What It Will Take for Apple to Crack TV

Steve Jobs posthumously set off a new round of speculation about that perennial object of desire, the Apple television, by telling biographer Walter Isaacson: “I’d like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use. It would be seamlessly synced with all of your devices and with iCloud. No longer would users have to fiddle with complex remotes for DVD players and cable channels. It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it.”

Old TV with Apple logoThere’s no question that TVs and their rapidly multiplying set top boxes need a vastly simplified user interface and good reason to believe that Apple might be the company to deliver it. The problem is that if the UI were really the problem, it probably would have been solved by now. The real, and much, much harder problem is cracking the business models that control how TV content is delivered.

The failure, at least so far, of Google TV illustrates the challenge. Google set out to solve the two problems that have plagued efforts to fix television. First, you must find a way to bring together the horribly fragmented offerings of TV and movie content on the web. There’s a lot of content out there, from Hulu to Netflix  to Amazon.com to iTunes to networks’ own sites. But no one site or service offers all the content a viewer might want, so a good user experience requires pulling many sources together. Second, live TV is still important for many things, especially sports, and is likely to continue to be so for a long time to come. So you need a way to integrate a live, and for practical purposes, that means a cable, feed.

Google tried to solve the first problem with the best tool it has, using search to discover web video and to try to bring it together into a common interface. Building great UIs isn’t Google’s strength, but its real problem was that content owners sabotaged the effort from the beginning. The content owners, from Hollywood studios to networks to sports leagues, live in an immensely profitable symbiosis with cable distributors. The owners and distributors have become reconciled to the idea of seeing the content on computers, tablets, and handsets, but will do everything in their power to keep it off TVs other than through their own fragmented, paid services, such as Hulu+. So they blocked Google TV’s access to these services.

The problem of integrating a live cable feed is even uglier. Google tried to solve the problem by the ugly kludge of have the Google TV box control the cable set top box, which most of the time has to be done by emulating an infrared remote control. A slightly better, but much more complex and expensive solution is to turn a third-party box into a cable STB by using CableCARDs and Tru2way software. There is every indication that the cable operators will drag their feet on allowing third parties to integrate live feeds for as long as possible.

Jobs’s cryptic remark to Isaacson gives us no clue about whether he solved these problems, but it seems unlikely. No matter how brilliant Apple is, these issues cannot be resolved unilaterally; the content owners have to be aboard. And Hollywood is, if anything, more suspicious and afraid of Apple than it is of Google.

Boosters of the Apple television idea argue that Apple went up against both the music industry and the wireless carriers and revolutionized their businesses. In the case of music, Apple went after an industry whose business model was being destroyed by massive file sharing and which, in the end, had little to lose by trying things Apple’s way.

The iPhone-carrier story is more complex. It is easy to forget that Apple initially tried to revolutionize the business by selling the original iPhone without a carrier subsidy and had to back down in the face of carrier resistance. It’s true that Apple has beaten the carriers on issues such as handset branding, but it has not changed their fundamental business model and no longer seems much interested in trying to.

The studio-sports league-cable complex promises to be a more formidable opponent than either music companies or carriers. For now, at least they have the high cards. Maybe some day Apple (or Microsoft, or Google) will look like a more attractive partner to content owners than the cable companies are. But that day seems several years away at the earliest. And until it does, TV will be a very hard nut for Apple or anyone else to crack.

 

 

 

Say it “Ain’t” So: Google Kills the Plus Sign

News comes via Search Engine Land that Google has up and killed the “+” operator in searches. From the beginning of search, or at least from the beginning of Google, putting a plus sign in front of a word in a search has meant that only result including that exact word should be returned.

But in an Oct. 22 post on the Google web search help forum, Google Kelley F. said:

We’ve made the ways you can tell Google exactly what you want more consistent by expanding the functionality of the quotation marks operator. In addition to using this operator to search for an exact phrase, you can now add quotation marks around a single word to tell Google to match that word precisely. So, if in the past you would have searched for [magazine +latina], you should now search for [magazine “latina”].

We’re constantly making changes to Google Search – adding new features, tweaking the look and feel, running experiments, – all to get you the information you need as quickly and as easily as possible. This recent change is another step toward simplifying the search experience to get you to the info you want.

I fail to see how this makes anything simpler or more consistent. For one thing, -, formerly the complement of +, remains the exclusion operator. A hyphen (not strictly speaking a minus sign) in front of a word means that any result containing that word should be excluded from the results. Plus and minus do seem to be a natural pair, and there’s no good reason for Google to break up the set.

One theory floating about is that Google killed the + operator to avoid confusion with the Google+ social network.  But user interface changes should only be made when they make things easier for users, and this one makes life a bit harder. And even with the change, there is no way to search for the + symbol. Searching for either + or “+” returns no results, while searching for “+1” returns more than 25 billion results including the numeral 1.

As Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan says, Google’s move “goes against 15 years of how search engines have operated, where quotes are used to find exact phrases. Now all those references across the web have become outdated, for no apparent reason other than maybe Google picked a name for its social network that wasn’t searchable.”

iPad’s Market Share Will Crater, but You Shouldn’t Care

Research firm Strategy Analystics got some attention with a report that showed Android accounted for 27% of the tablet market in the quarter ended Sept. 30. The report raised a lot of eyebrows.Kevin C. Tofel of GigaOm did some digging and found two significant issues with Strategy Analytics’ methodology.

Kindle Fire photo
Amazon's Kindle Fire

First, the Android numbers are for tablets shipped into the channel, not necessarily those sold, while Apple reports only actual sell-through. Second, the firm used a very broad definition of Android tablets. In particular, it included Barnes & Noble’s Nook Color. This is technically correct, but I’m not sure that a market that stretches from the iPad to the Nook is very meaningful.

By this standard, iPad’s market share is about to get a whole lot worse. Next month, Amazon.com will begin shipping the Kindle Fire, and all indications are that sales will be strong. Like the Nook, Fire runs a customized version of Android and if it is counted among Android tablets, their sales volume and market share will likely swell in the fourth quarter and beyond.

The number will undoubtedly set off a new round of speculation about what Apple must do to defend iPad’s market share. The correct answer is nothing, other than to produce the best product at the best price it can, consistent with its business strategy.

Apple does not care about market share and never has. It cares about absolute volumes and profit margins. And this has been a phenomenally successful business model that Apple should not and will not change. The history of the tech industry is littered with the corpses of PC makers that died chasing market share. Anyone remember Packard-Bell and AST? Dell and Hewlett-Packard nearly destroyed themselves chasing share at the expense of profit and Acer seems to be pulling back from the same fruitless race.

So Apple will serenely watch its share of whatever analysts choose to define as the tablet market inevitably decline as long as iPad volumes continue to grow and profit margins stay healthy. I think that the Kindle Fire and the likely successor to the Nook Color can both do very well without having a material effect on iPad sales. And everyone should just stop fretting about the meaningless market share numbers.

 

 

The Apple User Experience: Integration Is the Key

In a recent post, my colleague Ben Bajarin wrote a post on how the seamlessness of Apple’s iCloud is a bit like Amazon’s WhisperSync in the way it invisibly does its job. I’d like to take a deeper look at the design philosophy behind this and why it is a key to Apple’s success. In a word, the key to making the iPhone and iPad a better experience than their competitors is integration.

The iPhone’s new iOS 5 software has a couple of important tricks. Siri, a voice driven personal assistant, lets you accomplish much of what you want to do an an iPhone simply by speaking to it. iCloud creates automatic links among iOS devices, Macs, and, to a limited extent, Windows PCs. But the important thing is that these new features are built into the heart of the operating system, not whizzy add-ons. That means their function becomes a natural extension of the device itself. As developers do more to hook their apps into these services, their usefulness will explode.

I just finished up a project that required including a number of iPad and iPhone screen shots. I wrote the report on an iMac and in the past, getting those pictures from the devices to my Mac would have been a pain. Fortunately, the iCloud feature called Photo Stream came along just in time. Once Photo Stream was activated, I could create a screen shot on the iPad and within a minute or so it would just appear in iPhoto on the Mac with absolutely no intervention on my part. This is not magic, though it looks like it. But it does require deep integration of iCloud services into the operating system to work as seamlessly as it does.

Apple is actually late coming to the cloud and its early efforts, notably MobileMe, were not terribly successful. But in typical Apple fashion, the company is making up for lost time with a vengeance by pushing cloud connections deeper into its products than any competitor. Google may be the ultimate cloud company, but Android is festooned with an assortment of cloud services that never feel like part of an integrated whole.

One big advantage of Apple’s integration is that these services can be made available relatively easily so third-party developers can use them. Apple has already published an iCloud application programming interface and as Ben noted, developers are already finding interesting ways to use it.  Apple has not yet published a Siri API–the service is officially still in beta–but once it does, I expect the usefulness of a natural language voice interface will explode.

At Apple, it’s never about the technology, but always about the user experience. That philosophy is likely to keep iOS a step or two ahead of its competitors for some time to come.

 

 

Herman Cain’s 9-9-9: Why Tech Should Pay Attention

Herman Cain photoThis site doesn’t usually cover politics  and I promise we won’t make a habit of it. But in a previous life, I used to write about tax policy and I still follow the topic closely. I’ve been intrigued by Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax program. And in trying to make sense of the very skeletal proposal, I have realized it could pose huge problems for the tech industry with what is effectively a 9% tariff on imported goods.

The key element is the “9% flat business tax.” Cain’s protests notwithstanding, this is a value added tax, with an important and disturbing twist. Economists define a business’ value added as gross revenues less the cost of goods purchased or, equivalently, as the cost of labor plus profit.

Here’s the one-sentence description from Cain’s web site of just what will be taxed at 9%: “Gross income less all purchases from other U.S. located businesses, all capital investment, and net exports.” The devil is in the phrase “other U.S. located businesses.” In the unlikely even this ever became law, hundreds of pages of the Internal Revenue Code would be taken up defining a “U.S. located business.” Are Intel chips from a fab in Israel the product of a U.S. located business? What about a Boeing aircraft with components from all over the world?

If we assume Cain intends to limit the deduction to goods produced in the U.S., this is big trouble. Effectively, it increases the cost of foreign goods by 9% relative to U.S.-produced competition, the same as a tariff (and as such it would almost certainly be found illegal by the World Trade Organization.) Most countries that impose value added taxes allow them to be rebated on exported goods (that would be the effect of Cain’s net exports exclusion) but do not discriminate based on the source of goods purchased.

If Cain wants to argue that structuring a tax this way is necessary to revive U.S. manufacturing, it’s an interesting issue. But he should recognize that it is a major change both in tax and trade policy. And tech should realize that it is a serious threat to the system of global manufacturing that is at the heart of the industry.

 

 

How Amazon’s Silk Will Treat Your Privacy

Debates in tech land all too often degenerate quickly into name-calling cat fights among partisans. So it’s rare, and gratifying to see two sides naturally skeptical of each other engage in a dialogue that actually enlightens rather than inflames.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation,  reflecting the views of many privacy advocates, raised concerns about the amount of personal information Amazon.com might capture from users of the Silk browser in the new Kindle Fire. Amazon has responded  in detail and the analysis of the response by EFF not only goes a long way toward allaying those fears but serves as a model of how this sort of dialog should work.

Silk bothered privacy (and security) advocates because everything entered into the browser in its default mode passes through Amazon’s servers, allowing Amazon to capture vast amounts of personal information. This is done to let most of the heavy lifting of rendering web pages be done on Amazon’s servers, allowing   a much faster browsing experience.

In its response to EFF, Amazon made several key points:

  • A setting on the first page of Silk preferences will let users bypass Amazon;s servers, trading privacy for performance.
  • All encrypted sessions  (anything with an HTTPS address) will link Silk directly to the remote server, bypassing Amazon. This means that Amazon will not see usernames, passwords, and other sensitive information from secure sessions.
  • The amount of user information logged will be limited and logs will be retained for only 30 days. Amazon told EFF that there is no way to associate logged information with a specific Amazon account.
EFF still has some concerns about the amount of data Amazon can collect and the danger that aggregated data might still be linked to specific individuals. But, EFF said in its conclusion, “We are generally satisfied with the privacy design of Silk, and happy that the end user has control over whether to use cloud acceleration. But this new technology highlights the need for better online privacy protections. As companies continue to innovate in ways that make novel uses of–and expose much more personal data to–the internet cloud, it’s critical that the legal protections for that data keep up with changes technology.”
Amazon could have saved itself a bit of trouble by releasing this information earlier, but since Fire won’t ship until next month, no damage has been done. Kudos to both Amazon and EFF  for bringing out this important clarification.

How Apple Won the Mobile War

HP LX 95
The HP 95 LX

I have been following handheld computing products for about as long as they have existed, going back to such forgotten products as the Hewlett-Packard 95 LX and the Psion Series 5. In 20 years of effort, only three products truly caught the popular imagination: The Palm PDA, the BlackBerry, and the iPhone. And of these, only iPhone became a true mass market success.

Why? In the early days, especially, these products faced impossible technological hurdles. Miniaturization was still in a fairly primitive state,  so the devices were saddled with seriously inadequate processing power. Displays were awful–low-resolution, low-contrast LCD screens. And wireless connectivity was nonexistant.

But designers managed to make a bad situation worse by trying to make devices do too much. The HP 95 LX and its successors were actually tiny MS-DOS computers; their ability to run Lotus 1-2-3 was a key selling point. But only a relative handful of people, mostly engineers, had any desire for such a product and it attracted an enthusiastic, but tiny, market. Numerous other devices came along in the mid- to late-1990s in an assortment of sizes and form-factors: the Apple Newton MessagePad, the Casio Zoomer, the IBM/BellSouth Simon (perhaps the first smartphone), the AT&T EO, the Motorola Envoy. All tried to do too much with too little, and all failed miserably.

Palm P{ilot photo
The original Palm

The first device the break the paradigm was the original Palm Pilot of 1996. Its designer, Jeff Hawkins, had a Jobsian focus on the user experience; during development, he dropped any functions that he felt were too complicated and he swore that Palm users would never see an error message on their screens.

The Palm didn’t try to do much; essentially it maintained contacts and calendar in sync with your computer and took input through a modified handwriting called Graffiti. But it worked vastly better than anything else at the time and was a hit. It was also, by way of the Handspring Treo, the direct ancestor of the modern smartphone, though its only means of communication was to a PC over a cable. (My review of the original Palm Pilot.)

The first BlackBerry, in 1999, was also a very specific solution to a specific problem: mobile email. Early BlackBerries  had no voice capability. They were built on pager technology and the first model was called the RIM Inter@ctive Pager 950–the BlackBerry name came along a bit later.  The name is something of a giveaway; RIM came out of the pager industry and the 950 was conceived as a vastly improved pager.

Instead of having to know a special pager number, send a page, and wait for the recipient to call back, the BlackBerry let you send an ordinary email and reach the recipient anywhere, any time.  A tiny but surprisingly functional keyboard, much better than those on the primitive “two-way pagers” of the time, allowed replies.And like the Palm, it also synchronized contacts and calendar with a computer. (Read my review of the original 950.)

BlackBerry 950 photo
The BlackBerry 950

The BlackBerry was not an instant success. It started to catch on in a big way once RIM created the service that provided a secure link to corporate mail systems and enterprises started deploying the devices in large numbers. And, of course, the popularity grew once it gained voice capability. Like the Palm, the BlackBerry caught on because it served a real need and concentrated on doing one thing really well.

Throughout the late 90s and early 00s, there was a continuing effort to build handheld computers. Microsoft and partners such as Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and Toshiba, struggled mightily to cram something resembling Windows into a handheld product, but its PocketPCs, with their miniaturized Windows desktops, left users cold. It was only when Windows Mobile imitated the much simpler design of the Palm Treo that it achieved some modest success.

Apple, after the failure of the Newton, avoided handheld computing in favor of creating a new market for the iPod. In typical Apple fashion, it let others get beat up and learned from their mistakes. By the time Apple came out with the iPhone in 2007, the world had changed again. The amount of processing power you could cram into a small device had grown tremendously. Big, high-resolution, touch-screen displays were economical. And wireless networks were ubiquitous.

But like its few successful predecessors, the iPhone didn’t try to do too much, at least not all at once. The original iPhone was a limited device. There was no app store and no apps other than the ones Apple provided. Despite the widespread availability of 3G wireless networks, the phone was limited to 2G. And the battery struggled to get through a day of normal use. But it was an  instant hit because it did what it did well, without compromise, and in a way that delighted users. A year later, the iPhone 3G remedied the most glaring defects of the original, the App Store let a million apps bloom, and people finally had a full-fledged computer that fit in a pocket.

Strangely enough, the rest of the industry was pathetically slow to respond to the iPhone. Microsoft stuck by Windows Mobile, not seeming to realize that the iPhone’s design had rendered its Windows-derived user interface as obsolete as punch cards. RIM, too, saw no need for fundamental change even as the iPhone began to steal away its core corporate market. Only Google, with no history in the business, rose to the challenge with Android. Android is good enough, and has an attractive enough business model, to make it the only real remaining challenger to Apple. But even it has yet to prove that it can do any better than remain a beat behind the iPhone.

Passings: Of Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie

The death of Steve Jobs was a major world event,  accompanied  by an odd but affecting outpouring of grief from people who did not know him but whose lives he had somehow touched. So I was a little saddened, but hardly surprised, when the death of Dennis M. Ritchie attracted hardly any notice outside the world of computer science. Ritchie’s work touched at least as many people of Jobs’s–they just never knew it.

Unlike the showman Jobs, Ritchie toiled quietly in the vineyard’s of AT&T (later Lucent) Bell Labs where, with Ken Thompson, he revolutionized computing by making software independent from the hardware it ran on. Prior to the 1970s, software was bound tightly to its hardware. An IBM computer ran a proprietary IBM operating system and programs written in higher-level languages such as Fortran or COBOL were translated into code the computer could run using a proprietary IBM compiler.

Ritchie’s biggest contribution was the C programming language. C was a new sort of language, high level enough that could be written relatively quickly and without knowing much about the architecture of the computer it would run on, but with enough low-level control over things such as memory allocation that it could be used to write the operating system itself.

And the first great accomplishment of C was the writing of the UNIX operating system, on which Ritchie collaborated with Thompson. It was the first machine-independent operating system.  Originally written for Digital Equipment minicomputers, it was quickly ported to run on a vast variety of hardware. Today, UNIX and it descendants, which include Linux, Mac OS X, and Android, run on everything from telephones a TV set top boxes to the world’s largest supercomputer.

Though little known by the public at large, Ritchie was extensively honored by his fellow computer scientists. He received the Turing Award from the Association for computing Machinery, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE, the National Medal of Technology, and the Japan Prize. His memorial sits on the bookshelf of just about anyone serious about programming, a slender white volume  he wrote with Brian W. Kernighan called simply The C Programming Language and known universally as K&R.

 

Nook Color Users Like Apps–And Pay for Them

Owners of the Barnes & Noble Nook Color e-reader/tablet don’t just buy books. They also consume apps, quite few of them, it seems.

Nook Color photoThe buying habits of Nook Color owners are a bit surprising, and that could have interesting implications for Amazon.com’s  forthcoming Kindle Fire. Both the Nook Color and the Fire are highly modified Android tablets that identify themselves primarily with their retailer sponsors, not Google and Android. And both are connected to their own dedicated app stores, not Google’s Android Market.

“Our customers are used to buying content,” says Claudia Romanini Backus, a tech industry veteran who serves as director of developer relations for Barnes & Noble. That is a contrast to other Android products, whose owners have developed a reputation for having a fierce appetite for apps, as long as they don’t actually have to pay for them.

I had a chat with Romanini at the CTIA Enterprise & Applications show, where B&N was appearing for the first time. Compared to the typical Android customer, the typical Color buyer is far more likely to be female (women buy about 75% of the units) and older. The tablets are bought primarily as book readers and users begin to download apps when they realize that the Nook can do more.

About 9 of every 10 apps downloaded are paid, with the typical price at $2.99. However, a surprise best-seller is the most expensive item in the catalog, the $14.99 QuickOffice, which allows both viewing and editing of Microsoft Office documents. Other big sellers are games, including the several variants of Angry Birds; apps aimed at children, including iStory Time from DreamWorks; and educational apps. Productivity apps are surprisingly popular, with the free Taptu news reader being a popular download.

“We’re doing something unique and different from mobile,” says Romanini. “It’s not about the apps. It’s an additional way of consuming content. What differentiates us is that we come at it as reading first.”

Nuance Exec on iPhone 4S, Siri, and the Future of Speech

Though the iPhone 4S appears nearly identical to the current iPhone 4, it is, as my colleague Tim Bajarin points out a revolutionary device because of its voice-based Siri interface. For the past 20 years, we humans have learned to point and click, but this has never been a natural way to interact with our environment. Touch and speech, on the other hand, have been around since we were living in caves.

Photo of Vald Sejnoha
Nuance CTO Vlad Sejnoha

“Speech is no longer an add-on,” says Vladimir Sejnoha, chief technical officer of Nuance, probably the world’s leading speech technology company. “It is a fundamental building block when designing the next generation of user interfaces.”

Sejnoha is faithful to the code of omerta that Apple imposes on its vendors. Although Nuance has supplied technology both to Apple and to Siri before its 2010 acquisition by Apple, he declined to discuss Nuance’s role in the iPhone 4S: “We have a great relationship with Apple. We license technology to them for a number of products. I am not able to go into greater detail. But we are very excited by what they have done. It’s a huge validation of the maturity of the speech market.”

But Sejnoha made no effort to hide his enthusiasm for the Siri approach. “It allows you to find functionality or content that is not even visible,” he says. “It provides a new dimension to smartphone interfaces, which have been sophisticated but shrunken-down desktop metaphors.”

It’s has been a long, hard slog for speech to become a core user interface technology. It took a good thirty years, from the late 60s to the late 90s for speech recognition—the ability to turn spoken words into text—to become practical. “Speech recognition is not completely solved,” says Sejnoha. “We have made great strides over the generations and the environment has changed in our favor. We now have connected systems that can send data through the clouds and update the speech models on devices.”

Recognition alone is a necessary but hardly sufficient tool for building a speech interface. For years, speech input systems have let users do little—sometimes nothing—more than speak menu commands. This made speech very useful in situations were hands-free operation was desirable or necessary, but left speech as a poor second choice where point-and-click or touch controls were available.

The big change embodied by Siri is the marriage of speech recognition with advanced natural language processing. The artificial intelligence, which required both advances in the underlying algorithms and leaps in processing power both on mobile devices and the servers that share the workload, allows software to understand not just words but the intentions behind them. “Set up an appointment with Scott Forstall for 3 pm next Wednesday” requires a program to integrate calendar, contact list, and email apps, create and send and invitation, and come back with an appropriate spoken response.

Sejnoha sees Siri in the iPhone as just a beginning.  “Lots of handset OEMs are working on it,” he says. “There is a deep need for differentiation in Andoid and Apple will only light a fire under that. Our model is to work closely with customers and build unique systems tailored to their visions.” And while a speech interface can drive search, it can also become an alternative to it: “One consequence of using natural language in the user interface is direct access to information. We can figure out what you are looking for and take you directly there. You don’t always have to go through a traditional search portal. It will change some business models.”

Nor do the opportunities stop at handsets. “Speech is a big theme for in-car apps because that is a hands busy, eyes busy environment,” Sejnoha says. “All the automotive OEMs are working on next-generation connected systems. The industry is undergoing revolutionary change.”

The health care market is another hot spot.  “Natural language is taking center stage in health care,” Sejnoha says. “We are mining data and using the results to populate electronic health records.” Nuance recently signed a deal with IBM to provide technology for a speech front-end to the health care implementation of its Watson question-answering system.

The key to the next breakthroughs in speech technology, Sejnoha says,  is making effective use of the vast amount of  speech data that now exists, a challenge that has also attracted Nuance competitors Google and Microsoft. “Most algorithms use machine learning and are very data-hungry,” he says. “No one knows yet what to do with tens of thousands of hours of speech data. The race to do that is one. We are doing fundamental research and have a relationship with IBM Research as well. It requires a broad array of techniques to model speech in a robust way and to learn the long tail statistically and the build techniques that can benefit from large amounts of data. It’s a very exciting time.”

 

 

Can Smart Radios Save Us from Spectrum Stew?

SpectrumI’ve been hearing about smart, also known as agile or software-controlled, radios for what seems like 20 years now. The idea is to use software rather than hardware to control transmit and receive frequencies so that a single radio could operate on a broad swatch of spectrum instead of a few narrow bands–and perhaps also use software to control multiple radio protocols. Given the proliferation of frequencies and technologies being used for wireless data, it’s an idea whose time should be now.

Sprint’s wireless broadband announcement today added to an already complex picture. Sprint operates its basic CDMA/EV-DO network nationwide at 1900 MHz and offers WiMAX from Clearwire in selected markets at 2500 MHz. Today it announced that it will begin deploying 4G LTE on its 1900 MHz network and add 800 MHz service as it retires the Nextel network that currently uses that band.

Meanwhile, Verizon wireless runs CDMA/EV-DO at 800 and 1900 MHz and LTE at 700. AT&T offers GSM/HSPA at 850 and 1900 and is deploying LTE in the 700 MHz band.  Just to be different, T-Mobile runs GSM/EDGE at 1900 Mhz and HSPA at 1700 and 2100 Mhz. In case you lost count, that’s four carriers, seven frequency bands, and four fundamentally different radio technologies.

In most of the rest of the world, things are a lot simpler. Most carriers provide GSM and EDGE at 900 and 1800 MHz and HSPA at 2100. 4G plans, however, are literally all over the place.

I’m not sure it’s possible to build a phone that covers all bases with today’s technology, especially given the pressure for ever-thinner handsets. Its Qualcomm dual-mode radio provides CDMA/EV-DO at 800 and 1900 MHz,  GSPA and 850, 900, 1900, and 2100 MHz, and GSM/EDGE at 850, 900, 1800, and 1900 Mhz.  No wonder they left LTE out of this edition.

Unfortunately, smart radios seem to be one of those technologies that always remain a couple of years away from prime time. Given the proliferation of frequencies and technologies, they can’t come too soon.

 

 

Apple’s iPhone and Intel’s Tick-Tock

iPhone 4S web pageIntel has long followed a two-year product cycle it calls tick-tock. In a “tick” year Intel introduces new chips based on a major change in process technology, such as this year’s release of the Sandy Bridge processors. The next year, a “tock” brings refinement within the existing process.

This pattern is driven both by the pace of technology innovation and and the realities of manufacturing. Semiconductor technology evolves fast, but not so fast that major disruptive change is required every year. And a two-year cycle gives Intel the time it needs to perfect fabrication and reap the benefits of the investment in proces change.

It looks like Apple is falling into a similar patter with the iPhone. The 4S announced Oct. 4 was a tock to last year’s iPhone 4 tick. A similar tick-tock pattern marked the release of the iPhone 3G in 2008 and the 3GS in 2009.

There are still major changes in the 4S hardware, most notably the move to the A5 processor, the new camera system, and the use of a dual-mode GSM/CDMA radio. But the basic design is unchanged, allowing the new models to be slipstreamed smoothly into Apple’s (or Foxconn’s) production process.

A change in the industrial design of a handset may not be as disruptive as new semiconductor process technology, but it never happens without difficulty. Apple had problems ramping up production of the iPhone 4 and manufacturing difficulties caused many months delay in the release of the white version. Then there were the notorious problems with the antenna.

Keeping the  basic design the same gives Apple more time to perfect both the design and the manufacturings processes for what will almost certainly be next year’s tick, the iPhone 5, while maintaining smooth, high-volume production of the 4S.

 

Siri Could Be Reason Enough to Buy the iPhone 4S

Siri iconFolks who found Apple’s iPhone announcement disappointing, and there were plenty of them, weren’t really paying attention. My colleagues Tim Bajarin and Ben Bajarin have outlined the reasons consumers should be excited about the new phone, despite the fact that it looks identical to its predecessor. I’m going to focus on just one of them, the Siri personal assistant.

It’s a huge mistake to regard Siri as a speech recognition component. Speech recognition has become highly developed, but by itself, it doesn’t do very much. Anyone who has used voice control on an Android phone knows it is very good at letting you dictate messages, but not much else.

Siri cracks a much tougher nut. For it to work, the software, which runs partly on the iPhone 4s and partly on Apple’s servers, must understand not just your words but your meaning. If you ask “should I wear a raincoat today?” and Siri responds with a weather forecast, were are looking at very significant advance in machine intelligence.

At this point, a couple of very important caveats are in order. Siri looked spectacular in Apple marketing chief Phil Schiller’s demo. But it was a demo, and the people who create demos carefully limit their choices to commands and functions that they are confident will work. Apple didn’t give attendees at the announcement any hands-on time with the phone. So until users have a chance to try out Siri in the wild, we’ll have to reserve judgment on how good it really is. In a move that seems more Googley than Apple-like, Siri is being released with the iPhone 4 on Oct. 14, but it is officially designated as a beta product, perhaps in and effort to temper expectations.

A second question is just how good it has to be for people to find it useful. If it doesn’t truly make the iPhone easier to use, people will abandon it quickly. But if it works anywhere near as well as it did in the demo, I suspect it will revolutionized the way we interact with devices.

While science fiction computers has been able to carry on intelligent conversations for decades, it has taken real world computers about that long just to learn to recognize words reliably. Speech recognition, which companies such as IBM and AT&T began working on seriously in the 1960s, was based primarily on signal processing and statistical analysis. Natural language understanding seemed hopelessly beyond reach, whether the input was spoken or typed.

Siri was developed by a company of the same name that was acquired by Apple. The original research was funded by the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency, but Apple may have thrown more engineering and computer science muscle into the project than even the Pentagon can afford these days. But it also had to wait foir a dramatic increase in the processing power of mobile devices—one reason that Siri will not be available with iOS 5 on older phones–and more seamless communications that allow the work to be split between the phone and the server.

As smart as smartphones have become, simple tasks can require annoyingly many steps. Setting up a meeting requires checking a calendar for the proposed time, finding attendees in a contact list, and sending out invitations. If all that can be replaced by pushing a button and saying, “Set up a meeting with Tim Cook for 10 am on Friday,” ease of use will have taken a great leap forward.

One secret to any successful attempt at natural language understanding is restricting the range of commands, known as the domain, that it must make sense of. If you tell Siri, “Write Mr. Smith a script for simvastatin,” your iPhone will probably stare at you blankly (unless, of course, someone uses the Siri application programming interface to create a prescription-writing program.) The range of things you can reasonably ask a smartphone to do is still pretty limited.

The critical question is how much of that repertoire of requests Siri will handle well.  If it is a reasonable fraction, Siri alone will provide ample reason for the iPhone 4’s success.

There Already Is a Cheap iPhone

Image from Apple invitationThe oddest thing about the rumors bubbling around Tuesday Apple media event is the speculation about a “cheap” iPhone. Gizmodo, for example, published blurry pictures of quality-control rejects from Foxconn’s new plant in Brazil as “proof” of the imminent new cheap iPhone.

We know very, very little about the new hardware that Apple will announce; after losing an iPhone 4 prototype the last time around, Apple has done an even better than usual job of controlling leaks this time. But we can be very sure of what the “cheap” iPhone will be.

Apple’s practice for iPhone releases has been to keep the one-back model in the lineup while introducing a new phone as the premium product. At AT&T today, you can buy a 16 gigabyte iPhone 4 for $199 or an 8 GB iPhone 3GS for $49 (Verizon only has the iPhone 4 because there never was a CDMA version of the 3GS.)

So whatever the new iPhone model is and whatever it is called, we can expect the 15-month-old iPhone 4 to continue to be available, at sharply reduced prices. Maybe Apple will shave the price a bit by offering an 8 GB version, maybe not. But Apple has already said that the new iOS 5.0 software will run on the older iPhone, so it could be an attractive buy.

Was Android a Big Mistake for Google?

By many standards, Android is a huge success. It has become the top-selling smartphone operating system and is on a growth path to increase its dominance. But there is a significant question of whether it has done any good for its owner, Google.

Google bought Android in 2005 from its founder, Andy Rubin, for an undisclosed price. Google, as is its wont, never explained the rationale for the purchase. And because the software is free to device makers, it has not made any money for Google directly.

The general thinking in the industry has been that the Google services bundled on Android devices would create enough additional revenue to make Android a paying proposition. Only Google knows the extent to which this is working and they aren’t saying. But I suspect that the incremental revenue generated by Android, including sales at the Android Market, have not been huge contributors to Google’s bottom line. Tablets would seem to present a lot more monetization opportunities than handsets just because of the extra screen real estate, but Android tablets have been dismal sellers. I’m sure the iPad, with default Google search and Google maps, is generating orders of magnitude more revenue than all the Android tablets combined.

Meanwhile, Android is making money for Microsoft. Microsoft asserts that Android violates a number of its patents and has been signing up phone manufacturers, most recently Samsung, to deals that require them to pay royalties on each handset for a license to the Microsoft intellectual property. The needs to obtain patents to defend Android against infringement claims by Microsoft and Apple was  a significant factor in Google’s proposed purchase of Motorola Mobility. And Google could face a substantial judgment in litigation in which Oracle claims Android infringes on Java language patents that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems.

The bottom line is that Android is a big headache for Google without much evidence of a clear offsetting payoff. And now, Amazon has come along and helped itself, perfectly legally, to the Android source code and created a customized version of the software without so much as a by-your-leave from Google. The software will power the new Kindle Fire, which could easily become the dominant Android tablet when it goes on sale in November.

Android has been good for consumers and good for phone makers. Whether it has been good for Google is very much an open question.

 

Kindle Fire Threatens Google More Than Apple

Much of the coverage of Amazon’s announcement of the Kindle Fire has, understandably, focused on the potential competition with Apple’s iPad. While the two products are clear competitive in the sense that some consumers will pick one and forego the other, it is entirely possible that Amazon will sell millions of Fires without making much of a dent in iPad sales.

Kindle Fire photoA much more interesting issue is the impact of the fire on Google. At first glance, Amazon and Google are sort of partners in the Kindle project. The Fire runs on a version of Google’s Android software and Google is the default search engine on the tablet (a privilege for which Google is probably paying.) But a couple of things Amazon has done take aim at Google in ways that have to be causing some discomfort at the search giant, which is already facing serious challenges to its core businesses from Facebook.

First, there’s the matter of Android. To understand what going on, you have to realize the distinction between “Android” and “Google Android.” Android started out as an open-source operating system, but Google has been progressively tightening controls.  To use any Google branding or to have access to Google services such as the Android Market or the Google Maps app, a manufacturer must meet Google’s terms and conditions. For the current Honeycomb version of Android, “Google Android” is the only option because Google has not released the source code.

Amazon took a different route. Earlier versions of Android are freely available and Amazon took the code for Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and modified it for its own purposes. This is perfectly acceptable and legal under the Apache 2.0 license that covers Android. It’s not clear how compatible the Fire software is with existing Gingerbread apps, but it is clear this is not a huge concern of Amazon–and that there is nothing Google can do about it.

Google now faces the very real prospect that the first, and perhaps only, successful Android tablet, while built on a Google software platform, has nothing to do with Google. In particular, it does not use any of the Google services, other than basic search, that were Google’s rationale for building the Android platform. The Android business model was giving the software away, but making money off the users it delivered to Google services. Fire, however, is designed to use and promote Amazon’s services, not Google’s. In a very real sense, Amazon may just have stolen Android out from under Google’s nose as far as tablets are concerned.

(Related: Amazon Plans on Stealing Android from Google)

As Chris Ziegler writes on ThisIsMyNext.com:

Amazon now stands poised to take one of Google’s most critical assets — Android — and turn it against them. Praise for the Fire’s deeply-customized version of Android 2.3 has been nearly universal, and make no mistake, there’s no going back; this is Amazon’s operating system now, built atop a road-tested core that Google served up free of charge.

The other significant threat Google is Fire’s SILK browser. When running in its default mode, the browsers computational chores are split between the Kindle and Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2.) This architecture means that Amazon will be able to observe, and probably log, everything Fire users do on every web site they visit. (The SILK terms and conditions are silent on the uses that can  be made of this clickstream data beyond incorporating the existing Amazon privacy statement.)

Amazon has built its business through deep analysis of the data it collects from users of its sites. But until now it, like Google and Facebook, only has access to the clickstreams users generate while on their sites. With SILK, Amazon can observe what users do on every site they visit. The privacy implications of this are a subject for another time, but the wealth of data could give Amazon and enormous commercial advantage.

As Michael Mace writes on his MobileOpportunity blog:

This will be a fun space to watch. Apple and Google will both feel pressure to respond to Silk to prevent Amazon from getting a decisive lead in mobile web apps.  Maybe just the threat of Silk will be enough to finally drive some innovation in the mobile web platform.

I may be indulging in wishful thinking, but there’s a possibility that ten years from now we’ll look back on Silk as the single most important thing in today’s announcement.

Or not.  It depends on what Amazon’s agenda is, and they’re not telling.

 

AWS: Amazon’s Secret Weapon

Most consumers think of Amazon.com as a company that sells books and a whole lot of other stuff. But it is also a deep technology company that has turned its technology both into a product and a big competitive advantage.

Amazon Web Services is a vast online computing infrastructure that Amazon both uses itself and sells to others. AWS began in 2006 as a way for Amazon to sell surplus storage as its Simple Storage Service (S3.) But it really blossomed when the company added Elastic Cloud Computing (EC2), which lets customers rent virtual servers.

As AWS has expanded, it has offered increasingly sophisticated services that let companies create complete virtual data centers. Because of the ability to get up and running with no capital investment and to scale quickly and cheaply if demand takes off, AWS is immensely popular with web startups. Many established web businesses run on it as well and ithas just gotten approval for use with most unclassified federal government operations.

The AWS user interface is something no one but a software developer should ever encounter, but the Kindle Fire can be tought of as a firendly face for the cloud services. The vast storage capabilities of S3 and the CloudFront content delivery network power Amazon’s streaming media capabilities. AWS also provides the storage and computing power that let you, for example, begin reading a Kindle book on a phone and download it to a Kindle device and pick up reading exactly where you left off.

Others, such as Microsoft and, of course, Google, offer extensive cloud services. Apple is trying to catch up and I expect we will hear a lot more about iCloud as part of its iPhone announcement Oct. 4. But AWS’s extensive programming interfaces and Amazon’s experience in hitching its infrastructure to consumer services give it a unique leg up on the competition.

And interesting test of just how big an advantage AWS is will come with the performance of the Kindle Fire’s Silk browser. Browsers have been the weak point of all tablets because the complexity of rendering complex modern web pages can overwhelm their relatively  limited processing power. This is why even tablets that claim to support Adobe Flash generally do so really badly.

Silk splits the processing burden of rendering pages between the Fire and EC2, with much of the heavy lifting done in the cloud. Amazon officials were not very forthcoming about the technical details of Silk and were not very generous in demonstrations of its abilities, so I am going to reserve judgment until I have a chance for a hands-on trial.

If it works as promised, it could be an important, unique advantage for Amazon. Among potential competitors, only Google has to sort of cloud infrastructure that is required, but Google doesn’t make devices and the structure of Android would make it very hard for it to achieve the tight device-cloud integration needed to make something like Silk work.

 

 

Kindle Fire: The Disruptive Power of Amazon

Amazon.com launched its long-awaited tablet, the Kindle Fire,  today and once again established its place, alongside Apple and Google, in the Bit Three of economic disrupters.  My colleague Tim Bajarin has written about the details of the $199 tablet and why it will be a game changer. I am going to focus on the impact of the Amazon business model.

Kindle Fire photoOne reason that every tablet that isn’t an iPad has struggled badly is that they haven’t given consumers a compelling reason to want to own one. The iPad offers a great user experience based mainly on a rich system of inexpensive apps offered by Apple and a galaxy of third-party developers.

Competitors have offered products with a somewhat worse experience for about the same price or a much worse experience for a significantly lower price. Unsurprisingly, consumers found neither model appealing.

At this point, we have to assume that the actual performance of the Fire when it ships Nov. 15 will be close to what Amazon demonstrated on Sept. 28. Attendees at the event were only allowed to look at, not use, the prototypes on hand. But if it does, Amazon will be hard-pressed to meet the demand.

But the real prize for Amazon will be Fire’s ability to sell, something that should let the company quickly recoup the $50 to $100 in subsidy implied by the $199 price. The first thing it will sell is $79 annual subscriptions to Amazon Prime, an odd but highly successful bundle of free two-day shipping on all Amazon goods and unlimited access to Amazon’s large library of streaming movies and TV shows. My guess is that the conversion rate after the one-month free trial of Prime included in the Fire’s price will exceed 50%.

The Fire also looks to be a beautiful e-reader that will sell lots of books. (And Amazon protected its flanks by announcing three new monochrome eInk Kindles: an entry-level product at $79 and a new touchscreen version, with and without free 3G wireless, at $149 and $99. Those are impulse purchase prices that will probably finish off the printed book.)

Although Fire’s software is based on Android, it is not an official Google Android device and will probably not have access to the official Android Marketplace. I don’t think this is much of a concern to Amazon, because it stands ready with its own App Store, one more way to sell stuff. (In general, the fact that Fire runs on Android is about as apparent to the user as the fact that TiVo runs on Linux, which is to say not at all.)

Apple is not likely to be quaking at the prospect of Kindle Fire, nor should it. While the iPad and the Fire will compete at the margin–people only have so much money and only want so many gizmos–they are very different products with very different business models aimed at very different markets. Barnes & Noble and Google have a lot more reason to be worried. So does anyone else who sells stuff, whether the goods are digital or physical.

 

Industry Collaboration Could Speed Next Generation of Chips

Photo of Intel wafer

At a time when the federal government can’t seem to agree with itself that today is Wednesday, it’s a good thing to see New York State  get together with the largest chip makers to spur the next generation of chipmaking. And it’s even better to see that the state’s contribution is an investment in the State University of New York rather than unproductive tax incentives.

Under the deal, an industry consortium of Intel, IBM, Globalfoundries (the former manufacturing arm of AMD), Samsung Electronics, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., will work together to develop processes for making 22- and 14-nanometer chips on 450 mm wafers. The current generation of advanced chips have 32nm components and are made on 300 mm (about 12 inches) wafers.

In general, moving to smaller components increases capability while reducing power consumption. Manufacturing on larger wafers increases the efficiency of the fabrication process. But new processes are extremely expensive to develop, so sharing the burden among the leading semiconductor manufacturers makes sense.

IBM and Intel will invest $4.4 billion in the project, including the opening of an Intel headquarters in Albany. The state will invest $400 million in the College for Nanoscale and Science Engineering at SUNY Albany.

New York is not usually thought of as a leader in semiconductors. But IBM operates its major chip fabrication facility at East Fishkill while Globalfoundries is building a major new fab in Canandaigua.

The move to 450 mm wafers will have huge implications for the semiconductor and manufacturing-equipment industries over the next several years. Moving to chips with smaller components can often be accomplished through modifications of existing equipment, but larger wafers require wholesale replacement of chipmaking machinery. The last major change, from 200 to 300 mm, took place about a decade ago.

 

 

Reading the Signs: The iPhone and Semiotic Silliness

Image from Apple invitationNow that Apple has ended speculation about when it will make its long-awaited iPhone announcement, pundits, deprived of any actual news, have been trying to divine the hidden meaning in Apple’s clever invitation to the Oct. 4 media event.

The prize for most comprehensive effort goes to Prof. Helmut Weltschmertz of the Koblenz Institute of Numerology and Used Car Sales (thanks to Cnet’s Rafe Needleman for pointing it out), who found the “280” on the map icon signifies 280 new features.

But ostensibly serious analysts didn’t do a lot better at semiotics (the science of interpreting signs, and I word that I don’t think I have ever used in a sentence before.) Piper Jaffray’s Gene Munster took time off from predicting the imminent arrival of an Apple-branded TV, to interpret the “Let’s talk iPhone” tag line in a letter to clients. “In the past,” Munster wrote (as reported by Fortune’s Philip Elmer-Dewitt), “Apple has used its invitation to include cryptic hints as to what it will announce. The phrase on this year’s invite, ‘Let’s talk iPhone’ may be a simple play on words, but may also refer to new speech-based features for the iPhone.” It’s been widely expected for a long time that the next version of the iPhone would include a considerable expansion of voice features based on its 2010 purchase of Siri and details of the voice-based “Assistant” have been dribbling out for days. So Munster’s observation is about as helpful as noting that the pin on the map represents the location of Apple’s Cupertino campus.

Numerous soothsayers got excited about the 1 on the phone icon, interpreting it to mean that Apple would only be announcing one iPhone next week. Since Apple has only announced one new phone at each of four previous iPhone events, this seems a safe bet. Folks predicting a smaller or cheaper companion to what may or may not be called the iPhone 5 have never made a compelling case either that such a product was under development or that its development was part of any reasonable Apple product strategy.

Actually, we have a better than usual idea of what is coming Tuesday. The iPhone’s software has always been more important and interesting than the hardware and the core new features of the next model were laid out last spring during the announcement of iOS 5.0 at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. There will certainly stuff that goes beyond what was discussed at WDC, including advanced voice support and perhaps deeper Facebook integration, as suggested by my colleague Peter Lewis.

But we have six full days until the event. Expect much breathless speculation, most of it as silly as Prof. Weltschmertz.

Many Windows, One Login

A post at the official Building Windows 8 blog outlines a potentially very cool feature in Windows 8. You’ll be able to set up any Windows 8 system, conventional PC or tablet, to use a Windows Live ID as a local login. That means your identity, settings, and purchased apps will live in the cloud and you will have access to all the information on any device when you log in through Windows Live.

Of course, the devil is always in the details and we’ll have to see how well this works in practice. Security will be a particular concern, and Microsoft will have to get it right. But with data showing a sharp rise in consumers using multiple devices, it could be a winner and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Apple come up with a competitor through iCloud.

Check out the blog post for all the details.

The Amazon Tablet: Less Could Be More

M.G. Siegler at TechCrunch has some interesting tidbits on the tablet that Amazon.com is expected to announce at a media event on Wednesday. The most interesting news, other than the name of “Kindle Fire,” is that the tablet won’t ship with a built-in email client.

Amazon logoAssuming this is correct–and Siegler’s Amazon sources seem to be very good–it may be an interesting case of product differentiation through subtraction. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad in 2010, he clearly positioned the device as a PC alternative for a post-PC era. It’s hard to imagine a PC alternative without a good email client.

The Amazon tablet, however, isn’t vying for PC alternative honors. Amazon seems to view it  much more as a way to facilitate consumptions of the stuff Amazon sells, especially books, videos, and music. It is fundamentally an entertainment device, not a productivity device. And it doesn’t really need email. (If you really want email, you can always download a client app, though you’ll probably have to get it from the Amazon App Store rather than Android Market, which probably won’t come with the tablet either.)

All of this is consistent with my notion that Amazon is interested in producing not an anti-iPad but an un-iPad. Amazon is one of the very few companies around with the heft and the smarts to, as they say in basketball, create its own shot against Apple. and the indications are mounting that this is just what Amazon intends to do.