My Mad Crazy Brilliant Ideas To Save Apple From Certain Doom

Apple is doomed. No innovation, no market share, no new products, no Steve Jobs. Death  — soon — is all but certain.

This is the consensus, at least, from mobile analysts, Nobel-winning economists and tech bloggers alike. It’s nonsense, of course, the product of a herd mentality tucked inside a middle manager’s vision. Apple has the best mobile computing products in the world, controls the most robust mobile computing platform, and operates the industry’s largest retail footprint. Apple’s near-term future is as secure as any company, ever. Indeed, with Microsoft now in the throes of long-term turmoil, and Google’s CEO placing bets on every square in hopes of once again hitting the jackpot, expect Apple to pull even further ahead of the competition.

That said, Apple attained its present lofty status by embracing “crazy” ideas — ideas that changed the world as well as the company’s fortunes. In that same spirit, here are my crazy ideas to make Apple even bigger, even better, well into the future.

Are you listening, Tim Cook?

Lay Down (Arms) With Google

Apple and Google are the superpowers of global tech and they do not like one another. Thermonuclear war, however, is of little value to anyone.

Larry-Page-12103347-1-402I propose a “cold war” solution: Apple and Google sign a long-term licensing agreement. Google will abandon Android, and instead optimize its mobile services, all of them, for Apple’s iOS. In return, Apple will offer nearly unfettered access of its iOS platform to Google engineers.

Under this scheme, Apple will sell vastly more devices, continue to earn sky-high profits on hardware, and provide its (billion plus) customers with the best mobile experience on the planet. Google liberates itself from the Android noose, which has cost it billions already. Since iOS users are far more engaged with their devices, Google also receives more and better data using my scheme, which enables them to offer more and better advertisements.

Lastly, this frees up Apple to focus on what it does best. After all, there is a very real chance that iCloud, Siri, Maps, Spotlight, Mail, Calendar, et al, will never be as good as the Google equivalents. Jettison them all.

Merge With Samsung

samsung-wd8804-2-in-1-washer-dryer-combo-220-volts

Not sold on a Apple – Google partnership? Challenge accepted. Instead, Apple should merge with Samsung, their only real threat for smartphone sales.

While many still view Apple as a “computer company” this is misleading. Imagine a pyramid with design at the top, software  beneath that, retail below that, electronics and materials next, and supply chain management at the bottom. Samsung is similar, albeit with a far wider base and increasingly less skill as you venture up the pyramid.

Samsung makes some of the very best affordable washers, dryers, refrigerators and sundry other gadgets and appliances. Unfortunately, every one of them is needlessly complex. As everything becomes a “computer” and as the interface to every computer becomes our touch or our voice, we need Apple’s design and UI expertise more than ever.

Apple + Samsung equals the greatest global electronics design, development, manufacturing and distribution conglomerate in the world, ever.

Own F1 And Kill Cable Television

Apple TV remains a “hobby.” This may be fine for Tim Cook, but it sucks for the rest of us. Because the rest of us continue to pay far too much money for television content we do not want.

Why should we pay for 24 hours of ESPN, for example, if we only watch it 30 minutes everyday? Fox News dominates the ratings while MSNBC barely rises above statistical noise. Yet, we are required to purchase a “news” package that includes both. We want to watch a favorite series yet are forced to buy the entire channel’s programming line-up. This all seems terribly unfair and criminally outdated.

We need Apple. Before Apple can remake television, however, they will need to own top tier content.

I suggest Apple buy the massively popular F1 and the English Premiere League. Make these available solely via Apple TV. Fans of these sports will purchase Apple TV units in droves and quickly learn that the best viewing experience is the one that Apple already suggests (if not quite yet realizes): buy just what you want to watch, when you want to watch it, no matter where you are located, and no matter on what screen you prefer (TV, smartphone or tablet).

Speak Often And Kill The Bloggers

There was a time when Apple was left for dead. It was during these dark times when an Apple priesthood sprang up, discussing every new product, praising every minor change, and writing daily on the wonders of Apple — keeping the few believers securely within the flock.

Tiny pirate Apple is dead, yet the Apple blogger ecosystem, like kudzu, is everywhere now, and does more harm than good, I think. Apple bloggers, now bursting with readers and well-heeled sponsors, oblige both by touting every whiff of every rumor.

When Apple finally does release its newest product, we are instantly let down. We already knew. Our disappointment is further compounded because Apple inevitably fails to live up to many of the craziest rumors.

Apple should speak to the press and to the public on a regular basis. We shouldn’t need to get our Apple news from second-hand sources anymore.

Take Control Of Windows

Windows-7-RTM-Default-Wallpaper-the-Design-Story-2

To change the world you have to be crazy enough to believe you can. Case in point: Apple should buy Windows.

Microsoft’s generations-long hold on the personal computer operating system is in its dying days, laid waste by Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. The more Ballmer and his successors focus on protecting Windows, the quicker they accelerate the company’s demise. To survive, Microsoft must focus on applications and devices, not operating systems and bundled software packages.

That said, there is value in Windows. Or, at least, the Windows team. They built a platform that worked for well over a decade for well over a billion users. More impressive, they did this without controlling the hardware!

Apple will soon operate at least two platforms — iOS and iTunes — that will touch more than a billion users. This is foreign territory for the once small American company. But it is not foreign for Microsoft’s Windows team.

Steve_Jobs_S5F3_headshot_v2

Stay Crazy After All These Years

I have many other crazy ideas, in fact. Buy Bloomberg  and use ownership of financial data to swarm the enterprise, starting with banks and financial institutions. Go private, and use some of their cash for an “endowment” to keep the company alive forever (yes, literally).

Buy Tiffany’s and create a new line of premium-priced computing-based “jewelry.”

Integrate iCloud, fingerprint technology, and an open API. Touch any connected screen and it instantly re-calibrates itself to our preferred, personalized settings, ST:TNG-like. In this way, Apple becomes the company that manages every screen in our life, everywhere, all the time.

I know, I know. None of these make sense, none will work, they will never happen. But maybe Apple needs a jolt of crazy.

What are your crazy ideas for the company?

If Only Steve Jobs Were Alive To Witness The Final Destruction Of Microsoft

Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO, is officially out — sometime in the next 12 months. Another victim of Steve Jobs and the iPhone.

Blame that crazy, rebellious vision of Jobs which somehow changed the world, rendering Microsoft and the once impervious Windows as nothing more than fat, dumb, slow-moving dinosaurs.

msft vs aapl

Note the radical shift in value for Apple ($AAPL) from the very day the iPhone was first released (29 June 2007). Note Microsoft, standing still. Microsoft stayed big as the new world favored the small, the fast — the mobile.

Ballmer, for all the good he did for Microsoft — and anyone who says differently is either too young to be taken seriously, or too foolish to be tolerated — made the singular critical strategic mistake that has befallen so many of his ilk: a belief that the past is prologue.

Whereas Steve Jobs sought to destroy everything in his past, to remake the world, Ballmer sought to bring more and more of the past into the future. Ballmer’s way was right, for nearly a generation. Then it was completely wrong.

From the early days, when Microsoft became the Bill Gates – Steve Ballmer show, the men and the company were stunningly rewarded for pivoting from a software application company to a computer gateway troll. With Ballmer as the giddy lead tackle, Microsoft singularly changed computing: a computer was placed on every desktop and every computer required Windows to function.

There was no alternative. None. Every competing company was killed off. Excepting, Apple, which lay on the ground, bloodied, beaten and nearly dead.

As Steve Jobs remade himself, so too he soon remade Apple. Jobs understood immediately: to survive against Microsoft, there was only one way: to alter the very definition of “computer”.

As Ballmer clung to the strategy that had so richly rewarded Microsoft, building gateway upon gateway, attempting to create a “standard” for PCs, for gaming, for businesses large and small, for the Internet itself, Apple — under Jobs — took an alternate path: highly personal, highly mobile computers, with no keyboard, no mouse, and a relatively non-existent operating system.

A generation from now, perhaps Tim Cook will be forced to leave Apple, having missed some massive tectonic shift, just as Ballmer did.

Handicapping the Next Microsoft CEO

Steve Ballmer made many people very rich, few more so than himself. His future is secure. Microsoft’s much less so. A decision looms large for the company’s board: who will be the next CEO?

I caused quite a stir back in 2011 when I predicted the death of both Windows and Office by 2016. Time will prove me right. Nevertheless, right or wrong in my prediction, I believe that the next CEO of Microsoft must radically re-make the company. This will not be an easy task. As we learned once more with Ballmer, it is extremely hard for any CEO at any company to not focus on those areas that are raining down cash.

The new CEO must, however. Windows and Office have a limited future, no matter the profits they are bringing in today.

I believe the next CEO of Microsoft will be Stephen Elop, the current CEO of Nokia. Nokia is mobile and global, exactly what Microsoft needs.

What about you? Vote — and leave your comments below.


I Love The App Store. I Hate The App Store. I Love The App Store. I Hate The App Store.

Apple’s App Store is a bloated, visually appealing, industry-shifting revolution. Forget tales of Google Glass, the Internet of Things or talk of HTML5. The App Store — the home of the humble app — has only just begun to completely re-make computing, user interface and hardware design.

The App Store has permanently altered the fortunes of iPhone, which has permanently altered the fortunes of Apple, which has  upended the personal computing industry yet again. The App Store binds Apple products with one another and with every user.

I both love and hate it.

The App Revolution

I love the App Store, first and foremost, because I am so in awe of it. For those of us who lived through the dark times, when Microsoft ruled over all, it wasn’t even imaginable that it could ever be easier to have more and better and cheaper software available for Apple products than Microsoft products, no matter how far into the future we dared look.

Thanks to the unerring vision of Steve Jobs, we now barely give this once-unfathomable reality a second thought.

We have nearly a million apps to choose from: well-designed, tightly-focused, highly intuitive software programs constructed for all manner of activities, and offered at amazingly affordable prices. From my iPhone or iPad, with a few swipes of my finger, I find, review, buy, download. Takes maybe ten seconds.

Again, this is all once-unfathomable.

Apps that make my work more productive, my free moments more fun, my decisions better informed. Apps that connect me with my friends, my colleagues, and my self. I know with absolute confidence that every single app I purchase will work just fine on my iDevice. It just works.

But, damn, I can also hate the App Store.

Attention App Store Shoppers

More than half a decade in and Apple insists upon offering search options that wouldn’t pass muster on the world wide web in the 1990s. Given Apple’s loathing of Google, I fear a remotely workable solution may be years off. The “genius” service is a joke. Unless, of course, Apple actually believes that because I have purchased the Weather Channel app that I want half a dozen other weather apps on my phone.

There is no trial period, no money back option. Reviews are a jumbled mess, and I never know if an angry review is over the very latest release of an app, or from year’s past. If there are methods to filter an app quest – from the phone – I have yet to discover any. Nor are there any usable methods of ‘bookmarking’ an app for later reference, as Apple apparently believes that every app purchase is an impulse buy; now or never.

Plus, my God, forget the flat vs skeuomorphism debate. Who do we need to get fired so Apple will stop with the whole 99 cents nonsense?

And speaking of firing people, how is it even possible that there is still almost no social integration with the App Store? Whose app reviews should I most trust? Which of my friends have recently purchased what apps? I’m at a baseball game, which apps are most popular with this crowd? Which of the “hot” apps are just right for me? I will never know. Fact is, they are “hot” at this particular moment in time because Apple’s user base is downloading them right now, for inexplicable reasons. By this logic, my favorite cereal is the unbranded Cheerios sold at WalMart.

I am hopeful, however. As I wrote a few months ago, the upcoming iPhone (5+) AirDrop feature could enable one-to-one and one-to-group sharing of apps and other content. This would be a great way to trial an app, and a clever workaround to Apple’s failed search and recommendation functions.

Billions And Billions Served

The smartphone is how we connect to the world. The app is how we connect to the smartphone. Apple’s App Store leads the way, and has from the beginning. Yet for all the App Store has done, for all it has wrought, Apple can do better. Much, much better.

Apps are software and services, deconstructed. The App Store, however, is the reverse. This strikes me as a disaster waiting to happen.

For more than a generation, Windows dominated the personal computing landscape. It was an intensely popular, global standard — and a  hideous, ungainly mess. Until it became largely irrelevant. Windows worked for everyone yet was optimized for no one. Apple is now in a similar position with its App Store (and iTunes). The company has hundreds of millions of users, soon a billion, spread across iPhone 4, 4S, 5 and next, iPhone 5S, 5C and beyond. Plus, multiple iterations of iPad. Is it even possible to please — to delight — so large a user base? I’m not so sure.

Yes, Apple controls both hardware and software, unlike Microsoft. But, doing right by a billion people may simply be a hopeless endeavor, even for Apple. See also: Facebook.

The App Store helped Apple achieve what I once thought impossible. All I’m asking for now is that Apple do so again.

With Help From Silicon Valley, America To Dominate The 21st Century

America will dominate the 21st century – economically and culturally – thanks to our dominance in technology.

Mobile technologies, supplemented by social connectivity, integrated with real-time data, enhanced by location-aware services and all supported by infinitely scalable yet highly personalized digital platforms will determine our future. These meta-offerings, delivering growth-spurring anytime, anywhere connectivity to all people and things, are each led by uniquely American businesses.

Apple makes the very best mobile computing devices in the world. Facebook and Twitter connect us all. Google delivers timely, personalized, location-specific data to anyone, for free. The best business software, for companies of all sizes, is developed by Microsoft. There are many other examples, of course, and in virtually every case, an American company and American innovation has the lead. Second-place isn’t even close.

Nearly as important, funding for critical and continuous innovation, everything from Big Banks and crowdfunding, to venture capital, philanthropy and small business loans, are American strengths. America’s universities – public and private – are the best in the world. These centers are the catalysts of innovation.

No nation offers immigrants more opportunity for success. No nation is more secure. Our well runs deep.

Nearly Unlimited Potential

We do not rule all areas of technology, of course. America is just one of several leaders in biotech. That said, American-led businesses and research labs are aggressively targeting rather extraordinary opportunities to extend life, explore the mind, and re-construct severely damaged bodies. Expect America to be the premier leader in biotech very soon.

In the area of green technology, America is lacking. This despite the billions thrown at this potentially vital industry. On the plus side, however, given our massive reserves of oil, coal and natural gas, America’s own energy future is secure. There are extremely few developed economies that can say the same.

America’s strengths are so many and so vast, in fact, that it will be hard to not dominate the 21st century.

Unfortunately, there are two obvious, pressing issues that limit our nation’s future and impede individual joy and prosperity. They are our schools and our safety net, both of which are constructed for an America that no longer exists.

Failing Grades

Our public schools, those K12, government-run institutions nearly all of us attended, are in embarrassingly bad shape. In larger cities, especially, they are a near-invisible tragedy. I offer no magic bullet, merely an admonition: the current model of government-funded, union-led, community-based schools is clearly failing our children.

Given this, we should welcome as much change, innovation and disruption in K12 education as we do in Silicon Valley. Yes, this will likely significantly minimize the power of government-employed unions. If this matters to you, my only suggestion is that you think of the nation and the nation’s children first.

Opportunity Not Inequality

The other national failing is the very real potential of continuous technological change to leave many of our citizens in a semi-permanent economic prison. Understand: I am not speaking of inequality, but misery. Fighting to stop inequality is too often an angry, jealous battle to bring down those at the top. Forget that Larry Ellison owns an island or that Google’s founders have their own private jets to travel in – or that your neighbors are better off than you. Inequality is not the issue. Not providing adequate education, medical care and opportunities to positively contribute to society and achieve prosperity are the real failings we must address.

In retail, for example, America’s Amazon.com and WalMart are global leaders. Their innovations create numerous savings which puts money in our pockets everyday. They also place many out of work and force many more into jobs at barely livable wages. It is a national responsibility to correct this.

Again, I cannot divine any singular path toward resolving this. Therefore, I urge those who fear the power of the government to instead open themselves up to possible innovative solutions which are led partly or even exclusively by government. Yes, funded by taxpayers. This may be the only way to ensure health, education and opportunity for all.

Admittedly, government solutions too often transform into vampires, never dying, feeding off others, caring only about themselves. This is a risk I nonetheless think we should take.

The Silicon Valley – Washington, DC Nexus of Power

America will lead the 21st century, just as we did the 20th. We have the best and the most of the stuff required to retain our current lofty status, and build upon it. Our people and smarts and money and technology – led by Silicon Valley – will usher the world into a new age of abundance, connectivity, innovation and sharing.

Our attention must now focus on ensuring the benefits of each of these flow justly to all our citizens.

It is not surprising that a new nexus of power, linking Silicon Valley and Washington, DC is quickly forming. One has the money, the other has the power.

This new nexus will become as important, as integrated, as accepted and as fruitful as the ties that bound New York and Washington, DC in the prior century. Let us welcome this transformative shift in power and money and values.

Let us also keep vigilant. It’s okay to have more. It’s not okay to leave our fellow Americans behind.

Image courtesy of Flickr.

Steve Jobs And The Radical Innovation Of Fair Prices For Great Products

I’ll trade you one Twitter re-tweet and a Facebook Like for two LinkedIn endorsements. Deal? How about if I throw in a recommendation on Yelp?

In a world where it seems as if everything has a value, adjusted in real-time, tailored for each specific person based upon their unique wants, needs, interest and location, auto-managed by Big Data, leveraging platforms eagerly funded by Silicon Valley, and all of it executed by a ever-expanding range of bartering algorithms which forever traverse the world wide web, why is it so damn hard to put a actual price on anything?

Excepting Apple products.

I love love love the fact that Apple cares enough about its products – and me – to put a specified price on each of its products, clearly marked, unchanged by locale or season or aggressively savvy salespersons.

Want a Mac? An iPad? Want to download that song on iTunes? Want to purchase that book on iBooks? Want that newest app? The price is obvious. No games, no gaming.

Why is it that so few tech companies, even (supposedly) great ones, are unable to match this simple act?

Microsoft Office has been around for about 20 years. I would honestly not be surprised if every single reader paid a different price than I did. Worse, if you want an online version, or want to be able to access Office on your iPad or Android, for example, you may need to hire an accountant to decode the pricing scheme.

This is not done for our benefit.

I am here, money in hand, ready to buy your product. Just tell me: what does it cost? It cannot possibly be so hard to answer so simple a question, can it?

I’m not simply picking on Microsoft. Amazon is constantly gaming me. Offering an endless series of deals, specials, “gold boxes”,  cheaper prices if I subscribe to Prime,  free stuff if I get a Kindle, virtual coins if I download their Android store.

Still worse, they further compound their anti-customer complexity by offering different prices for the exact same product to different customers. Apparently, Amazon’s big data cloud can alert the company in real-time to exactly how much I am (really) willing to pay. Clever tech, I suppose, but it makes me feel used and cheated.

Apple seemingly stands alone in standing behind its products. The price is listed, take it or leave it.

Google, meanwhile, dares not charge any of us for their service. This speaks volumes. Of course, while they may be unable to divine a price for their very own search and map offerings, they’ve clearly determined how much I am worth to anonymous advertisers.

It really is this radically simple: Build a great product, one that is desired, and market demand will ensure you always achieve the optimum price. Construct a sub-par offering and you must always play a sort of Big Business version of three-card monty.

For example, can you actually tell me how much you paid last month for cable? You’ve had cable television for years. They send you a bill every single month. Yet you aren’t sure of the price being charged? Really? How much does your HBO cost? ESPN? Cable without ESPN? These really should not be unanswerable questions.

Why did every single person on the very same flight pay a different price than you? Does that make you feel like you cheated someone – or were cheated on? Can all these various businesses really only succeed by using vastly superior computing resources to effectively steal from us?

Not Apple. Not Steve Jobs.

Yes, Jobs was a “product guy,” a visionary, a demanding SOB –  one of the crazy ones. He was also a damn smart businessman. Jobs understood that gimmicks and obfuscation are the hallmarks of those unable to offer a truly great product.

Do not be fooled. The oft-promoted notion that our personal algorithms will latch themselves to various network bots and travel the “google” and buy what we need at the best price available, is a con.

You really think your “price bot” will ever out-compete Amazon’s or Google’s?

It’s time we use our sizable purchasing power – all of us – and disrupt Silicon Valley and the Big Data hegemony, which insists upon ever-changing prices, at inexplicable times, for unknowable reasons, based on their constant and hidden buying and selling of who we are, what we care about, and what we need. This is a game we can never win – because it’s been designed to work against us.

Of course, this battle cry should not be considered a call to revolution. Rather, a simple demand for the obvious: Show me your product. Tell me the price. I can then make the decision if it’s worth it. That’s all I’m asking for. And that’s exactly what Apple delivers. It’s just another way they make my life easier, better.

Steve Jobs was on our side. Too many others are not.

Image courtesy of Apple 

Marissa Mayer Neuters The Cowboy Coder

“All the speed he took, all the turns he’d taken and the corners he’d cut in Night City, and still he’d see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void…” 
Neuromancer (William Gibson)

I suspect we are on the cusp of a transformation in how engineers and computer programmers are hired, valued, rewarded, promoted. The line was drawn when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer effectively killed off telecommuting. With this, she also dispatched the last of the cowboy coders from the Valley.

The cowboy coder has long been the stuff of pop culture mythos: vain, skilled, belligerent, cool. The dark character-artifice presented in film, books and television. Machines rule our lives, everyone’s lives, excepting, we were told, these Silicon Valley cyber-riders who expertly manipulate the algorithmic levers of the world’s digitized power centers.

Supremely valuable to the company he deigned to work for, far superior than the prototypical office “drones” who showed up dutifully for work every morning, the cowboy coder lived by his own rules, his own creed, his exceptional talents.

Thanks to Mayer, he is no more.

Cowboy Coders Dethroned

Without making headlines, coding prowess – long the princely, priestly lifeblood of Silicon Valley – was dethroned.

Here’s Mayer in February:

To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. (emphasis mine)

Translation: Meatspace trumps cyberspace.

Here’s Mayer in April:

People are more productive when they’re alone, but they’re more collaborative and innovative when they’re together. Some of the best ideas come from pulling two different ideas together.” (emphasis mine)

Translation: Conversation trumps coding.

Connections Equal Profits

Power and value now flow not from coding but from creating and enabling connections. Connections equal profits. To create deeper, lasting, more profitable connections with customers requires deeper, more meaningful connections amongst the workers.

Cowboys are loners – and they do not play well with others.

Make no mistake, this phenomenon is not restricted to Yahoo, nor to female CEOs. Recall that the big Facebook-Waze merger was scuttled because Facebook wanted Waze’s people – it’s coding talent – to relocate to Facebook headquarters. Translation: The Valley’s most valued social media company understands that far-flung coding greatness cannot equal the value that arises via physical proximity.

Earlier this month, Steve Ballmer made it similarly clear in his Microsoft re-org that collaboration trumps all:

Collaborative doesn’t just mean “easy to get along with.” Collaboration means the ability to coordinate effectively, within and among teams, to get results, build better products faster, and drive customer and shareholder value.

669px-The.Matrix.glmatrix.2

In-person, cross-company interactions that arise from an army of lesser skilled but far more sociable programmers trumps world-class coding.

Which begs the question: how should coders be valued? Who is “best”? Who achieves “most”? What skills are critical? Who gets promoted? It’s still too early to know. I suggest, however, that we look to the iPhone for guidance.

iPhone Changes Everything

The iPhone changed mobile and mobile changes everything.

Consider that last quarter Apple sold 50 million personal computers. Only 4 million were Macs. The remaining 46 million were iPhones and iPads – mobile computers.

Mobile now rules the computing landscape, and unlike their desktop predecessors, mobile “PC” applications are not optimized for intensive processing, use or focus. Rather, they are constructed, rail by rail, across very distinct tracks – all of which are required for success:

  1. Mobile
  2. Location-aware
  3. Social-collaborative
  4. Touch-based
  5. Cloud-connected
  6. Rapid (“bursty”) use
  7. Native code
  8. Highly visual presentation
  9. Entertaining
  10. Personalized

In this new age of computing, an application can only succeed by effectively traversing multiple domains, multiple stakeholders, disparate content sources, and numerous touchpoints. Think: Yahoo’s mobile applications team working with Apple, licensing content from Weather.com, integrating Yahoo’s user database information with Facebook and Twitter APIs, and coordinating this with Flickr, all just to create the new, free Yahoo weather app for iPhone.

Those who expertly develop, sustain and integrate relationships across the pillars will be well rewarded. Horizontal trumps vertical.

The cowboy coder, working alone, magically conjuring his binary alchemy, a master of a single application or system, is now more of a cost center, inhibiting the development of the far more valuable horizontal connections that determine success.

Coding Is Relationships

It’s time to consign the detritus of the cowboy coder to the dustbin of history. Moving forward, personal (mobile) computing must deliver social, visual, delightful, real-time, collaborative experiences.

For good or bad, coding has gone uptown. Everything is digitized and everyone has a computer. The new “best” coders now arrive for work each morning from inside comfy, anointed busses. From their gleaming office they eat the finest foods, they wear a badge and their cube has a number, well-earned. The products and services they build are for everyone to use.

Laudable – but boring.

The cowboy coder is dead. It’s time for a new programming hero to step forward.

Images courtesy of Wikimedia

We Took Grandpa’s Keys Away. Now We Have To Take His iPhone.

Is there any more magical device than the iPhone? With this amazingly light, utterly beautiful device, we can call and text, email, video chat, play games, watch television, read the great books of history.

We tweet and Facebook. We buy and sell stocks. We set our home alarm, monitor our blood pressure, pay our bills – all with a few swipes of our fingers.

Perhaps this is simply too much power to possess by someone on the verge of senility.

Some of us have already had the discussion over taking away a parent’s car keys. Soon, we may all need to decide if we should take away their iPhones, iPads, Kindles and Androids.

The very technology that connects them with the world, with their grandchildren, that entertains and enlightens them, may – regrettably – become more than they can properly control.

Forget Nigerian email scams, what of FaceTime video scams? Will your aging mom or dad accept calls from anyone? Might they give away – to that friendly man on the screen – their banking information? Their Social Security number?

Will your father or grandmother, say, in their current mental state, tweet pictures of themselves – to Facebook or Twitter – that are entirely inappropriate?

Who will they text? Will your daughter in high school be troubled by the increasingly irrational emails her grandmother is sending her?

Will grandpa leave the device open, allowing hackers complete, unfettered access?

That Zynga game that your dad spends so much time with – will he spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on in-app upgrades?

Your mother has repeatedly posted embarrassing information about her adult children on Facebook. How do we make her stop?

How will we take away our dad’s iPhone, or our mother’s iPad?

How do we initiate this conversation?

How do we cut off our loved ones from connectivity and all the joy it offers? These are difficult questions but we may have to face them.

Tech companies are designing smartphones and tablets to make it increasingly easier to connect with search, the web, friends and family. Should we demand tech companies also build devices that are harder to use – at least for some?

Is it right – or necessary – to require Apple, for example, to build in a set of “anti-accessible” controls such that we can limit the functionality, use and time our parents and grandparents spend on their devices? Will Silicon Valley create a start-up that uses biometrics, for examples, or other identity tools to ensure a device is “locked down” when we are not around, or that only the “good” gets through, and no bad can get out?

It seems that tech companies, from Samsung and Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, ought to bear some responsibility to ensure that the powerless elderly aren’t handed a truly powerful device without any consideration as to the potential harm it may cause.

With smartphone or tablet in hand, everyone and everything becomes instantly accessible, all over the world. The frightening corollary: Everyone and everything now has instant access to your parent’s (virtual) front door. At some point, you may be forced to take away the keys – for their own good.

You should not have to undertake this rather depressing familial obligation all on your own.

Image courtesy of ThinkProgress

Silicon Valley Is For Winners Only

Though I live in the richest area of the country – and during the richest epoch in humanity – whenever I spot a Powerball billboard and the number is over $100 million, I nonetheless fantasize about winning the jackpot.

This sets my mind to wondering. Even in my daydreams, I’ll assume there may be other winners. I know that taxes will take a mighty toll. I suspect that taking a lump sum will also bring the total amount I receive to something more Earth-bound. Say, $50 million.

From there, I quickly start divvying up the pot.

$10 million to parents, siblings, and in-laws.

$20 million to my children – in a trust, obviously: say, $200,000 every year forever.

$10 million goes to charity. I am a good and magnanimous winner, after all.

That leaves $10 million for my wife and I. Which breaks down like this:

  • $4 million for 2 houses – one of which will be a lovely $3 million Victorian in San Francisco
  • The remaining $6 million is doled out in monthly increments of $10,000 – each – till we die.

Pretty damn good.

Silicon Valley is like that. This is the land of the Powerball – and we are all winners here.

Yes, as with the taxman, we must pay the tolls. Our commutes are the stuff of dark comedy. Home prices are so high as to be literally inexplicable to our parents. There is a rather shocking and joyfully overt intolerance for diversity of thought: we gloriously present to the world our progressive, hard-driving, world-changing values like as if it’s that baby cub in The Lion King, yet anyone even dare suggest that, just perhaps, Marissa Mayer should not  be on so many boards, or maybe, just maybe, Obamacare should be shuttered, and they are quickly cut off from the innermost of the in crowd.

A rather small price to pay, really.

After all, here we live better than, say, 99.3% of the entire planet. Ever. We are the ultimate winners of a culture that has done more to transform the world than any other over the past millennia. Ok, over the last 100 years. But, hell, it’s not even close: Silicon Valley >> California >> USA >> The West.

The rest of the world lags far, far behind.

This place did not happen by mistake. So why are so many in Silicon Valley not positively reveling in their success? We created – and sustain – something that the rest of the world has failed to achieve, repeatedly.

Our choices won. We have been proven right, over and over. Celebrate!

Have you  given one second’s thought lately as to how unbelievably thin the new iPod Touch is – that thing you recently bought for your youngest daughter? It’s actually better than that “illustrated primer” tablet contraption in the popular sci-fi novel, The Diamond Age. Oh, and there’s not only two of these in all the world, as there was in that fictional tale. No, at least hundreds of millions. Because they only cost $200.

Read nearly any book, watch nearly any show, listen to any song, visit any site, connect with the world, video chat, all on this amazing, affordable device that nearly anyone on the planet can have. Oh, and it’s super-small and light as a feather.

It is right that we have more, eat better, live longer, can travel farther. The reason we spend so much time focusing on ourselves, on our work, our region, is because we continue to do it right. Why be afraid to admit this?

Is the marked hesitance to utterly bask in our blessings some perverted penance? Some odd notion of guilt yet to be disrupted by our collective big brains?

We stand at the top of the mountain. Think big and enjoy the view!

Let the world see that we have done it right, done it better, and that they are doing it wrong. Yes, we work much longer hours. We abhor unions. We demand super-intelligence. We glorify technology. We bask in disruption as much as creation. We swim in real-time. Because it’s right. Don’t like it, you’re wrong. The results are proof positive.

For our views, our choices, we have risen to the top. Party like it’s 1999. The rest of the world will eventually come to their senses.

But, should you think your success is undeserved, that the sacrifices of your parents, the brains you were born with, the luck of the time and place of your birth, the serendipitous confluence of money, talent and microprocessors are all more responsible for your good fortune, such that the largesse you have is little different than winning the lottery, then you are probably in the wrong place.

You can’t disrupt if you believe yourself unworthy. A master of the universe may suffer the slings and arrows of self-doubt, but never doubt their superiority.

This is your home now – the home of Apple and Google,  Genentech and Twitter, Facebook and Paypal; the land of crowd funding, kick starting, globe-spanning, market destroying transformation. These are no accidents.

Embrace it. If you cannot, you should probably just leave. It will reduce the commutes for the rest of us.

I Owe Bill Gates An Apology

I have changed my view of no person, whether living or dead, more so than I have changed my view of Bill Gates. Where once I hoped he failed, hoped his company would fail, believed him responsible for stifling competition, innovation, cheered when my very own government was working against him, now I accept him for what he really is: the man who has most transformed the world during my lifetime.

I owe Gates an apology.

No one, not Steve Jobs, not Mark Zuckerberg, not Hewlett nor Packard, has had a more profound global impact on people and business, on the spread of technology or the continued pre-eminence of America’s globe-spanning computing innovation, than has Bill Gates. Despite innumerable obstacles, Gates succeeded with his once-mad vision of placing a PC on every desktop.

Now, he has a new mission, one far more audacious, far more transformative. It is plainly stated through his well-funded
foundation:

“We believe every person deserves the chance to live a healthy, productive life.”

POLIO_OralVaccineNigeria_1000x380_revised

Sadly, we are far from realizing this vision. Yet, with Gates bringing his skills to bear on this rather base human failing, I honestly believe we will move radically closer to turning the hope that every person deserves a healthy, productive life, into actual reality.

Think how computing changed and improved and spread from 1980 – 2000, only now, those changes applied to people and medicine and learning and access and work.

If, as Steve Jobs said, Bill Gates “just shamelessly ripped off other people’s ideas,” then perhaps in trying to solve the world’s biggest problems, this is a good thing. Gate’s tactics may have found their logical pursuit.

Gates – still the world’s richest man – no doubt understands how profoundly billions of lives can be changed for the better by radically improving the code that now now dominates our world. In public classrooms, where our nation’s children are not realizing their fullest potential, and in villages thousands of miles away, where their children are dying, the tools to alter this reality are either at hand or very soon will be. We have an amazing opportunity to remake the world.

Think Gates can’t change the world a second time? Maybe. Although, if it was 1975 again – nearly 40 years in our past, before most of the people on this planet were even born – and by some odd coincidence you actually saw this machine, a Altair 8800, could you have divined how it foretold the future? Gates could.

664px-Altair_8800_Computer

Embrace, extend, extinguish – the modus operandi of Microsoft under Gates, and now eagerly adopted by today’s Google – laid everything to waste, it seemed. Netscape, Lotus, Apple (nearly), Wordstar – and all the many companies and products and people we no longer can even recall.

Yet it’s this same mental prowess, this same hyper-competitive drive, likely tempered by age, that could allow Gates to show us how to extend computing power, applied data, and a ruthless fealty to results, to extinguish some of the planet’s most chronic, life-limiting maladies.

If the world can be radically improved, it will take a fundamental re-working of the existing algorithms of modern life – all the nasty realities we presently tolerate or ignore, or simply fail to see. Gates was as good at crafting an algorithm, as good at writing code, as he was a unrelenting business tycoon. The world needs him.

This time, I am on Gates’ side, without apology.

The iOS 7 Game Changers

iOS 7 is a big deal, really big – the biggest change to iOS since the original iPhone. Indeed, it’s hard to prepare long-time users for how significantly different iOS 7 is compared to its predecessors.

Though still in beta, there are three new features that I think will be “game changers” – each will have a significant and lasting impact on users, developers, competitors and Apple’s bottom-line.

iTunes Radio

shared_controlcenter_lastframe_2xRadio is built right in to the Music app which is built right in to the OS. This is a key benefit of controlling your ecosystem, and here it pays off handsomely for users. “Radio” is simple to use, works well, is free, setting up new channels is a snap, and the selection is nearly endless. Not coincidentally for Apple, Radio’s clever design beckons users to spend even more money in iTunes.

Analysts have noted that while iTunes revenues continue to grow in the aggregate, per-user spend has dropped rather significantly. This at a time when Apple makes its hardware products almost fully dependent on iTunes. I can’t say this new service will help stem that tide. I do know, however, that iTunes Radio will be a smash hit.

For those hundreds of millions who have not yet settled on a streaming music service, iTunes Radio is the obvious choice. For those that have, the ease of use and superior integration of Radio may lead them away from their current provider. If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, for example, it will be hard to justify getting your (free) music anywhere else.

Biggest Impact: The music industry. Think of iTunes Radio less as a Pandora killer and more as a FM-radio killer.

Auto-updates

Never again visit the App Store to update your apps. It seems like such a small thing, I know, but auto-updates makes life with an iPhone much nicer, and more delightful. Updates and bug fixes occur behind the scenes now, and there’s no annoying red badge demanding your attention.

While better for the users, and likely to make fragmentation even less of an issue for Apple, there is a obvious downside: auto-updates alter how developers market their commitment to their app.

Though there are some minor visual cues in iOS 7 that alert users when an app has been updated, I suspect most users will no longer be consciously aware of the many new features and fixes in their (updated) app. If I am correct, allowing users to bypass the App Store “update” screen means app developers will lose a critical opportunity to highlight their work and deny them a rare chance to get directly in front of the user.

Biggest Impact: App developers.

But, wait. There’s more. Consider the possible implications of this seemingly minor new feature:

Apple, long just a hardware company, may soon become the only company on the planet, across any industry, able to reliably push to a billion (iOS) users the exact content of their choice. That’s unprecedented market power.

Biggest Impact: Cable television industry and content providers, to start.

AirDrop

index_airdrop_posterframe_2xAccessed from the control center, AirDrop allows users to quickly send files to other (nearby) iPhone user(s). It’s hard to overstate the potential of AirDrop. Truthfully, I’m not entirely sure how this feature will be used out in the world, or if carriers may attempt to impede it’s usefulness, or what the full security ramifications are. I just know it’s huge.

In fact, I predict AirDrop will have a paradigm-shifting impact on content sharing – which means it should have a paradigm-shifting impact on social sharing sites, particularly Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn. Again: unprecedented market power.

It might be great fun to share a Vine with your followers, for example, but it may be far more impactful to instantly share a video with a small group of friends who are physically nearby.

To “airdrop” a video from my iPhone to yours, for example, or enable real-time multi-player gaming, which this does, or transfer information one-to-many (iPhone-to-iPhone-to-iPhone) could make AirDrop the single most important iOS 7 feature of all. As Apple notes, “anything from any app with a Share button” can be shared over AirDrop.

Biggest Impact: Social Media platforms. (Hint: Plus, the advertising industry.)

Bonus: Take heed, Silicon Valley, of that Apple phrase: “a Share button.” To not have your service listed as a Share button inside iPhone may permanently marginalize your platform.

The World Is Not Enough

iOS 7 contains many new features, new gestures and a rather jarring new visual language – with fully re-designed colors, iconography, and fonts. There is the very clever (and long overdue) Control Center panel and more robust notification options. Peer deeper, however, and you discover far more has changed than the visual presentation layer.

Focus instead on how all the files, photos, videos, URLs, contacts, music and everything else remain inside the tightly controlled Apple ecosystem. Map out the linkages between your iOS device, your content, and all the world wide web has to offer, and you see this clearly: more data than ever before flows through and within your iPhone.

Whether iPhone-to-iPhone(s), iPhone-to-iCloud, iPhone-to-iTunes, or iPhone to sanctioned services, such as Facebook and Vimeo, Apple manages the channel – and its a channel miles deep and miles wide, and nearing a billion users.

As the Apple user base expands outward with each new sale, Apple’s designers have pulled each user even deeper insider the Apple ecosystem.

Apple, Diversity, and Why It Succeeds

Quite possibly, the single most important action undertaken by Tim Cook as CEO of Apple was when he fired Scott Forstall – so often referred to as “the next Steve Jobs.” There were likely many reasons for Cook’s move, but the overarching one is well-documented: Cook demands collaboration and Forstall was not known to share the glory nor the information. Cook would have none of it. He wants the company free of politics, fully focused on its mission, everyone working together.

Apple shows us again and again that to do the very best work, to make the very best products, to create something out of  nothing that magically appeals to everyone requires great people with a singular cause, a focused leadership, and unwavering faith in what they are doing.

Does this make Apple anti-diversity?

Absolutely not.

Tim Cook has said that the only pictures in his office are of Robert F. Kennedy,  a man who preached the benefits of diversity, and Dr. Martin Luther King – a man who helped change America’s views on so much, including how we value people who are different from ourselves.

Nonetheless, it seems current efforts to promote diversity within tech companies are doomed to failure. The companies that succeed in Silicon Valley are typically highly focused, comprised of people of highly similar backgrounds and educations – all focused on a singular mission.

The last great Silicon Valley success story, Facebook, came straight out of a Harvard dorm – chock full of well-to-do white males. It’s nearly impossible to be less representative of American society than that. Yet Facebook has a billion users around the world.

There are good reasons why so many of us believe there are societal benefits to diversity and inclusion, of course. Everyone of us benefits – culturally and economically – when everyone’s talents, creativity and dreams are afforded the opportunities to be fully realized.

But such larger social benefits fail to pass the results test when it comes to individual company success. Making Apple more “diverse” will not make it better. Walk into any Apple Store right now and see young and old, black and white, male and female all testing, using – coveting – the company’s many amazing devices. Apple’s success proves that mission and focus – not diversity – are what drives corporate greatness.

No, this does not mean we should not have nor promote diversity. Rather, we must acknowledge that change needs to come from outside. Efforts to promote computer programming for girls, for example, or to bring more people of color into STEM fields – these are worthy. Trying to enforce diversity policies inside a company is simply not the way to go.

Could Apple really do better if the picture below looked more representative of American society? That is a difficult case to make.

Apple Executive Leadership Team
Apple Executive Leadership Team

Apple is the world’s richest tech company. It has amassed the most cash. It makes the very best smartphone, tablet and laptop in the world. It is the global leader in personal computing. The company has over half a billion users and is growing, particularly in developing markets.

Would it be any more so if Apple’s leadership was, say, half women and/or 25% people of color? Would their products be any better? More appealing?

If you want a diverse workforce in Silicon Valley, and no doubt many of us do, then complaining about VCs not funding enough women, for example, of fretting that big tech companies aren’t hiring enough people of color will likely continue to fall on deaf ears.

Silicon Valley can absolutely adapt to change. That change, however, needs to come from the outside – and be data-driven.

We need to make more of those men and women who can propel Apple and Silicon Valley to continued greatness. That will – of necessity – demand a more diverse hiring pool to choose from. It’s simply wrong, however, to look to Apple HR, for example, or Sand Hill Road, to construct this path. That is not their mission.

The Dividing Line Between Human and Replicant Already Happened

In the film, Iron Man 3, the good guys encase themselves in tech. The bad guys put the tech inside their bodies. This is telling. Hollywood – and most of America – remains oddly uncomfortable with the notion of technology which “alters” our self – even as it alters everything we see, hear and touch.

No surprise, then, that Tony Stark, the man inside the Iron Man suit, fires off witty bombs in the vain hope it will ease his mental suffering rather than taking a pill – blue, red or otherwise – to help resolve his constant panic attacks.

This idea that the tech we place inside us is to be feared, unlike all the tech swirling outside of us, is a dated and dying relic of our fading, twentieth-century upbringing.

We are all already replicants.

Wikipedia defines “replicant” as “a bioengineered or biorobotic being created in the film Blade Runner. (Replicants) are virtually identical to an adult human, but have superior strength, agility, and variable intelligence depending on the model. Because of their physical similarity to humans, a replicant must be detected by its lack of emotional responses and empathy to questions posed in a Voight-Kampff test.”

What test could we use today to detect a replicant? Should we? Probably, it’s too late to discern. Rather than optimizing artificial intelligence tests, we may ultimately need to design tests to determine what is really real – assuming our future technology affords us one “true” sanctioned reality.

I suspect that many of us fear technology which goes inside us because we deeply fear that this changes, possibly forever, who we are, how we think, what we can do, what we believe, how we feel, even if only a little. As the world changes ever-faster, we cling to the idea that somehow we – our being, our self, our consciousness – can forever remain the same.

This is a false belief.

The truth is more frightening and far more awesome. Very soon, we will refuse to deny ourselves – all of us – the clear and present self-altering benefits and protections of advancing technology even while, as in our fiction, we cling to a idealized notion of the purity of who we are.

I believe I can prove this.

We are already live-tweeting (and vining) brain surgery. Anyone can witness a man’s brain being altered – or “repaired.” Highly technical work on human brains is about to become as commonplace as the work done on our hearts. Only this time, we will watch – making it radically more accessible.

Kaiba Gionfriddo, nearly 2 years old, is alive because doctors at the University of Michigan used a 3D printer to create a airway splint so that he can breathe. As the physical went digital, now, the digital – restricted only by our imagination – becomes physical.

Young Grady Hoffman was confined to an isolation room for two months. The child used a telepresence robot to interact with the outside world – which included his parents and siblings. How much of that child’s being was contained within the robot? 5%? 50%? How much a mere 5 years from now?

Should this young boy from South Africa be denied having a hand crafted for him by a 3D printer? Of course not. Should he not be allowed to pitch on his Little League baseball team even if the hand offers him some advantage? What if he goes pro?

These headphones monitor brainwaves then play songs to match the person’s mood. What better knowledge graph or recommendation engine could there be? On what day will Google Glass offer this capability – and make it worth our while to serve up exactly the right content in exchange for the stunningly personal data they can mine?

Children are alive, and we are entertained, by altering our bodies and having our brainwaves probed. Given that we cannot prevent our brainwaves from escaping our “being,” today’s brain monitoring headphones will probably lead to tomorrow’s grocery store Muzak – mundanely and algorithmically sending specific songs into our head – and ours alone – to entice us to spend more money in the toiletries aisle. How is this any different than commanding to a “replicant” to mop the floors?

Publicly funded scientists in the United States are actively working on fully restoring memories – such as those lost to the ravages of Alzheimer’s.

In people whose brains have suffered damage from Alzheimer’s, stroke, or injury, disrupted neuronal networks often prevent long-term memories from forming. For more than two decades, Dr. Berger has designed silicon chips to mimic the signal processing that those neurons do when they’re functioning properly—the work that allows us to recall experiences and knowledge for more than a minute. Ultimately, Berger wants to restore the ability to create long-term memories by implanting chips like these in the brain.

The path to success in this, which almost no one objects to, obviously opens up the potential for creating or altering memories. A memory, after all, is nothing but a series of electrical impulses. Tweak one or tweak them all – they have been changed. The fact is, the technology to alter and to create memories is a given. All that’s left now is to figure out how cheaply and massively scalable such technology is.

Everything about us – who we are, who we believe we are – is already altered by technology. Today’s baby-steps are next decade’s global disruption to our very notions of life, living and humanity.

Deliberate, publicly-sanctioned alterations to the human mind is the final frontier – and the future has arrived. UC Berkeley scientists are working to protect computing systems by having your brain activity serve as a identifier – your personalized access code, as it were. The few people who actually read William Gibson’s Neuromancer thirty years ago likely never really believed they would be alive to experience such a blurred physical-cyber existence.

In fact, we may have already surpassed this fiction. Researchers at the ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto are using bulk computing power to monitor an individual’s MRI scans to determine what that person is dreaming. Know what a person hears, perceives, dreams – and feels – is to know that someone or some external force can alter each of these. Won’t each of us embed technology within ourselves just to prevent this?

Soon, we will consume technology if for no other reason to retain our sense of self, not lose it.

We are a society that fears the potential ill effects – and possible amorality – of consuming drugs like ecstasy while at the same time idly accepting shockingly advancing changes to who we are as human beings. We need to face the truth: we are on the cusp of technologically altering our self to maintain our self.

The Definitive Answer Guide to Which Smartphone You Should Buy

Forget all the rumors of an Apple iWatch. Ignore the surprisingly good reviews of Google Glass. Neither of these will come close to replacing your smartphone. Not for many, many years; probably never. The question is not whether  you will buy a smartphone – you will. The question is: which smartphone should you buy?

I am here to help. Don’t worry, I promise this will be painless.

I’ve traversed two decades in the telecommunications industry and have spent ridiculous amounts of time over the years testing and sampling various smartphones across just about every single platform, price point and form factor. If it means anything to you, I even own a MeeGo. Looks great, but unfortunately it works about as well as your four-year-old netbook.

Let’s begin.

Dear Brian…

Which smartphone should I buy?

The iPhone 4S.

Perfectly designed, flawless to operate, affordable. Apple offers the best, most robust, most pleasing ecosystem of apps, games, content, payments, customer support, product integration and accessories. I cannot say exactly how many billions Microsoft, Google and others have spent over the years attempting to equal the iPhone’s operating system – iOS – but I can say that none have yet met the challenge.

Apple’s iPhone repeatedly tops the competition in customer satisfaction ratings. iPhone users are much more likely to stick with iPhone compared to Android users. That should tell you all you need to know.

Done! That was easy.

What? You have more questions? My singular advice simply not enough? Fine. What else?

Why not iPhone 5?

There is a reason why the iPhone 4S continues to sell so well around the globe: on form and function, ecosystem and compatibility, the 4S offers the best bang for the buck of any smartphone on the market, bar none.

Yes, the iPhone 5 is a great device. It has superior hardware specs to the 4S. In my opinion, however, it feels too delicate. It’s design is not perfect. iPhone 5 is too long and narrow. For many people, particularly women, they can’t control the entire screen with a single swipe of the thumb.

iPhone 5

I hate Apple!

No, you do not. Besides, Apple, just like Nokia, Google, Samsung et al is a giant, for-profit corporation unaware of your existence. This is not about them, this is about you – and the best smartphone for you. Get the iPhone 4S.

Don’t care. I refuse to buy an iPhone!

Fine. Buy an HTC One, it’s a good phone.

You’re saying the HTC One is better than the Samsung Galaxy S4?

No. I think the S4 is slightly better. But if you buy the S4 all your friends will think you did so only because of all those Samsung commercials.

Not a Droid or LG?

No.

Shouldn’t I just wait for the latest model?

I cannot recommend that which does not exist.

I read that Android has surpassed iPhone. True?

After years of slavishly copying iPhone, the Android UI inexplicably remains almost willfully confusing. This is compounded by the greed and short-sightedness of carriers and handset makers. However, Google nearly makes up for this with great search, maps, Google Now notifications and other services optimized for Android. Plus, many handset makers like Samsung put amazing hardware into their devices. If you simply cannot bring yourself to get iPhone, an Android is a suitable alternative.

What about all the “phablets” I keep hearing about? Should I get one of those?

No.

But…

Do not be swayed by that big screen – even if you can hold the device in one hand comfortably.  Smartphones are not televisions. You take your smartphone with you everywhere. You use it constantly. A phablet is almost certainly not right for you. Form is a primal factor in choosing the right smartphone and the phablet form is an evolutionary dead-end. The one thing it does well – offer a very large display – simply cannot overcome all that it does bad. Phablets are too big, too wide, too heavy and not optimized for the role they attempt to fill: a multi-purpose, always-on, fully mobile personal computer.

I’m going to buy a phablet anyway. I like the big screen.

If you insist, then I recommend you get the new Samsung Galaxy Note II. You will regret this.

You obviously hate Windows Phone.

How Nokia could have blown through two plus years of development and delivered only the Lumia 920 and the 928 (soon), is beyond my comprehension. Windows Phone deserves a far better flagship device.

But I do not hate Windows Phone – the operating system. It’s a beautiful, reasonably intuitive, highly customizable UI that delivers real-time updates probably better than any other platform. The problem, though, is that Microsoft simply made the wrong UI choice. I suspect they will never recover from it. Singular, static apps really do work better for smartphones – as iPhone has proven repeatedly – than the “live tiles” format that Windows Phone adopted.

My daughter loves Facebook. Should I get her one of those HTC Facebook Phones?

No.

But she really loves Facebook.

Get her any other (non-Windows Phone) phone listed here. I promise you, she will be fine.

I think you’re wrong about the iPhone 5.

The iPhone 5 was a very clever attempt by Apple to build a device with a larger display – as the market demanded – while maintaining all the benefits of their app ecosystem. Apple can and will do better.

I cannot afford any of these devices.

Whatever smartphone you choose, assume you will have it for between 1-3 years. The cost of the device itself will almost certainly be less than the cost for voice, data and texting services. Plus, you will buy apps, music and other content, and accessories – such as a car charger, stereo speaker and case – for your smartphone. Factor all of these costs into your decision.

If you still decide to go with a low-priced device, get last year’s top-of-the-line Samsung: the Galaxy S III. If you can get a refurbished model, this is a truly great buy. If you cannot afford this, I would encourage you to not buy a smartphone at all. Get a quality feature phone with a physical QWERTY keyboard. There are many options available.

My company doesn’t allow me to use iPhone or Android.

Delta doesn’t allow me to have my smartphone running during take-off. That’s never stopped me.

I can’t possibly type on that touchscreen. I need a real keyboard.

You will learn.

I refuse.

Then, wait. Very soon you can have a BlackBerry Q10. I think you will be impressed. (Note: do not get the BlackBerry Z10)

Blackberry_Q10

Which carrier should I go with?

That I cannot help you with. They all have their own unique set of faults.

iPhone 5 Versus Galaxy S4 A War Of Less Versus More

Last week, within the span of 24 hours, the two dominant players in the global smartphone wars released…not new smartphones, but new commercials. Both were very well done. They are also very different. Both ads reveal the core differences between Samsung and Apple, and possibly between Android and iPhone users.

First up, Samsung.

Now, the latest iPhone commercial from Apple.

Corporate Values Revealed

Apple’s latest iPhone ad is sixty seconds of creamy, delicious awesomeness. The commercial spurns crass marketing appeals. Rather, it uplifts us, revealing that life is spread over an infinite number of sparkling moments which may occur at any time, at any place, and all ready to be captured forever, thanks to Apple.

The images are so powerful, so palpably iconic – and so emotionally directed – that words only get in the way. Indeed, there are almost no words spoken or presented until the very end: “Every day, more photos are taken with the iPhone than any other camera.”

Contrast Apple’s focused, less is more approach with Samsung’s newest commercial. It starts loud and bold, the music of Vivaldi framed with brash, confident slogans.  The Samsung ad shows off the device’s camera, the screen, the speakers, bludgeoning the viewer with an audio and visual assault clearly meant to match the power and functionality of the device itself.

The Galaxy S4, the ad suggests, is all about…more. More display. More sound. More features. More of everything.

For Apple, less is more. Emotion trumps function. Not so with Samsung – and by default, Android. More is more, and function – not emotion – matter most. More is better. More is bigger, bolder, louder, crisper, more functional. More is more.

Less Versus More

Which ad is best? Standing on their own, that’s easy: Apple’s ad is great while Samsung’s is only good. Yet on the more important question – how will each new ad help its respective company win the smartphone wars – well, that’s harder to answer. After all, design, innovation, product focus, global supply chain, carrier relationships, retail footprint, content, apps and services are all extremely vital to the two combatants, no matter how good or bad the advertising.

However, on the values level – emotion versus function, less versus more – I suspect this is a war without end.

For Apple, there must always be that deep emotional connection between the user and the product. The product should uplift, possibly ennoble the user. Apple products, as their commercials reveal, strip everything away until the end result is (near) perfection. Less is more.

Score one for Apple.

But this value, while it resonates with many, will not convince everyone. The global smartphone market is big. Really big. It’s already over 1 billion strong and growing. Smartphones are now outselling feature phones. It’s wise to assume that before this decade is out at least 2 billion and potentially 5 billion people will possess a smartphone. That is a staggering number, nearly unparalleled in product history.

Do five billion people on this planet consume wheat? Corn? Meat? The scope of the smartphone market is nearly incalculable.

These devices, then, like cars, like the PC that sat on our desk for years, like food, must serve a purpose – many purposes, in fact. I already use my smartphone to write blog posts, monitor my finances, track my fitness, edit presentations and outline my next book. Soon, I will use it as my car key, house key, credit card, debit card, glucose monitor. What next? I can’t say but I know my next device must offer more.

Score one for Samsung.

The Smartphone Wars Continues

It seems unlikely that any rival or any new technology, Google Glass, for example, is going to unseat Samsung or Apple anytime soon. Expect these two companies to remain the dominant “personal computing” companies through at least this decade. They will battle it out in the marketplace and in the courts. They will fight over suppliers and content licensing. They will seek to win on pixel counts, integration, UI, features, price and innovation.

But I suspect the biggest difference between the two will remain just as it has been revealed in their latest commercials: Apple will remain focused emotional appeal, a less is more approach, and on what the product means to you. Samsung will stay focused on adding new features, increasing old specs, and promoting what their product can do for you.

These are core values, deeply held, and unlikely to change. Which side you choose likely reveals far more about you than simply which platform you prefer, iOS or Android.

Forget Mad Men Or Breaking Bad. Give Me The Recurring Tales Of Microsoft.

People are often surprised to discover that I rarely watch television. Make no mistake, though. I’m no culture snob. It’s just that tracking tech companies is so much more fascinating. None more so than Microsoft.

No, not Apple, not Oracle, not Google or Facebook, not even a Marissa Mayer-led Yahoo. Microsoft stands alone, equal parts The Office, Lord of the Rings, and and a really bad, big budget Tom Cruise flick. The stories tumble out, one after the other, always somehow both a shock and painfully obvious.

Founder Bill Gates, we all know, has gone from despised to beloved. Once the face of the evil monopolistic digital land baron, now the big data soul of 21st century philanthropy.

Next, of course, there’s Steve Ballmer, Gate’s Salieri. Ballmer has spent most of his adult life fighting Gate’s wars, living in Gate’s shadow. Small wonder that, despite his many billions earned in sweat and blood and equity, he is now loathe to relinquish his role as lord of Microsoft.

Ballmer is worth as many stories as Gates, and most of them even better. For decades, Ballmer has faithfully spent his days and nights aggressively, angrily growing Windows – convinced it was the very same thing as growing Microsoft. Too late, he discovered the truth. No. Comically, he has yet to discover this truth even though everyone else has.

There’s so much more…

How many billions has Microsoft poured away in its futile efforts to catch up to Google?

How many billions more will it spend now that it has decided catching up to Apple is also necessary?

How many worthy competitors has Microsoft destroyed over the years – obliterated, in fact – only to suddenly later find itself rebuffed by a bumbling Yahoo, or scorned by a geeky Mark Zuckerberg, who decides to stake the future of his company on something as inconsequential as an Android launcher?

I cannot be the only one that finds watching Ballmer transform from an angry grizzly to a toothless Pooh Bear far more entertaining than anything put out by Hollywood.

I cannot be the only one who lived through the Microsoft Terror, watched as Microsoft took on GM, IBM, GE, even governments, now staring dumbfounded as Microsoft runs to France, crying about Google.

The stories write themselves…

The biggest, baddest personal computing company of our age spent years talking about, developing, showing off and building all manner of mobile computing devices. After years of toil they arrived at the gates of the promised land, inexplicably turned around, then mocked Apple and Google as they passed through that magical portal.

Then were turned away when they finally got mobile religion.

Microsoft destroyed Netscape, yet somehow missed out on the Internet’s greatest riches.

Microsoft rode in on a white horse and saved Apple, only to be mesmerized by the wizardry of Steve Jobs.

On its mighty shoulders, Microsoft alone raised up PC companies to the heavens – like Dell and HP – only to sit idly by as they quickly fed upon themselves in a foolish race to the bottom.

The company spent a king’s ransom to destroy Sony only to discover – too late – that Apple was the future of music, movies and gaming.

Microsoft developed the best ever PC operating system – after PCs became damn near irrelevant.

Worse. The company may no longer possess even the ability to right itself as Ballmer has spent the last decade swiftly excising all who possessed even the hint of challenging him.

But you want to see what’s on Netflix?

The company continues to earn ungodly profits – yet their stock refuses to budge.

Their software licensing model, once considered impervious to attack, is now beaten and bloodied. Only, not by free and open but by pricey consumer hardware.

They’ve spent so much over the years on media relations that now no one in the media can stand them.

Microsoft is everywhere yet ignored. Microsoft is giant yet mocked. Microsoft is rich yet may have no future. There is no better story in tech, in fiction nor on the silver screen.

Holding Apple to a Higher Standard – Solving Texting While Driving

I love my iPhone. I use it all the time. I take it with me everywhere. Yes, everywhere. I have tried and tested numerous smartphones over the years. I can confidently state that you can do no better than the iPhone. However, iPhone – Apple – can do better by us. Too many of us are texting while driving, and dying. More than nine people everyday, in fact. This has to stop.

Yes, it’s easy to claim that people’s foolish behavior is in no way Apple’s fault. Probably, you are right. I don’t care. I hold Apple to a higher standard. I don’t pay a “premium” to purchase Apple products. There is no “Apple tax.” I pay Apple’s higher prices because their products are the best: the best value, the easiest to use, the most intuitive, the most functional.

Apple even promotes this idea. Witness their latest marketing campaign for iPhone. No pretty women in leather jumpsuits, no ninjas, no lasers – no need. Instead, the powerful truth: iPhone is an amazing device, simple to use, and offers a nearly un-ending amount of fun and function for everyone – from anywhere, as their iPhone “Discovery” ad makes plain.

iPhone ad anywhere

iPhone doesn’t merely dominate the U.S. smartphone market, they dominate pretty much every relevant metric for smartphone use and engagement. Tragically, we remain engaged with our iPhones even while driving.

According to a recent AT&T study, nearly half of adult drivers in the U.S. admit to texting while driving. Over 40% of teens admit to texting while driving. Worse, the numbers are rising.

It’s not ignorance causing this. The texters-and-drivers are fully aware of the potentially deadly and devastating consequences of their actions. Doesn’t matter.They text anyway. No doubt they also tweet, check Facebook, choose a playlist and more, all while behind the wheel.

What’s Apple going to do about this?

Yes, I want Apple to do something. Because possibly only Apple can do something to fix this. Apple gave us the smartphone revolution. The iPhone changed everything. We now use the iPhone – and all the copycat smartphones – everywhere we go, no matter the setting, no matter who we are with. This recent IDC study, for example, noted that well over half of all Americans have a smartphone and a vast majority of us reach for our smartphones the moment we wake up and then never put it away. We use them in the movie theater, at the gym, while we are talking to other people in real life. Don’t believe that getting behind the wheel of a car suddenly changes everything, whether it should or not.

No, I do not care if it’s unfair to place any blame for our behavior on Apple. The fact is, we text while driving. We aren’t going to stop. Apple needs to accept some responsibility for what they have wrought. As much as I want a beautiful Apple Television, as much as you may want an iWatch, and as cool as this patented wraparound display iPhone is, none of that should be a priority for Apple until the company makes using the iPhone while driving a car much, much safer proposition. Or impossible. Either way, the problem needs to be fixed, soon.

Possible solutions? Honestly, I don’t know. Perhaps the iPhone will recognize when we are driving and simply stop working. Maybe Apple can require apps to mess up when we are in a moving vehicle – not autocorrect our texts, for example. Maybe Apple engineers can get Siri to work great, all the time, whether for texting, tweeting, checking our calendar, selecting a playlist. I don’t have the answers. That I leave to Apple. And we need the best they can give us.

Slogans, such as from AT&T’s  “It Can Wait” campaign are unlikely to work, I suspect.

it can wait texting

It Can Wait videos admittedly offer some truly heartbreaking stories of people whose lives have been irreparably and profoundly damaged because someone was texting while driving.

Tragic, sad – but how will this help? As AT&T’s own study says, 98% of those who text while driving already know it’s bad.

It was sobering to realize that texting while driving by adults is not only high, it’s really gone up in the last three years.

That quote is from Charlene Lake, AT&T’s senior vice president for public affairs. You think more marketing is the answer? No. Showing tragic stories may shock a few into proper behavior, I don’t doubt. Realistically, however, this is that rare case where we need a technical solution for a cultural problem.

According to TechCrunch:

The Center for Disease Control says that there are an average of nine people killed in texting-related accidents each day, with 1,060 injured in texting-related crashes.

Since texting occupies your eyes, hands, and mind, it’s considered one of the most dangerous distractions on the road, and elevates the risk of a crash to 23 times worse than driving while not distracted.

Nine people killed every single day. Read that again. Nine people die every single day from texting-related accidents. Going to stop what you’re doing now that you know?

I don’t believe you.

Apple gave us the iPhone. It was like nothing ever before. But Apple’s job is not complete. The iPhone is magical and revolutionary. We mortals have not yet learned to fully control its power. We need Apple’s help.

Images taken from Apple’s iPhone “Discover” commercial and AT&T’s “It Can Wait” campaign against texting and driving.

Did Steve Jobs Actually Intend For Apple to Live Forever?

Steve leaves behind a company that only he could have built, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.
– Apple Inc statement upon news of the death of Steve Jobs

What if more than Steve Jobs’ spirit lives forever? What if Apple lives forever? Is this even possible?

I say yes.

As the blogosphere pronounces ‘Apple is Doomed’ at every turn, I can’t help but thinking that we have it wrong. Apple will have its ups and downs, no doubt. It’s just that the more I follow Apple, the more I study Steve Jobs, the more I suspect that while he could not live forever Jobs absolutely believed his creation, Apple, could. Literally.

These are my clues:

Apple University

As the LA Times noted shortly after his death, “Apple University” was a serious focus of the seriously focused Jobs. Think what you will of him personally, but Jobs believed in the rightness of his vision. Apple University was created to inculcate his innumerable qualities in those who would come to run Apple years and decades into the future.

To survive its late founder, Apple and Steve Jobs planned a training program in which company executives will be taught to think like him, in ‘a forum to impart that DNA to future generations.’ Key to this effort is Joel Podolny, former Yale Business School dean.

According to a former Apple executive, speaking anonymously: “No other company has a university charged with probing so deeply into the roots of what makes the company so successful.” Training at Apple University reportedly focuses on what enables a company to create sustained innovation.

If there is one key to serious longevity, it is that: sustained innovation.

Apple Endowment

Jobs was audacious. To enable Apple to live forever, he needed money. Lots of money. Apple has that. Forget about stock buybacks, or Wall Street howls for dividends. Ignore the idea that Jobs and Apple are hoarding cash for acquisitions – keeping their “powder dry” as it were. The nearly hundred fifty billion Apple has amassed has a higher purpose: an Apple endowment.

I believe that Jobs, had he lived longer, would have worked diligently with two groups he no doubt found tiring, Wall Street and Washington, to change the laws so that a substantial portion of Apple’s already substantial cash reserves could be used for an endowment.

Growing up in the area, Jobs no doubt knew of the founding of nearby Stanford University. Via Wikipedia:

With his wife Jane, Stanford founded Leland Stanford Junior University as a memorial for their only child, Leland Stanford, Jr., who died as a teenager of typhoid fever. The Stanfords donated approximately US$40 million (over US$1 billion in 2010 dollars) to develop the university, which held its opening exercises October 1, 1891.

One billion is nice. One hundred billion is better. Harvard’s endowment, for example, the richest of all, is approximately $30 billion. What if Jobs – and he would have made Tim Cook aware of this, I suspect – wanted to have, say, $60 billion of Apple’s money set aside as an endowment?

At $60 billion, if the investment manager of the “Apple Endowment” earned 6.5% a year returns on average, that would deliver approximately $4 billion every year, forever. Apple currently spends about $4 billion a year on R&D. Imagine: Apple research and development funded in perpetuity. Think what the company could achieve ten years from now, a hundred, a thousand. If the future Apple made only enough to pay for its operating expenses, it could still churn out amazing products for your great great great grandchildren.

Business Model Purity

Beyond the money, of course, the more I study Apple the more I admire Jobs’ vision to ensure the durability – the permanence – of Apple. There is a purity to Apple’s business model that is, ironically, so rare in Silicon Valley. Google and Facebook encourage our use of their services, for free, then sell our data to others. Who is the customer? HP, for example, lives off exorbitant printer ink costs. Believe it or not, that is not a sustainable business.

Apple, by contrast, builds great products and prices them accordingly. No tricks, no inducements. Buy them or not. You always know what you are buying, and for how much, and what you are getting for the money. A hundred years from now, for example, I suspect there will be a littany of new business models, some great, some doomed to fail, some beyond our comprehension. Apple’s, however, I am sure will still thrive long after we are all gone.

Saying No

What does HP do anymore? Who are they? What about Cisco? Are they out of the consumer market or back in? Why is there a Google+ and a Google X Phone and a Google Car? There is creation, and then there is creation that moves you forward, sustains you. Jobs was famous for keeping Apple not focused on building great products, but on great products that mattered.

Yes, some of the stuff we never see would no doubt be cool. Yes, some of the top talent — the A players — are more likely to stay at Apple if they have a skunkworks to play in, like Google’s X Labs. Ultimately, however, such activities diminish focus, which alters who you are. No point in living forever if it’s not really you.

Jobs’ words on focus from 1997 still ring true today – and probably will for decades, at least:

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.

Control

If you follow Apple and/or Steve Jobs, you doubtless know the importance of control: control of core technologies, control of your product development, control of your distribution, control of your brand. So much of Jobs’ control efforts flew directly in the face of accepted wisdom and practice in Silicon Valley: open, sharing, licensing. Jobs would have none of it. He wanted Apple fully in control of its technologies – and its future.

Retail

Apple is (now) lauded for Apple Stores. You may already know they bring in more money per square foot than any other retail chain on the planet. They also ensure that Apple can offer its products directly to customers. Apple, rare in its industry, is not dependent on others for marketing and sales. But I wonder now if there’s an ever greater, longer-lasting benefit to its stores.

Retail is changing, profoundly. Online, mobile, the sharing economy, 3D printing, same-day shipping. With its many stores, Apple are learning, in real-time, not only what their millions of customers think about their latest products, but by being on the front-lines of buying and selling, Apple is learning the future of retail: the integration of real-time, social, online, digital and physical. Not even Amazon possesses this alchemy. Apple Stores should enable Apple to meet the demands of a changing world long into the future.

Here’s To The Crazy Ones

I think of this story from Business Week shortly after Jobs’ passing:

On the day Jobs died, employees numbly walked outside to watch an American flag lowered to half-mast—and then returned to work. Partners who were in town to meet with the company were astonished to learn that appointments would take place as scheduled. “That’s what Steve would have wanted,” an Apple manager explained.

Yes, that’s the way Jobs would have wanted it. He also would want Apple to continue building amazing, magical, revolutionary products in the year 2525. It could happen. It’s crazy, I know, but it’s those crazy ideas that change the world.

The Apple Walled Garden is Grounded in Old Fashioned Product Superiority

The value attributed to ecosystem “lock in”, such as the value Apple derives through tightly integrating its devices with its proprietary AirPlay, and the iTunes and App Store platforms, for example, is overstated both by industry analysts and by Apple’s competition. Counter-intuitively, I believe this is a win for Apple, as its competitors focus their efforts on a false equation. Even if switching costs were reduced to zero, few would leave Apple’s ‘walled garden’.

iTunes, App Store and accessories are a significant business for Apple. Recently, Horace Dediu of Asymco noted that these revenues are greater even than the Mac business line. Equally surprising, Apple’s content, software and accessories business generates more revenues than any mobile phone vendor is generating in total, excepting Samsung:

iTunes revenues surpasses mobile phone competition

Users have clearly invested a great deal in Apple-backed apps, content and accessories. I am just not convinced, however, that their intent — or effect — is to appreciably increase user “switching costs”. The real switching costs are more elusive to define but of far greater value. Competitors, such as Amazon and Google, appear convinced that app freebies, lower-priced music, below-cost streaming video and near-zero margin hardware will enable them to snare current and potential Apple customers away, hopefully forever. This is a strategy that I believe is doomed to failure.

The fundamental difference between Apple and its competitors lies not at the margins but in the totality of sterling hardware, comprehensive and ongoing support, usability assurances, unequaled product integration and unmatched reliability. To effectively compete with Apple, companies must tackle all of these. Be forewarned: these are costly, take years to achieve, demand a relentless focus and are hard to sustain.

Ready to Switch

Google’s Android platform has rapidly overtaken Apple to capture the lion’s share of the smartphone market. Numerous vendors offer Android phones at a variety of price points and form factors. Android – the OS – and Android the line of smartphones, has no doubt steadily improved over the past three years. In the mind of many analysts these improvements, when combined with relentless, price-sensitive competition will deeply cut into Apple sales and/or margins. Except, this continues to be proven false. The view which perpetuates the industry is that marketing and high switching costs are preventing many from leaving Apple’s ecosystem. This is false.

Consider some of the mission-critical and more commonly used smartphone applications across all major platforms. Phone, email, text, mapping and GPS. Skype, web browser and search. Facebook. Instagram. Twitter. Angry Birds. Words with Friends. Are all these or any of these truly so much better on iPhone than on any competitive Android product?

The fact is, for most users and for most user activities, the bulk of their interactions with their smartphone and tablet has a negligible switching cost.

There are numerous other examples. Your Kindle account can easily transfer to a different device. Same with your Netflix and Hulu+ services. YouTube plays just as well on Android as iPhone, maybe better. Yet in their last quarter, Apple sold a record number of iPhones and iPads. Their rather conservative guidance for the following quarter included gross margins between 37.5% and 38.5%.

Apple’s success is not due to switching costs. Rather, Apple products, systems and service is simply superior.

I do not want to suggest there is no financial cost whatsoever to switching. Your apps and accessories, for example, may become worthless if you move from iPad, say, to the Nexus 7. Plus, there are ‘costs’ borne through the often tedious process of switching to something new. Additionally, moving your music collection from one platform to the next, for example, or across multiple machines, takes time and patience. These cost. Such costs are real. But, most analysts appear to be overestimating such costs. They operate under the assumption that if only Google or Samsung, for example, can offer viable alternatives to iTunes, then Apple can be beat. This strikes me as a strategic misstep. Instead, these companies need to undertake the long, hard, costly effort of building a truly better product; one that is reliably serviced, simple to operate and fully supported for years to come. To date, who else is doing this?

Apple Assurances

We can get nearly anything we want, from anywhere, at any time. This has led to reduced prices, more competition and often to greater innovation. It has also created massive uncertainty. Where, exactly, do I go to service my Google Android Nexus LG phone? From my carrier? Who will guarantee it is updated regularly? How well will the newest HTC Android phone work with my Samsung Google Chromebook? What of the content I purchased from the Android Market, which was fully revamped as Google Play?

The real switching cost is manifested through the massive uncertainty that other users face on a regular basis, which Apple users do not.

Anyone remember Google Television? Why are there several Android phones by Google’s Motorola division yet for the true “Google experience” I should purchase a Nexus phone made, this year, by LG? Or a Nexus 7 tablet by Asus. Or a Nexus 10 tablet by Samsung.

The Apple premium is earned not through high switching costs but by the assurances Apple delivers, day after day, and across the millions of customers it sells to and services. Moving me off Paypal and iTunes, for example, and over to Google Play and Google Checkout, is a minor hassle, nothing more. Kill off any iTunes and App Store advantage. Wait for Google, or Amazon or Samsung to have as many active credit cards on file. Assume Apple’s accessories products become universal standards – including for Windows Phone, Blackberry, Nexus tablets, even competitor notebooks. Reduce “switching” costs to nearly zero. How many will leave the Apple fold? I suspect very few.

The User is the Buyer

One of the revolutionary aspects of this new age of personal computing, where we have rapidly transitioned from PCs and laptops to smartphones and tablets is not only the rise of mobility, nor the rise of the touchscreen nor even the slow, inexorable rise of the voice UI. Rather, this new age of computing has aligned the actual product user with the actual product buyer. This is a clear advantage for Apple. As Steve Jobs noted in 2010:

What I love about the consumer market, that I always hated about the enterprise market, is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves. They go ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ and if enough of them say ‘yes,’ we get to come to work tomorrow. That’s how it works. It’s really simple. With the enterprise market, it’s not so simple. The people that use the products don’t decide for themselves, and the people that make those decisions sometimes are confused. We love just trying to make the best products in the world for people and having them tell us by how they vote with their wallets whether we’re on track or not.

I am the buyer. I am the user. I am prepared to switch. Neither my apps, my downloads, nor my music collection is holding me back. Apple’s competitors have simply failed to offer me equivalent or better value.

Apple competitors are actively copying the parts of Apple that are easiest to copy. Instead, they need to do the hard work of building a superior product, offering superior customer service, committing their company to improving its product, bit by bit, year after year. Like Apple, they need to do everything they can to assure their customers that everything will be exactly the same next year – only better. This is hard. This is why Apple is rewarded. This is why so few switch.

Apple iWatch vs Google Glasses and the Next UI Battle

iStock_000021284452XSmallRumors of the Apple iWatch continue to sprout. Google Glasses will soon be for sale. The “Internet of Things” and wearable computers are quickly transitioning from the realm of science fiction into our everyday reality. Very soon, sensors throughout our homes, on our pets and possibly inside our bodies, all monitored or even controlled by our smartphone, will be the norm. Imagine now if these were ad-subsidized devices, like Android or Kindle, offering no escape from the latest marketing pitch or sponsored social media update. Is this a tolerable future?

While many analysts doubt the ability of Apple to maintain its margins in the face of stiff competition from the likes of Google and Amazon, companies that sell hardware at cost and make it up on advertising and ‘content’, I think the opposite is true: We are on the cusp of a world where personal computing hardware will become increasingly more important and more profitable. This favors Apple. Moreover, as hardware and computing become increasingly smaller and more personal, the Google business model, which fully relies upon advertising, may simply become too intrusive to tolerate.

Tim Cook recently said Apple is not a hardware company. With iTunes and iCloud, retail, services and accessories revenue, Cook is technically correct. Nonetheless, Apple makes most of its revenues directly from hardware. Google CEO Larry Page prefers talking about “moonshots” and driving “10X” changes in our thinking. He doubtless understands, however, that his company makes nearly all its money – and has from the beginning – on advertising. Following the money helps us not only to properly value these companies, but serves as a lens into their future. I suspect we will quickly witness fundamental differences in the design philosophy and user experience from the new wearable computing products coming out of Apple and Google.

The next design battle will almost certainly not be about “skeuomorphism” versus “flat design”. Rather, monetizing hardware, the Apple way, versus monetizing data and advertising, the Google way, will set the stage for this next great battle.

Advertising

As hardware becomes ever-more integrated with our physical self, will we dare rely on lesser hardware that is subsidized by advertising? Maybe. While many may reflexively assume that advertising is always bad, this need not be the case. The promise of Google is that it will provide us with the right information at the right time in the right format for the right device. In some cases, this may be an ad. The problem, of course, is that to succeed with such a mission, every user must hand over to Google an exponentially larger set of personal data, more personal than ever before: where we are, who we are with, what we are doing, how high is our blood pressure, how sad is our mood, how many calories in that muffin we weren’t supposed to eat. When will this become too much?

Intrusion

Advertising is not merely built upon data collection. It also requires interruption – what I call the “intrusive business model”. I think the most potentially intractable problem that Google faces in its quest to create connected, personal hardware devices, one that Apple is liberated from, is the fundamentally intrusive nature of its business model. We may all “search” for information, but that does not necessarily mean we want to be bombarded with ads. Ads are already everywhere, it seems; within our (free) apps and games, on Google maps, scattered across web pages, inside YouTube videos, and more and more on the Google search page. Where does this end?

I don’t want my Google Glasses, for example, to pop up ads right in my eye, nor have a commercial play some catchy jingle into the sensor I keep in my ear. I don’t want my iWatch clone, for example, to vibrate every time it thinks I might be interested in some deal or datapoint – when in fact, it’s really because the sender – the intruder – is making money off stealing my attention. As computing becomes increasingly more personal, there is a very real chance that Google’s business model becomes increasingly more intrusive.

Apple is almost the exact opposite of intrusive. What is iPad but a beautiful pane of glass that we operate with the touch of a finger. Complexity vanishes. We are free from intrusion. This is the case for Apple software as well. Consider that both iOS and Mac OS place the focus squarely on, well, focus – and not on multitasking, alerts, notifications and other intrusive messaging forms.

Presentation

There is an obvious tension here, and it may favor Google. With Apple products, when you want data, you swipe the screen, for example, or beckon Siri. Consider Android versus iPhone differences. Notifications, reminders, alerts, home screen messages and the like are all much more readily presented and visible with Android. Apple’s model favors waiting for the user to seek and request data. For advertising, I absolutely favor the Apple way. But not all data is advertising. In many instances, we want immediate ‘glanceability’ for real-time information. Sometimes, when the data is truly what we need, we want to be intruded upon. I want my maps app to tell me that the road ahead is jammed – even if I am on the telephone. Or, as in the case of a Fitbit bracelet, for example, I may ultimately want to be reminded over and over again to do my exercise for the day. This form of data intrusion favors Google.

The question for Google, though, is can they truly intrude upon our personal space only when we really want or need the intrusion? For a company that has made all its money over the years by flashing advertisement upon advertisement across every one of our screens, I have serious doubts.

Through patent filings, we know that Apple has been working on wearable computing devices for at least several years. Such devices can continuously record our heart rate, monitor our environment, potentially know us better than our friends and doctors. As our devices learn more and more about us, know more of our likes, habits – and needs – there will be a great debate on when and why to ‘intrude’ upon the user. Google plasters extraneous information across all their products and services because their business model demands this. Crossing that ‘intrusive’ line will likely become too enticing for them, I suspect, pushing more and more users to Apple and its “expensive” hardware. Apple, however, needs to understand that sometimes, in some cases, intrusion is good.