Tech.pinions Quick Takes – Page 4

Is There No One At Google Who Knows How To Say “No”?

Google, in an email to those that pre-ordered a Nexus Q:

We also heard initial feedback from users that they want Nexus Q to do even more than it does today. In response, we have decided to postpone the consumer launch of Nexus Q while we work on making it even better.

Google amazes me and not in a good way. They are one of the largest, most powerful, most important companies on the planet, yet:

– They spend the time and money to prepare a device that has glaring deficiencies.

– They take a lot of time from Google I/O to demo the device.

– They allow customers to pre-order the device.

– They then pull the device because they discover what everyone has known from the get-go: That the Nexus Q was a flawed concept that was Dead On Arrival (DOA).

Is there no one at Google who knows how to say “no”?

The New Mac Ads: If Tech Companies Were Cruise Lines

There has been a real kerfuffle caused by the new Mac Ads.

Some people dislike them. Others hate, hate, hate them.

On the other hand, some people like them…or, at least, they tolerate them.

MAC OWNERS AND MAC HATERS ARE NOT THE TARGET AUDIENCE

I agree with those, those and those who point out that these ads are not addressed to current Mac owners. They’re addressed to POTENTIAL Mac owners.

And the message being sent is so simple that it’s simply being misunderstood.

THE RETAIL STORE’S REASON FOR BEING

Here is Ron Johnson, former head of Apple’s Retail Stores, On Lessons Learned From Apple About Gaining An Edge As A Retail Brand:

“For example,” Johnson explained, “Apple has always offered the most easy out-of-the-box user experience, but we noticed there was a gap between buying and using. People were intimidated by even the easiest product set-up. So we said, if we can set up a product for them in the ten minutes before they left the store and they started using it and falling in love with it, it would be transformational. It was an insight that made the Apple store relevant.”

“(T)here was a gap between buying and using. People were intimidated…if we can set up a product for them…it would be transformational.”

Words for every business to live by. Words that Apple DOES live by.

IF TECH COMPANIES WERE CRUISE LINES

If tech companies ran Cruise Lines, most would invite you to ride on their world class cruise liners, help you pack your bags, give you a free limo ride to the docks, provide you with a lovely and delightful cruise…

…and then make you row ashore when you arrived at your destination.

Apple seems to get it. Instead of giving you a dinghy, a paddle and a hale and hearty farewell, they build a bridge between their products and their customer’s destinations. And as you’re crossing that bridge, Apple has their “geniuses” at the ready – there to encourage you, lend a helping hand, and cheer you on.

And that’s a good thing. A very good thing indeed.

The Swedish Surface and the Pathetic State of Online Journalism

Yesterday, an obscure–outside Sweden, at least–web retailer, webhallen.com, published a page that purported to give the still unannounced pricing for Microsoft’s Surface tablets. The surface was quoted at a ranged from $1,000 for a minimal ARM version to $2,100 for a loaded x86 model.

Wpcentral.com was apparently the first to come across this report and run with it. But it was quickly followed by many others, including some of the biggest names in online tech news: ZDnet, InformationWeek, Mashable, Cnet, and many others. Many of the reports, while expressing some doubt about the authenticity of the information, were quick to speculate about a monumental screwup by Microsoft. For example, Cult of Mac went with the headline: “Don’t Worry, Apple! Microsoft Will Kill Its Own Surface Tablet With $1,000 Price Tag.”

Of course, when someone finally got around to talking to Webhallen, the great scoop turned out to be nothing but a dummy page. When Paul Paliath of Techie Buzz reached a Webhallen spokesperson, the company admitted that it had no idea how the Surface would be priced or even whether it would be carrying the product.

In the grand scheme of things, this was all a tempest in a teapot. Still, it demonstrates important weaknesses in how news is being reported and disseminated these days. There are several factors that should have given any reporter or editor pause before taking the prices seriously:

Online catalog pages are a notoriously unreliable source of information on the availability or pricing of new products. Dummy product pages have an unfortunate way of escaping from staging servers, where they should stay hidden, onto the public web.
The information didn’t pass a simple sanity test. Microsoft is not going through all the effort and cost to bring the Surface to market only to price it so high that failure is guaranteed. The reported prices made no sense.
It seems unlikely that Webhallen would be first in line to get Surfaces to sell. Microsoft has said that initial sales would be through its own stores.

But the pursuit of news on an otherwise slow summer day seems to have overwhelmed many writers’ and editors’ common sense. And this sort of hting, of which this is only a particularly egregious example, undermines the credibility of all online news.

The much maligned traditional media always had rules about sourcing and verification of information. I started my career at the Associated Press and even though there was tremendous pressure to be first–as great as that on any web site–there was even more pressure to be right. Being late could produce a slap on the wrist; being wrong could end your career. It’s time we on the web worried a bit less about being fast and a lot more about being right.

WSJ’s Internet History Is Way Off

The Wall Street Journal‘s editorial page seems to have dedicated itself to showing that every single thing uttered

Photo of Bob Kahnd — Robert E. Kahn (Wikipedia)

by President Obama is at best a misstatement. Today, Gordon Crovitz takes on the President’s statement that the government helped business by creating the internet. Unfortunately, in the process he mangles facts and history.

Lets look at some of the claims:

“The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.” This statement is attributred to Robert Taylor, who was present at the creation and certainly should know, but lacks any context. ARPAnet was created specifically to connect disparate research networks working on DARPA projects, mainly at universities.

“If the government didn’t invent the Internet who did? Vinton Cerf developed the TCP/IP protocol, the Internet’s backbone, and Tim Berners-Lee gets credit for hyperlinks.” Vint Cerf developed TCP/IP jointly with Robert E. Kahn. At the time, both were employed by DARPA. Tim Berners-Lee may have invented the World Wide Web, but the idea of hyperlinks goes back to Vanevar Bush and Ted Nelson and was extensively implemented in HyperCard well before Berners-Lee’s work.

” It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks.” This one is a howler. Ethernet was indeed invented by Robert Metcalfe at Xerox PARC. It it was, and remains, a local networking standard. It was tremendously importnat in the development of the internet, but was never used to link networks together.

The history of the internet is not particularly in dispute and we have the great good fortune that most of the pioneers who made it happen are still with us and able to share their stories. (For example, my video interviews with Cerf and Kahn.) In a nutshell, the internet began as a Defense Dept. research project designed to create a way to facilitate communication among research networks. It was almost entirely the work of government employees and contractors. It was split into military and civilian pieces, the latter run by the National Science Foundation. By the early 1990s, businesses were starting to see commercial possibilities and the private sector began building networks that connected with NSFnet. After initially resisting commercialization, NSF gave in and withdrew from the internet business in 1995, fully privatizing the network.

To paraphrase Yogi Berra, you can look it up in a book–or a web site.

Confirmed: The iPad Isn’t Good At What It Isn’t Good At

What is it about the iPad that moves seemingly rational people to say perfectly ridiculous things?

The latest example of this foolishness is Matt Asay, writing in The Register, who argues that because there are some enterprise chores that the iPad does not do well or at all, “iPad is RUBBISH for enterprise.” The gist of Asay’s argument goes something like this:

Enterprise users depend on heavy-duty apps, especially Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
These apps are not available on the iPad.
The Apple alternatives, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are less capable.
Therefore, the iPad is unsuited to enterprise use.

Each of these statements except the last is indisputably true. And that conclusion is completely wrong.

The problem is the implicit assumption that unless a computing device is well-suited to everything we might ask of any computer, it isn’t suited for anything. This is the sort of thinking–Microsoft is particularly prone to it–that has given us bloated all-purpose devices that can do anything, though often not very well.

To support his case, Asay quotes a Macworld article (unfortunately, no link was provided): “For the most part, I love writing on my iPad. But I still do so only when my MacBook isn’t around…”

I would say the same thing, and I would add that I don’t use my MacBook Air when my 27″ iMac or desktop Windows PC is around. The critical thing is that the iPad is always around when I want it; it has the right mix of capability of mobility for a vast variety of jobs, many of them as great utility to the enterprise.

It is true that putting capable Office programs on tablets gives Windows slates a potential advantage in the enterprise markets. But, as I have written, the new versions of Office programs, while more touch-capable than their predecessors, still are not very well suited to touch use. It’s not at all clear at this point that a Windows tablet running Excel 2013 will really be very much better for enterprise spreadsheet use than an iMac with Numbers.

The big problem here, though, is the fallacy that lack of capability at any task the enterprise may demand renders a device useless. Let’s accept–and celebrate–the fact that we are living in a world where we have a choice of devices of varying capabilities and where

Will Windows RT Include Outlook? Microsoft Won’t Say

Folks who plan to use Outlook on ARM-powered tablets, such as the Windows RT version of the Surface, may be in for a disappointment. The materials Microsoft released this week along with the Consumer Preview of Office 2013 were frustratingly vague about the RT version, saying only that Windows RT tablets would come bundled with a version of Office that included Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

In in response to a direct question on whether Outlook would be available for RT, a Microsoft spokesperson said “we are not sharing more specifics about ARM plans today.”

A lack of Outlook on RT tablets has important implications. Many enterprises rely heavily on Outlook, especially as the front end to Exchange mail and collaboration systems. and the lack of Outlook would eliminate a major competitive advantage for Windows tablets vs. the iPad and other tablets. Users would be stuck with the mail, contacts, and calendar programs built into, and the mail program, at least as it exists in the windows 8 Consumer Preview, is particularly weak. It’s Exchange support is limited and it does not support standard internet mail (IMAP or POP3) accounts at all.

However, as I point out in a post earlier today, Outlook 2013 shares the space and resource hungry architecture of earlier versions and implementing it on an ARM device would be highly problematic. In particular, Outlook’s storage requirements will prove very troublesome on tablets where storage is limited to a few gigabytes.

Very Quick Office Reaction: Getting the Cloud Wrong

I’ve just spent about half an hour playing with the new Office 2013 preview, so obviously this is a very preliminary reaction. There will be a lot more to say in coming weeks and months. But I do think that in its understandable enthusiasm to bring Office applications to the cloud, Microsoft has made a fundamental mistake.

I very much like the idea of syncing copies of documents to the cloud. But I want first and foremost to retain a local copy, especially when working on a laptop rather than a tablet. Here’s how I do it now: My Office apps are set to save files by default to the Documents folder on both Windows and Mac. The Documents folders, along with its many subfolders, is set up to sync automatically with SugarSync and the non-tablet systems that I use regularly are set up for full two-way sync; when I upload a new or updated document from system A, that same document is silently, but quickly, downloaded to system B. This gives me up-to-date local and cloud copies. (You can do something similar with other sync services such as Dropbox, but I have been using SugarSync since it was in beta.)

The new Office apps save by default only to CloudDrive, meaning that no permanent local copy of the file is created (a temporary file is created to save any changes made while not connected to the network.) This makes sense on Windows tablets, though not as much sense as it does on a iPad, which lacks a real user-accessible file system. It makes no sense whatever on a laptop. You can easily override the default setting to store files locally, but then you have to manually create a cloud copy. Based on lots of experience, for reasons of both security and availability, I want that local copy.

What a really want from CloudDrive integration is something that works like SugarSync and automatically saves locally and syncs to the cloud. In fact, it could usefully go a step further and check before opening a local copy to see if there is a newer version on CloudDrive and give you the choice of which one you wanted to edit. This wouldn’t be hard to implement and would provide a much better experience.

Customers May Have Forced Apple’s EPEAT Retreat

Well that didn’t take take long. Just a week after Apple announced that that it was pulling its products from EPEAT environmental certification, it reversed itself and said it would continue with the program and work with EPEAT to evolve more modern standards.

In an open letter, Bob Mansfield, Apple’s soon-to-retire senior vice president for hardware engineering, said:

“We’ve recently heard from many loyal Apple customers who were disappointed to learn that we had removed our products from the EPEAT rating system. I recognize that this was a mistake. Starting today, all eligible Apple products are back on EPEAT.”

This sort of public retreat is rare, if not unprecedented, for Apple. So what happened? As usual, we have no clue as to what led to the change and Apple isn’t talking beyond the release of the letter. But I think I can make a pretty good guess, and the primary clue is Mansfield’s first sentence.

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Related content: Does Apple Hate the Environment?
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Whether EPEAT is a good standard or not, many organizations are deeply committed to it. A fair number, mostly in the public sector, have formal commitments that require them to buy EPEAT-certified products. And Apple may have miscalculated just how important that would be.

I think the most significant pressure may have come from schools, both K-12 systems and colleges. Many governments, including federal, have EPEAT requirements, but they are not significant buyers of Macs. (Current EPEAT standards cover desktops and notebooks but not tablets or phones, so iPad and iPhone sales would not have been directly effected.) But the education market is hugely important to Apple.

As best I can tell, no institution said publicly that it would stop buying Apple products because of EPEAT, but The Boston Globe quoted Bill Allison, director of campus technology services for the University of California at Berkeley as saying: “When something like this happens it is a significant change in the landscape. We are reviewing the impact of this.”

The language in private, I suspect, was stronger and that is what most likely led Apple to accept a rare public embarrassment and reverse its decision.

The Tech.pinions Opinion Cast: An Evolving Idea

An analyst colleague of mine and I were joking recently at a major tech trade show. We thought it would be funny if we put up a table in the hallway with a sign that said Ask the Analyst and charged a fee per 5 min for our advice.

Of course this would never work but we thought it was an entertaining idea to kick around. I personally don’t listen to many Podcasts, to be honest. If I want insight or perspective I call the people I trust, they are usually analysts or executives, and we have a conversation. Yet I have been getting many emails from readers asking if we would do a podcast. So we decided to try our hand again but we decided to call it an Opinion Cast and focus more on sharing our wide ranging opinions on matters related to tech. So tomorrow in the afternoon we will have our Podcast rebranded as our Opinion Cast to stream or download.

But I wanted reach out to readers prior and see if there were any specific topics they would like to see us address on this Opinion Cast. We already have a few topics in mind but if anyone would like to submit specific topics for us to tackle we will be glad to consider them for this or future Opinion Casts.

In the future I would like to try streaming one live and letting readers chime in with questions or comments. I’m just thinking out loud here as we try to figure out how to do something valuable with the Opinion Cast.

Any thoughts, ideas, or topic suggestions are appreciated. Feel free to make them in the comments below.

Celebrate the Fourth with Warring Declarations of Internet Freedom

When the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in 1776, it was rife with divisions: north vs. south, slave vs. free, big states vs. small states. But the delegates managed to compromise on a document that remains fresh, relevant, and revolutionary. Today, things are different. So on the 236th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (in those slower times, it was passed on the 2nd and published on the 4th), we have competing declarations of internet freedom.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, and others got the ball rolling with a Declaration of Internet Freedom. Although these groups lean leftward in their political orientation, the sin of the declaration is not its partisanship but its insipidness. It’s so brief that I’ll include it in full:

We stand for a free and open Internet.

We support transparent and participatory processes for making Internet policy and the establishment of five basic principles:

Expression: Don’t censor the Internet.
Access: Promote universal access to fast and affordable networks.
Openness: Keep the Internet an open network where everyone is free to connect, communicate, write, read, watch, speak, listen, learn, create and innovate.
Innovation: Protect the freedom to innovate and create without permission. Don’t block new technologies, and don’t punish innovators for their users’ actions.
Privacy: Protect privacy and defend everyone’s ability to control how their data and devices are used.

This reminds me a little of the “Oppose Terrorism” license plates that Virginia issued after 9-11. Anyone taking a firm stand where no rational person would want to take the other side isn’t saying much. Unless you do a lot of reading between the lines based on the positions taken by the groups sponsoring the declaration on issues such as network neutrality and copyright, there’s nothing there to disagree with. Or rally around.

This declaration prompted Tech Freedom, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and other libertarian-leaning groups to come up with their own Declaration of Internet Freedom. It’s longer, more controversial, and a good bit more substantive. Though it clearly reflects its sponsors’ preferences for minimal government (“Government is the greatest obstacle to the emergence of fast and affordable broadband networks.”) it’s not overly partisan and offers much, particularly a forthright defense of free speech, that would put EFF, Free Press, and Tech Freedom on the same side of the issue.

It probably wouldn’t have taken too much effort for these groups to have reached out to each other and come up with a unified statement of rights that actually might have some impact. They actually agree on more than they disagree about, and the agreement covers most of the central issues. But today, alas, it is far too easy to get up on your electronic soapbox and shout than to do the hard work of coalition-building.

Further Thoughts on Apple and Investors

In a post this morning, Ben Bajarin speculated on what it is in investors’ thinking about Apple that keeps the stock price relatively depressed. Like Ben, I am not a financial analyst, but I think the mystery is even deeper than he suggests.

Apple’s stock price has move up smartly in recent months, but it has stayed pretty much in step with earnings–and the remarkable thing is how little investors think $1 of Apple profit is worth. The chart shows the price/earnings ratio–the recent stock price divided by per share earnings over the past 12 months–for Apple and a number of other tech companies. Apple’s PE of 14.2 actually puts it below the average of 15.4 and the median of 14.5 for the S&P 500.

None of the explanations advanced skeptically by Ben can begin to explain this. I think it is inevitable that the meteoric growth that Apple has enjoyed in recent quarters will soon slow if only because it is gradually saturating its markets–and the larger your base is, the harder it is to sustain high growth rates. But there is every reason to believe that Apple’s growth over any reasonable period in the future will exceed that of IBM, Oracle, or SAP, all of which enjoy higher PE ratios. And it makes no sense that a dollar of Google earnings is worth 24% more than a buck of Apple profit. It all seems a sort of anti-magical thinking.

The fact is that even if Apple falls to earth with slower growth and no new blockbuster products, its stock should reasonably fetch more than it does. But Apple’s PE ratio has been flat for about a year and was falling before that, so this isn’t a prediction that the price will go up anytime soon either.

(Disclosure: I do not directly own any Apple stock, though funds I invest in may.)

An Install CD? Really?

Hard drive powerhouse Western Digital is getting into the home networking business with a new line of high-speed wireless routers, some with built-in storage, that the company says are optimized for streaming media around the house. I’ll be taking a deeper look at the products and the state of home networking when I get back from a couple of weeks away.

But something struck me when I opened the box of the sample My Net N900 that WD sent me. The package contained te router, the usual butt-ugly wall wart power supply–and a yellow ethernet cable and an installation CD. I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I suddenly realized what an anachronism this was.

The CD does a nice job of leading you through the Windows setup using a direct ethernet connection. But even WD seems to realize that is is living in the past because the instructions for “Mac/Tablet/Browser” tell you to start the router, connect to it over Wi-Fi, and point your browser to 192.168.1.1, a follow the routine on-screen. (That IP address can be problematic if you are using the My Net to replace an existing wireless router that uses the 192.168.1.x address space. It should instruct you to shut off any existing Wi-Fi first.)

Disk-based setup is still common, but it is time for it to go away. Apple has made it clear that it considers the both the optical disk and the RJ-45 Ethernet port dead in laptops, and where Apple leads, everyone else eventually follows. WD properly anticipates that some people may be setting up a router in a home that has no traditional PCs with optical drives, Ethernet ports, or even the ability to install a setup program other than through an app store.

Fortunately, there are two simple alternatives available. Manufacturers can rely entirely on online setup. Or if they don’t want to rely on connectivity, a web server embedded in the device itself will do the job. Everyone should ditch the disk.

Was Winning on SOPA Bad for Tech?

I’ve spent a very interesting day at the Tech Policy Summit in Napa, but based on what I’ve heard, I’m beginning to think that the industry’s quick victory in killing the Stop Online Piracy Act this spring may be a long-term impediment to the industry’s agenda in Washington.

The problem is a lack of understanding of why tech won on SOPA or a sense that it was, in many ways, shooting fish in a barrel. The backers of SOPA made ridiculous mistakes. The bill was taken up after a single House committee hearing from which opponents of the bill were effectively excluded (one witness from Google was used as a sacrificial lamb.) Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) did not really understand his own bill and tried to force it through on a fast track, a move that served only to roil the opposition. On the opponents quickly seized on a line of attack that the bill would “break the internet.” This wasn ‘t exactly true, but supporters generally lacked the technical expertise to refute it.

These conditions will be very difficult to recreate. And getting things you want passed is orders of magnitude harder than stopping things you oppose. It is going to take sustained struggle, not a SOPA-like quick hit, to win passage of important agenda items such as visa reform.

It’s entirely understandable that entrepreneurs are quickly disgusted by the stupidity and partisan pettiness of Washington politics. But their opponents have long since learned to put up with it, day in and day out. Until the leaders of tech can such it up for the long strugggle, they are going to wait a long time for another SOPA victory.

Google, Quickoffice and Productivity Beyond X86

In an interesting move today, just weeks before Google I/O, Google has announced via their blog that they have acquired Quickoffice, a productivity suite of software, and team. This move has a number of interesting implications.

First and foremost I believe this move again signals Google’s intent to go vertical. Acquiring Quickoffice certainly gives them a differentiator for their own hardware when it comes to productivity software, should they choose to use it that way. Of course on the surface and in the short term I would expect them to bundle this productivity suite on all Android devices. This move on the outset is designed to go right after Windows on ARM (Windows RT) and the inclusion of Microsoft Office on all Windows RT devices out of the gate.

This move is largely focused on tablets. It is no industry secret that Google is in the weakest position when it comes to tablets. The iPad has continued to dominate, and most likely will for the foreseeable future, but the lack of industry confidence in Android tablets has been astounding. In fact many analysts, our firm included, have more optimism for Windows 8 based tablets which are not even in the market yet over Android tablets which have been in the market for 2 years. It is not everyday that professional forecasters and industry observers will give an advantage to an unproven and unreleased platform, yet that is exactly what has happened. This again just re-enforces the lack of confidence in Android tablets to break into the mass market.

Google will obviously seek to change all of this with their acquisition of Quickoffice. This demonstrates, to this analyst at least, that Google may be starting to understand tablets and that tablets are a viable platform for productivity. I have been of the opinion that Google had not been interested in tablet productivity and in particular tablets (or Android for that matter) in a business setting. Most of Google’s moves and posture toward this market has been focused on consumers. Just look at the renaming of their store as an example. The Google Play Store doesn’t make me think I should go purchase productivity software or applications.

The other interesting observation I would throw out is that the myth that X86 (or Intel and AMD Silicon) is the platform of choice for productivity is certainly busted. I believe I could make an extremely strong case of this point simply doing an analysis of the iPad but with Microsoft Office on Windows RT and now Quickoffice as a standard for Android, we certainly have enough evidence that ARM platforms will be fully sufficient not only computing platforms but productivity platforms.

Phil McKinney to CableLabs: Time for Some Cable Innovation?

In a fascinating move, CableLabs, the non-profit research and development arm of the cable industry, announced today that Phil McKinney, former CTO of Hewlett-Packard’s Personal Systems Group, was coming aboard is CEO. What makes this interesting is that McKinney is an innovation guru and author of the recently published Beyond the Obvious: Killer Questions the Spark Game Changing Innovation. But CableLabs is not exactly Xerox PARC.

CableLabs has been responsible for some important innovations, most notably the DOCSIS protocols for moving high-speed TCP/IP data across cable networks. But in recent years it seems to have devoted most of its energies to helping cable companies comply as grudgingly as possible with legislative and regulatory mandates that they open up their proprietary cable boxes. This has given us a series of user-hostile and sparsely deployed technologies, including OCAP, Tru2way, and CableCARD that have done as little as possible to enable advanced third-party cable boxes.

I’ve known Phil for some years and find it hard to believe he would have taken this job unless the cable companies that own CableLabs saw some real innovation as being in their interest. The industry’s value-added content delivery is threatened in the medium and long term over-the-top internet distribution and could badly use a dose of innovation.

McKinney says he will be heads down in his new job for the next three months or so, but will be ready to talk about new directions for CableLabs in the fall. As they say in the TV business, stay tuned.

Steve Jobs in Carbonite

Part of Steve Jobs’s brilliance in life was his mercurial nature, sometimes fortified by duplicitousness. He thought an Apple phone was the stupidest idea on earth until the arrival of the iPhone. He made fun of Intel processors until Apple abandoned PowerPC for x86. He was a man of firmly held opinions that could change as circumstances required.

Steve Jobs dead, however, is frozen in time. The opinions he expressed in the year or two before his passing last fall are his views forever. And anything Apple does counter to those views is treated in some quarters as a desecration of his memory. And that leads to silly pieces like Gizmodo’s 10 Changes That Must Have Steve Jobs Spinning in His Grave.

The sad truth is that we have no idea what Steve Jobs thinks, or will ever think, about anything. All we know is what he thought of certain things under the circumstances that prevailed at some point in the past.

For example, in October, 2010, Jobs said: “The reason we [won’t] make a 7-inch tablet isn’t because we don’t want to hit that price point, it’s because we think the screen is too small to express the software.” But improvements in screen technology have made it possible to do a 7″ iPad with the same 1024×768 resolution of the original iPad and the iPad 2 and a pixel density similar to the third-generation iPad. So if Apple does a 7″ iPad, will that be a repudiation of Jobs or a recognition that something important has changed?

One of Gizmodo’s 10 violations of the spirit of Jobs is that supply executives are now attending meetings once the exclusive province of engineers and designers. Maybe that reflects Tim Cook’s preferences as a supply chain guru. But it might also reflect the fact the Apple is nearly 60% bigger than it was when Jobs stepped away from active management a year or so ago and that it now a vast enterprise that necessarily has to be run in a considerably more bureaucratic way. This, by the way, is why I think Cook is actually the right CEO at the right time; some of use remember a much smaller pre-Cook Apple that constantly struggled with supply chain and channel management issues.

Of course, it’s possible that Jesus Diz’s Gizmodo post was just Gawker link bait. In which case, I apologize for linking to it.

Next Time, Samuel L. Jackson Should Try Matzoh Balls

Apple is having some fun with a TV ad in which Samuel L. Jackson tells Siri to remind him to put the gazpacho on ice. Unfortunately, when others try to replicate the experience, Sire is going to leave them with hotspacho, because she can’t seem to get that reminder right.

The problem here would seem to be a breakdown in communications between the creative types at the ad agency and people who actually use Siri on iPhones. She has a lot of trouble with the word “gazpacho.” Even when I helped by giving the context of “Spanish restaurant,” Siri had a lot of trouble with the request:
After I tried six or seven more times, she finally got it right. But when I asked Siri to rem,ind me to freeze the matzoh ball soup, she got it right the first time, with no trouble.

This little experiment mostly demonstrates the extreme sensitivity of speech systems to the language model they use. I suspect the Spanish-language version of Siri does a lot better with gazpacho, but maybe not so well with matzoh balls.

There are two lessons here. One is that the product folks should really have a close look at the ads to make sure the claims hold up. (My guess is that this one slipped through because the creative team really, really wanted Jackson’s crack about hotspacho.) And we are still a long way from speech becoming a comprehensive, everyday alternative for text entry and navigation.

A Windows 8 Problem I’m Looking Forward To

Windows 8 introduces a problem new to the annals of computing. Systems using the new Uniform Extensible Firmware Interface in place of the venerable BIOS and a solid-state storage device in place of a spinning hard disk may boot so fast that there is no way to for a human being to interrupt the process. No more F8 to get to the Windows startup menu, or F2 (or any of a number of other key combinations, depending on the manufacturer) to change system settings such a selecting the first boot device.

Windows chieftain Steven Sinofsky has a post on the Building Windows 8 blog detailing Microsoft’s response to the problem. Basically, any failure to boot normally automatically generates an option screen that lets you choose a response. Interrupting an otherwise normal boot can be accomplished through settings within Windows, then restarting.

Having spent far too many hours of my life twiddling my thumbs while Windows systems rebooted, this is one problem I am really looking forward to. (Of course, Macs have dealt with related problems for years by just having you hold down a key as you power up.)

Intel Could Use a Dose of Andy Grove

In a presentation to financial analysts on May 10, Intel CEO Paul Otellini said he was not particularly worried about the prospect of Microsoft issuing a version of Windows for ARM processors later this year. “We think [x86 is] a differentiator,” he said. “We have the advantage of the incumbency, the legacy support.”

Maybe he’s right. But it is disconcerting to hear this sort of complacency from the head of Intel, especially at a time when ARM-powered smartphones and tablets pose an unprecedented threat to Intel’s core laptop and desktop business.

I can only wonder what Andy Grove would say. Grove, who was Intel CEO from 1987 to 1998, famously wrote: “Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” Grove also once ordered an advertising campaign attacking what was then the company’s most successful product the 80286 processor, in an effort to get customers to move to the newer, much more capable, and ultimately wildly successful 80386.

Grove remains a senior adviser to Intel and has always avoided any public criticism of his successors. But I find it hard to believe he is happy watching the company he built acting so passively in the face of a threat.

Side note: Intel was actually a major player in the ARM business for some years. It bought Digital Equipment’s StrongARM business in 1998. The chips, renamed XScale, powered many handheld computers and early smartphones. Intel sold the division to Marvell in 2007.

DISH Hopper: What Goes Around Comes Around

Satellite TV operator DISH Network got a lot of attention when it announced its new Hopper DVR with a feature that “can automatically skip commercials in primetime TV – ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC in HD. Only on the Hopper. Only from DISH.”

Photo of Replay 4000 — The Replay 4000 DVR from 2002.

A cool feature, but hardly new. When ReplayTV introduced the first DVR in 1999, it included a 30-second skip-forward button, a revolutionary idea at the time. (Replay was the brainchild of Anthony Wood, who went on to found Roku.) Three years later, Replay, by then owned by SonicBLUE, introduced the Replay 4000. The new DVR included the ability to skip commercials automatically as well as a feature that allowed sharing of recorded programs with other Replay owners over the internet.

As I wrote at the time, this was viewed with great alarm by Hollywood, and the studios predictably rose up and crushed SonicBLUE, which had a fatal penchant for provoking legal challenges. But Replay, which launched a bit before the more successful TiVo, played an important part in revolutionizing how we watch television.

Back to the Future: Windows RT Browser Wars

This morning, I had the strange feeling that I was back in 1997. With Google cheering them on, Mozilla complained that Microsoft was unfairly excluding browsers other than Internet Explorer from devices, expected to be mainly tablets, running the forthcoming version of Windows designed for ARM processors.

A bit of background: Browsing on Windows 8 for Intel/AMD processors will be open to all comers. But Windows RT, the ARM version, places many restrictions on applications. Microsoft says the only applications with full, desktop-style access to the system with be a version of Office, the Explorer file manager, and the Internet Explorer 10 browser.

Strictly speaking, Mozilla is right. It does not appear that browsers other than IE will be allowed on Windows RT. But so what? Microsoft was nailed in the turn-of-the-century antitrust suit for using Windows’ mono[poly position on desktop computers to restrain competition in the browser market. But Windows’ monopoly isn’t what it once was, and Win RT doesn’t have a monopoly of anything. We have yet to see a fully functioning version of it demonstrated publicly.

Furthermore, Apple, which arguably does have a monopoly (and remember, a monopoly is only illegal if it is obtained illegally or if it is abused) in tablets, doesn’t welcome browsers other than Safari on iOS devices. There are alternative browsers available in the app Store, but they are skins slapped on Safari. Apple would seem a more appropriate target for frozen out Google and Mozilla.

Maybe this is just reflex, or maybe Microsoft seems an easier target because of the antitrust history. But the Modified Final Judgment that settled the case lapsed a year ago, though there is still ongoing supervision as a result of a case brought by the European Commission.

That may be what’s behind a curious comment attributed to Microsoft Deputy General Counsel David Heiner. CNET reports that Heiner told Mozilla that Windows RT “isn’t Windows anymore.” That may just be a lawyerly way of saying that Windows RT is a new product, outside the scope of previous antitrust judgments.

iPad Magazine Apps–A Rare Failure

Technology Review Editor Jason Pontin has written an insightful article on why magazine apps on the iPad have been a huge disappointment to publishers–and why TR is abandoning its apps in favor of an HTML 5 web site.

When the iPad came out two years ago, many in the magazine industry, along with Apple itself, hailed the tablet as the savior of the troubled publication business. While the iPad has vastly exceeded original expectations for most classes of apps, magazines have been a dismal flop. Pontin explains why better than I ever could, so read his piece.

But I have to admit I am not all that surprised. The goal of most apps seemed to be to recreate the print product in electronic form, a goal that never felt right. And the apps tended to be big, slow, and buggy.

I still get a bunch of print magazines, but the only publication for which I have a paid online-only subscription is the Kindle Fire edition of The New Yorker. The New Yorker works as an app better than most simply because it is almost entirely text, laid out in the most boring way imaginable, so the design elements, such as they are, survive. That said, I actually hate the New Yorker‘s Kindle app. It’s slow and buggy. It violates Kindle user interface standards by requiring a vertical swipe to turn pages; a horizontal swipe takes you to the next or previous article. And it won’t let me rotate the Fire to get that annoying power button out of the way.

But I was surprised by Pontin’s explanation of just how dismal the economics of the app have been. It looks like magazine publishers will have to go on looking for their salvation.

How Apple Won’t Become a Mobile Carrier

At GigaOm, Whitey Bluestein writes that Apple’s next move is becoming a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), buying wholesale spectrum from operators such as Verizon wireless and AT&T and offering an Apple0branded service directly to customers. I’ll never say never, but this seems extremely unlikely.

Bluestein errs in his description of the history of Apple’s carrier relationship. The original 2007 deal with AT&T was revolutionary (for the U.S.) because it eliminated the carrier subsidy. But after just two months, Apple cut the price from $600 to $400. And when the iPhone 3G was announced in June, 2008, Apple went to a traditional subsidy model. Carriers other than AT&T were unwilling to come aboard otherwise, and even AT&T was happier with a familiar, although arguably worse, deal. Apple is more powerful vis-a-vis carriers than any handset maker has been, but it doesn’t unilaterally call the shots.

The MVNO business in the U.S. has been one epic fail. Companies from Disney to Richard Branson’s Virgin empire have tried it only to flee after a relatively short time. Of the major U.S. carriers, only Sprint has been very interested in wholesaling spectrum; both Boost Mobile and Virgin Mobile USA, the leading U.S. MVNOs, are owned by Sprint. And Sprint’s network won’t do for Apple unless Apple were willing to pump in the billions in capital Sprint needs to build out a 4G network.

This is not a business Apple really wants to get into. It comes with a boatload of federal and state regulation, something Apple has always worked hard to avoid.

But most important, a major Bluestein argument doesn’t hold water: “By offering mobile service with iPhones and iPads, the company could provide the full Apple experience to its users.” No, because it would be dependent on carriers’ existing network, it would be providing the same lousy experience AT&T and Verizon customers get today. But Apple, not the carriers, would get the blame for the dead spots, slow data rates, dropped calls, and lousy voice quality. Apple could certainly improve on billing (though much of the complexity of billing is the result of an impenetrable thicket of federal and state taxes and fees that Apple couldn’t avoid) and could offer more rational, though probably not cheaper, data plans. But the Apple experience is the result of the company’s top-to-bottom control over its products. And that is exactly what it would be unable to provide as an MVNO.

And that is the primary reason why Apple is going to avoid this business.

It’s Not Apple’s Responsibility To Pay More Taxes

Most of the response to The New York Times‘ takeout on how Apple avoids billions of dollars in taxes has implied that Apple is doing something wrong and somehow has a moral responsibility to be paying more. Nonsense. As Arik Hesseldahl wrote at All Things Digital, “The implication the story leaves a reader with — that Apple is somehow doing society a disservice by not paying its fair share of corporate taxes — is simply wrong on many levels.”

Apple actually has a duty to its shareholders, its employees, even its customers to run its business in the most efficient, effective, and ultimately profitable way possible. And that responsibility includes not paying more than is required in taxes.

I have written about taxation for many years and closely followed the Reagan tax cuts of 1981, their partial repeal on toe corporate side in 1984, and the tax reform debate of 1986. Ridiculous tactics like the “double Irish with a Dutch sandwich,” as described by the Times are nothing new. The 1981 tax bill created a way that money-losing companies could effectively sell their losses at a profit.

It’s fun to pick on Apple these days and the company can certainly afford it. But every well run company has mastered the art of tax avoidance. The moves that benefit individual companies create weird distortions and inefficiencies for the economy as a whole. General Electric, which figured out how to make a fortune off the trade in tax losses in the early 80s, is the past master at it.

The real lesson of the Times story is about the tax code, not Apple. It shows both how badly the law needs fixing and how difficult it will be to fix; every loophole is someone’s billion dollar opportunity.

Windows on ARM May Get Its Own Brand

The Wall Street Journal‘s Don Clark is reporting that Microsoft is considering calling the version of Windows that will run on ARM chips something other than Windows 8, the name expected to be used for the Intel/AMD version. But I can only hope that his belief that the Windows-on-ARM operating system may be called Windows RT is wrong.

First, it’s a lousy name. It does not fall trippingly off the tongue. The best you can say is that it is better than WOA, hard-core tech-speak for Windows-on-ARM. Windows Tablets are going to need all the marketing help they can get and something with a little more pizzazz would be helpful.

Second and more important, Windows RT would be a really confusing name, because of its extreme similarity to WinRT, which is how developers usually refer to the programming model for Windows 8 Metro apps. Among developers, programs written for Metro as usually referred to as WinRT apps. In theory, at least, all WinRT apps should run on both Windows 8 and Windows RT, if those are the names Microsoft chooses. But the whole thing seems unnecessarily confusing.