my iPad on a copier.
• Multitasking on the iPad: looks pretty nice, with the swooping.
• Update for iPad coming in November. The silence is deafening and for good reason. That's a quarter of a year off, and that's way too far away. Keep your Jailbreak.

Half clap when iPods cames up

• iPod Shuffle: people miss the buttons; um no shit Steve. New iPod shuffle doesn't look much better then the 2nd gen (which, admittedly, was quite good); it's smaller and has a black ring. $49; that's a good price.
• iPod Nano: touchscreen obviously; it's basically a screened, bigger, iPod shuffle. Looks OK, but the square screen is a bit odd. If it's $100 that'll big a good deal. Quote: "I can hold down anyplace...whoops, not there." Screen rotation...interesting they decided no accelerometer. Price: $149/$179...that's too high.
• iPod Touch: iPhone without contract (AT&T dig there). They said they've sold more touches than DS's; that would have to be more than 132 million devices. Retina display, thin, blah blah blah. Front camera for facetime...back camera? Back camera. Skinny, phone-less iPhone 4. $229/$299/$399 (8/32/64GB, next week). Seems nice, but not a must-buy.
• iPod Classic: I think it's dead.

iTunes:

Lala, it'll be online, streaming of TV, $.99 rentals and...hrm. Maybe you guys can make iTunes 10 much, much much better than it's current incarnation? iTunes is slower than a frozen Zombie, and the UI is shit. iTunes ping and.....dead stream. So when the stream dies on their tech, it starts you back to the start of the stream. It looks like the connection is back. OK, so Ping is what, just facebook for iTunes? Interesting?
It'll go live right now. Jobs was expecting a some applause there it seems like.
Ping: iPhone and iPod touch, but no iPad? That's weak. iTunes 10 is available today.

One more thing: one more hobby
iTV is a go. He's up his ass about a lot of it, but I have no doubt that it'll be popular. "People don't want to think about storage" (sigh). :People don't want to sync to their computer" then why do the iPhone and iPad NEED TO SYNC TO FUNCTION?!?!
iTV is a screenless iPad without major storage.

Anyway, looks like I missed out on the end of the keynote; I suppose the new Apple TV, at that price, actually looks OK. Not game changing, too focused on buying stuff, and too much iTunes lock-in, but it certainly could work just fine.

Chris Martin, he'll be available in store within 6 weeks.

Apple's Live Stream tomorrow

Here's a gem from Apple's recently announced live video streaming of their mini-keynote tomorrow:
"Apple® will broadcast its September 1 event online using Apple’s industry-leading HTTP Live Streaming, which is based on open standards. Viewing requires either a Mac® running Safari® on Mac OS® X version 10.6 Snow Leopard®, an iPhone® or iPod touch® running iOS 3.0 or higher, or an iPad™."
Well, Apple has made a lot of fuss about how fucking great they are because they build on open standards. I think it can be said that Apple itself is acknowledging how full of shit that idea is. I suppose they deserve commendation for that, so kudos, Apple, for showing us the joy of "open standard" systems.

Apple's BS
via Rafe Needleman

Phones, the uber gadget, and dedicated devices

When I go to work it is not uncommon for me to carry my phone, music player, netbook, and iPad; there's never a guarantee that each item will be used that day, but I can't see myself not having each of those items with me. It's not that I couldn't boil that down to two items: the phone and the netbook. It's that I don't want to.
The modern phone is an amazing thing, blending telecommunications usefullness with a smattering of computing utility. I can listen to, and download anywhere, podcasts, music, and video on the phone. But I don't. No, instead of plugging into my 4.3" slab of glass and Android, I plug into my 3 year old white OG Zune. Why? Because it's perfect for what I want.
With the Zune I have a dedicated device optimized for listening and watching content. It has hardware buttons that can be accessed without going through a lock screen, volume that can be adjusted through a pants pocket, and an interface that is designed to do one thing: play shit.
So I find myself very rarely using the much more technologically advanced phone to listen to anything, and I still go through the nightly sync cycle that ensures I have an up to date selection.
My specific situation isn't the only example of a dedicated device that seemingly makes no sense in this modern world. Take the Kindle, a single function devices that is seemingly usurped by the iPad, the do-almost-all ubergadget that I'm typing on right now. While the Kindle can be used to read books, the iPad can be used to read books, write books, watch the movie based off of the book, and play the mobile video-game spinoff of the book. But the iPad isn't perfect. It's too heavy for extended reading sessions, it's display is more tiring to look at than e-ink, and the interface is designed for general computing, but dedicated reading. From a value standpoint the Kindle seems to make little sense (and much less sense when it cost 50% of the iPad), but for usability it's unbeaten.
So now we find ourselves at an odd nexus; increasingly capable and impressive machines that do everything, and increasingly cheaper and better machines that do a single thing, and do it well. While many pundits have called each new ubergadget the killer of this, and the killer of that it's becoming increasingly obvious that single purpose devices are going to continue living on. What the ubergadget is killing, however, are the middling and poorly designed single purpose devices that end up cluttering junk drawers across the country. And that's a good thing.

Phones: A wishlist

iPhone

Cupertino, spruce up your UI. What was revolutionary and clean 3 years ago is stale and uneven now. Notifications are translucent and light-blue, settings are black and white, drop-down menus (such as in Safari) are clunky, with thick, brash borders and lettering. This goes triply true for the iPad. The high-DPI screen on the iPhone 4 makes your sub-HD resolution look even worse; not in video, not in apps, but with any menu item with text larger than 12-pt. It looks pixelated and out of place on the larger screen. Everything else is pretty decent though, including anything that slides. Those buttons are rad. Also your folders suck, but all the mobile folders pretty much suck (from a usability standpoint; parts of the UI are actually pretty neat).

Notifications. These suck, especially with your 1-operation at a time design. Now, to be fair, this is fairly well fixed with multitasking, but that's not out for the iPad yet so I still get to bitch about it. Also, no snoozing? No saving notification for later? No stacked notifications? What is this, a Western Union telegraph? Go steal Palm's WebOS notification system; it's the best on the market.

Hardware: make a bigger screen. Work with an iPhone and a Pre (or Blackberry, or *shudder* a feature phone), and the screen seems plenty big, more than enough for a nice hand-held experience. Work with an iPad and an EVO/Droid-X and the iPhone screen looks like a tiny window into what could be. Imagine, if you can, looking through a tiny window to control a computer and surf the internet; that's what the iPhone is. So don't do a huge bump, maybe something in the 3.7" to 4" size; the EVO and Droid-X's 4.3" screen is too big for many people. Of course this won't happen; they've painted themselves in a corner on this (well not really, but for my purposes...) with their mystic "retina display".

Contact management: you're getting creamed by Android and WebOS. I know you're not a cloud company but neither was Palm and look what they've done. Coming from you it's downright pathetic. And don't get me started on mobile.me. What a piece of shit; not for what it does but for what it costs. Your cloud setup is 3rd class at best.

Android

Go get a consistent UI. You're getting better on this, but c'mon. Also, add flash, add smoothness, add some wow factor to your UI. Look at an iPhone, and to a lesser degree the WebOS phones, and you see slinky orientation changes, soft fades between screens, natural looking UI motion, and other little touches that scream "I have weight!". Android has none of that and needs it; it's Windows 2k vs. Mac OS 10.0. Arguably equally functional, I sure as hell knew which one was more enjoyable to interact with. And don't tell me Sense UI makes up for it. Also, don't let youtube links from your browser be handled by the HTC flash application; that's more of an HTC problem, but MAN does that suck.

On the plus side is your system wide back button; very cool to go from an app to the web and all the way back. Best breadcrumb system ever.

Customization: take a page out of WebOS; it's drop-dead simple to install extensions to WebOS (such as battery percent notifier, software keyboard, etc) from a thriving unofficial dev scene. You're the Open Source OS! Make this shit happen! On the other hand, the incredible capabilities of some of the applications in the Market are awe-inspiring (location based wifi activation?! yes please).

Notifications: good, but steal more from WebOS; provide more information about emails, sms, etc within that notification pane. Also, allow for individual clearing of notifications, not this "clear it ALL!" approach you have now. The widgets are awesome though; kudos on that.

Contact management: you're almost there with the facebook integration (at least on Sense), but you need some serious work on it. Compared to WebOS's integration between Google, Exchange, and facebook your attempt is just lackluster.

Your cloud strategy is good but needs improvement; add in application syncing and application settings and you'd be white hot.

WebOS/Palm

Get some new hardware. Seriously. I have seen 5 WebOS phones leave my house in the last year and have active issues with the remaining hardware. Better processor, more ram, SD card (you aren't Apple after all), slider that doesn't cause the phone to shutoff or Oreo-cookie. And for god's sake get your UI GPU accelerated. This isn't Android, you can spec in GPU support to all of your phones. Optimize the crap out of your integral apps; the phone app, THE PHONE APP, has such horrendous performance you're almost better off using Google voice through the browser. Your gallery app is slower than shit. Same thing goes for Google Maps. Your email client is pretty awesome though; so is your contact management (also the best in the industry). Get better apps; you're doing OK on this part but have huge room for improvement.

You're cloud strategy is pretty legit; if you wipe a WebOS phone and come back to it your apps automatically download...RIGHT WHERE YOU LEFT THEM. That's nice, it's like the iPhone restore form backup, but over the air. Stretch this out with photo backup (stolen from Kin) and you'd be awesome. Your notifications are pretty hot too.

Blackberry:

I don't really give a shit so keep on trucking. Just update the CPU on the Torch, what is this, 2008?

WinMo7

Steal the best parts of the Kin, the Zune HD, X-Box 360, mix with extremely strong Exchange support, add in good twitter/facebook integration (do not take this from Kin), add an API to the Kin spot so foursquare can build an app, allow multitasking, and don't fuck it up. You might be worth something then.