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iPhone: the interface’s the thing

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The Wall Street Journal asks whether people will buy Apple’s slick new iPhone for $5-600. Of course they will — if it’s as good and as easy to use as it looked in Steve Jobs’s presentation. (Here’s some coverage: David Pogue’s test-drive; John Markoff’s story; Lev Grossman in Time; Farhad Manjoo in Salon.)

The original iPod came in at a similar price point and pundits asked similar questions. The value of Apple’s innovation pretty much obliterated the price sensitivity of the market, and by the time the early-adopters all had their iPods and Apple started going after a wider market, it was able to bring the price down some (and add more value by continuing to improve the product).

No, the question about the iPhone isn’t, “Will people pay for it?” It’s simply, “Can it really be as easy as Jobs made it look?”

Mobile-device interfaces are such a total disaster today that many of us simply never learn to use more than a fraction of their features — and even when we learn them, we tend to forget them immediately. Phones have become so disposable anyway, why waste your time learning all their dumb menus? Blackberries and Treos are considerably better, but they’re still full of compromises, and they typically do a lot less than the iPhone — which in effect is a tiny Macintosh optimized for phone and music functions.

If the iPhone interface is as intuitive as Jobs promised, then people will line up to get it regardless of its hefty price. It will have succeeded, to paraphrase Alan Kay’s famous utterance about the original Mac, in being the first cellphone interface good enough to be worth criticizing.
[tags]apple, steve jobs, iphone[/tags]

Yahoo reorg: “audience” over here, “publishers” over there

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Interesting. Yahoo announces a corporate reorganization with the following explanation:

Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, today announced a reorganization of its structure and management to align its operations with its key customer segments — audiences, advertisers and publishers.

Nothing unusual there. Sounds like your good old-fashioned off-line media company. Except, hold on a minute: Hasn’t Yahoo spent the last few years repositioning itself as the big Internet media company which understands that its “audience” and “publishers” are the same people?

This is the message I have heard in conference talks by Yahoo exec Bradley Horowitz; it’s the message Yahoo gave by acquiring Flickr and Del.icio.us; it’s the message of the great success of Yahoo’s “Hack Day” events, which deliberately blurred the line between the corporate “us” and “them” in the developer community. Google may have more PhDs and keener algorithms, this vision of Yahoo had it, but Yahoo understood the social dynamics of the new, user-driven Web far better than the competition. Or so it seemed.

So either (a) the message never really made it to the top of the company; (b) it did, but now it’s being jettisoned, which would be too bad; or (c) the reorg will need another reorg real soon.
[tags]yahoo, yahoo reorg[/tags]

Post departures spark sinking-ship suspicions

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This week two well-known Washington Post journalists upped and quit their newsroom to start a new venture on the Net. That got tongues wagging across the blogosphere — and across the print business as well. In some quarters the action was granted watershed-like status. Brave souls striking forth from a crumbling old world into the wilderness? Or, er, rodents fleeing a listing mothership?

The hubbub simply sounds quaint to this grizzled veteran of the flight-from-print-to-Web meme. This isn’t the start of something big; it’s the latest in a long, long line of defections that have been piling up for many years. Chris Nolan notes some recent examples, including her own, in a letter to Romenesko; I flashed back somewhat further in time.

When a half-dozen of us left the S.F. Examiner newsroom en masse in 1995 to start Salon our colleagues looked at us like we were nuts. Give up good union jobs? Nobody wanted to read on the Web, anyway! John Markoff wrote in the New York Times that our departure was a harbinger of a new world in which newly independent “tribes” of journalists would break free from their corporate overlords and light out for the new territories.

I never felt very tribal, myself. I just know I’d rather help build something new and exciting than work for something old and valuable where all I could do was watch helplessly while its owners gutted and dismantled it. At Web 2.0 Roger McNamee repeated a point I’ve heard before: The newspaper industry is not doomed, it’s committing suicide. Its managers and owners have decided to “harvest” its value with 24 percent profit margins rather than invest the money to move its assets into a new era and onto a new platform.

In other words, you might say, journalists aren’t abandoning newspapers for the Web; rather, newspapers are abandoning journalism to the Web. Not all newspapers at the same pace, of course, and not all at once, and not without lots of fights. But the process is real, it has been underway for over a decade, and though it will take decades more to unfold it shows no sign of being reversible. The only thing notable about this week’s Post story is that the newsroom exodus is beginning to reach those places — like the Post, or the Times, or the Journal — where print journalism is likely to last longest.
[tags]journalism, washington post, salon, web journalism, roger mcnamee[/tags]

Open source: Linux TVs and “virtual piecework”

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I recently joined the legions of Americans upgrading their TV sets, trading in my trusty and still functional (but awfully faded) 20-year-old RCA box for a fancy new Pioneer plasma display. I’m the sort of consumer-electronics purchaser who actually reads the manual; flipping through the Pioneer’s book, I nearly jumped out of my seat when I discovered the entire text of the GNU Public License. Yes, it seems that somewhere in its innards, this TV is running Linux!

In other open-source news, the Wall Street Journal ran an interesting lead piece the other day about Zimbra — the open-source challenger to Microsoft Outlook ‘n’ Exchange. I’ve followed the Zimbra saga from afar because the product is in certain ways a competitor to Chandler, the project whose story I tell in my book. (Yes, Zimbra’s name derives from the Talking Heads song, which is in turn a borrowing from Dada poet Hugo Ball.) The Journal piece, by Robert Guth, was a thorough description of how a modest-sized startup company is leveraging the work of an open-source community.

What I found strange about it wasn’t the idea that, nearly a decade after the concept of open-source software development was first introduced to the mainstream (and almost as many years after Andrew Leonard’s groundbreaking work on the subject at Salon, that I was proud to edit), the whole idea can still be framed as a novelty. No, what was really off about the piece was its headlines: “Virtual Piecework…Trolling the Web for Free Labor.”

I suppose there is still a faction in the software world that dismisses the complex social and behavioral structures that have created substantial software products like Firefox, Apache and the Linux in my TV set; in this view, open-source developers are simply chumps who give away “free labor.” And I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised to find that stance echoed in the Journal. But I was anyway. Guth’s piece was a smart introduction to the process — at once idealistic and pragmatic — of distributed open-source software development; the reductive headline was jarringly disconnected from the content that followed.
[tags]open source, linux, plasma tvs, wall street journal[/tags]

Web 2.0: Fear of IPOs

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This Web 2.0 conference is almost exclusively focused on the business end of the phenomenon. And the defining characteristic of this iteration of the tech-industry business cycle is that virtually no one other than Google has gone public. It’s as if the excesses of the dot-com bubble left the very term “IPO” tainted. It’s also the case that this time around, the market, very sanely, isn’t that keen on supporting IPOs for companies that haven’t demonstrated profitability. So the “exit strategy” of choice today for startup companies isn’t to go public; it’s to be acquired by Google or Yahoo (or maybe AOL or Microsoft).

Yesterday evening, Barry Diller advised a questioner who asked how you could “build value” today: “Don’t sell it. Just ride it. Equity is built by holding on. Sometime you gotta sell a little of it. But hold onto it if you have something of value.” (Here’s more on Diller’s talk.)

This advice has its limits, however. A successful Web service start up reaches a point, if it manages to attract millions of users, where it has to start getting really good at things like datacenters and customer support. Maybe that’s not what the founders are interested in. Or maybe it’s dauntingly expensive. At that point, selling out to a Google or Yahoo makes perfect sense. These companies are explicitly and unashamedly in the business of doing outsourced R&D for the big guys. That’s “building value,” too.

But staying independent is more fun. Look at GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons — a colorful ex-Marine whose “I’m just a dumb guy who flunked fifth grade” serves as cover for a shrewd business mind.

Parsons told the conference about his near-IPO experience earlier this year; he said he spent $3 million preparing his SEC filings and courting bankers, only to discover that the bankers and the financial press were focused exclusively on “short term accounting paper profits.” Parsons is a believer in operating cash flow instead. He’s proud of his company, with its 920 support reps actually answering the phone when customers call in about the domain names they’ve bought. But all he heard from the public market’s representatives was, “When are you going to get your customers to use self-help so you can cut your support staff?” So he pulled the plug on the IPO.

I cringed at Parsons’ unabashed enthusiasm for ads that plant his logo on the chests of well-endowed women (“”Because that’s where every guy would be looking”). But most Web 2.0-style execs could learn something from his understanding of the basics of retail psychology: “People love the convenience and speed that comes with the Net. But when it comes to resolving problems or learning features, people much prefer to deal with other people.”
[tags]Web 2.0, web2con, barry diller, bob parsons, ipos[/tags]

Web 2.0: Server husbandry

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From Eric Schmidt’s argument that network-based computing would prove irresistibly more reliable than alternatives, to Jeff Bezos’s pitch for Amazon’s on-demand storage and computing services as a means to “let people spend more time and dollars on the differentiated part of what they’re doing, less on the undifferentiated,” to Microsoft exec Debra Charpaty’s presentation about the nuts and bolts of building and running datacenters, one focus of this Web 2.0 conference has been on the server side of the old client/server dichotomy.

Web services are great, the argument goes, but don’t forget about what it takes to deploy and maintain them. “The Cloud” is a nice metaphor for everything that’s “out there” on network-based services, Charpaty argued; then she showed slides of endless racks of machines and squat, windowless buildings sprouting on desolate flats, and declared, “This is the real cloud.”

In one sense, these vast, electricity-hogging, heat-dissipating, cycles-generating structures are the new mainframes. Yet they are also the nerve-centers for an approach to computing that’s more distributed than ever before.

How do the businesses at the heart of the Web industry manage to juggle their determination to dominate the increasingly centralized business of providing the new basics, like storage and raw network-based processing, with their professed dedication to the values that shaped the personal computing industry that gave birth to theirs — values like freedom of speech, individual empowerment, and the unlocking of personal creativity?

That’s the big question underlying all the other controversies more visible on the surface here, like Net Neutrality or intellectual property or open APIs or data mobility.
[tags]web2con, web 2.0, web services[/tags]

Web 2.0 launch pad

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While we clink glasses over House victories and bite fingernails over squeaker Senate races, here are some notes from today’s sessions at Web 2.0.

Thirteen new companies offered five-minute pitches for new products and services at the “Launchpad” event here.

The one that jumped out at me, unsurprisingly, given my history of interest in personal-information managers and the focus of my book on one such project, was Stikkit. It’s a personal-information manager (and sharing tool) built around a sticky-note metaphor. It looks like it has a heritage stretching all the way back to the old-fashioned “terminate and stay resident” note-taking programs like Sidekick and free-form PIMs like Lotus Agenda. Stikkit is led by Rael Dornfest, who I know from his work organizing many editions of the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I made a note to myself to explore it further tonight, but it appears to be down at the moment. More later!

I was also intrigued by Klostu, an attempt to create a “super-social network” linking together the separate islands of the “Boardscape” — the thousands of disconnected message boards across the Net. This strikes me as smart: there were tons of communities sharing stuff online long before anyone had coined the term Web 2.0, and it makes a lot of sense to serve them.

The presenter for Instructables, a site featuring user-contributed “how-to” projects, repeatedly emphasized that his service’s most important feature is the passion of his users. He’s right: more than spiffy software or innovative business models, that’s what makes any Web venture — “2.0” or not — matter.

Here are the rest of the projects:

Omnidrive and Sharpcast: Two different approaches to syncing stores of content across multiple machines and devices.

Turn: Automated ad targeting.

Sphere: “Less geeky” blog search.

Adify: Instant advertising networks.

3B: Three-dimensional, walk-through Web browser.

ODesk: Hiring market and distributed management system for software developers.

Venyo: Reputation management service for bloggers.

Timebridge: Outlook add-on for meeting scheduling.
[tags]web 2.0, web2con, launch pad, stikkit, klostu, instructables[/tags]

Random morning notes

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I’m in Seattle today on business. So as you would imagine the local paper here pays special attention to, among other topics, all things Microsoft.

But I was struck by the near-Kremlinological level of focus in a front-page item in the Seattle Times business section that reported on the failure of Microsoft to send Windows Vista off to manufacturing according to schedule — or, wait a minute, it’s not really a schedule, it’s just that a Times reporter saw a sign in a building window a week ago that said the new operating system would be off to manufacturing in a week. But now it seems that was wrong.

This kind of Vatican-smoke-signals reading felt more like trade-journal stuff or material from an obsessive blogger. In fact it’s both; the real story — in more detail and with a far more appropriately light tone — comes from veteran Microsoft watcher Mary Jo Foley’s blog.

Meanwile, Microsoft has released IE7. Walt Mossberg points out that mostly it’s about catching IE users up with features that Firefox has always had. IE users get tabs! This is a good thing, don’t get me wrong — it’s just so long in coming that it feels like it barely matters. Opera gave me tabs so long ago I can’t even remember life without them.

Finally: Front page of the Journal today features reporter Pui-Wing Tam’s personal account of her year-long surveillance by the leak-crazed Hewlett-Packard investigators. At the bottom of the front page: an H-P ad. (This is either the first or one of the first times the Journal has placed advertising on its front page.) Is this a plain old “whoops”? A sign of how airtight the Journal keeps the seal between church and state? Or an act of corporate contrition (“We spied on you, we’re sorry, here’s some business”)? Who knows? It’s certainly eyebrow-raising.
[tags]microsoft, vista, ie7, hewlett-packard[/tags]

Ballmer explains Windows delays — or, how Vista is like Iraq

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Steve Ballmer was interviewed in Saturday’s Times. Noted:

Q. What was the lesson learned in Windows Vista? After all, it wasn’t supposed to ship more than five years after Windows XP.

A. No. No, it wasn’t. We tried to re-engineer every piece of Windows in one big bang. That was the original post-Windows XP design philosophy. And it wasn’t misshapen. It wasn’t executed, but it wasn’t misshapen. We said, let’s try to give them a new file system and a new presentation system and a new user interface all at the same time. It’s not like we had them and were just trying to integrate them. We were trying to develop and integrate at the same time. And that was beyond the state of the art.

This is at once an unusually candid and an oddly defensive statement.

Ballmer is saying that, in 2001-2, as Microsoft pondered the next phase of Windows’ evolution post-XP, the company deliberately chose to “re-engineer every piece of Windows in one big bang.” It’s a telling choice of phrase. In the software development world, “big bang” (typically used in “big bang integration”) is used to describe a bet-it-all strategy that involves building lots of parts of a system separately and waiting until the end to hook them up and hope they play nicely together.

So Ballmer is essentially admitting that the “design philosophy” of the new Windows was founded on a risky, widely discredited approach. Then he turns around and says that it wasn’t “misshapen” — twice.

Misshapen? Is this a new buzzword I’ve somehow missed? Did the Times reporters mistranscribe “mistaken”? What is Ballmer talking about?

Then he says, “It wasn’t executed.” Note the passive voice, correct for it: “We didn’t execute it.” Which means, “We didn’t do it.” That’s, you know, obvious, I’d think.

Then Ballmer closes the explanation by declaring that the problem wasn’t one of integration; it was even worse than that — it was that Microsoft, the largest and most successful software company in the world, set out to simultaneously “develop and integrate” new versions of all the core functions of its central product. Now, in 2006, the company understands that this was “beyond the state of the art.” But back in 2001-2, they didn’t see that.

This is a fascinating rationalization. I’m loathe to draw too facile a comparison between the tribulations of a technology company and the drama of global conflict. But here, I think, there’s a clear and illuminating parallel between Microsoft’s hubris in this era and the Bush administration’s overreaching in Iraq — two phenomena that overlap almost precisely on the historical timeline.

And no, of course I don’t mean to suggest that there is any moral equivalence, or that the sad saga of a software product’s delay is in any way an event of equal import to the tragedy of an unnecessary war of choice resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths. But there are some similarities, too, to wit:

Bush’s team — chests puffed large from its success in invading Afghanistan post-9/11 — ignored conventional wisdom and disregarded expert intelligence and invaded Iraq, only to discover that the effort to control and transform that country was beyond its means.

Gates’ team — surveying a decimated post-dotcom industry landscape as the “sole superpower” of technology — simiarly ignored conventional wisdom and disregarded expert knowledge. Incremental development? Continuous integration? They are for mere mortals. Microsoft, with its mountain of cash and its armies of developers, could bring brute force to bear on the most intractable of large-systems development problems. The company would rip out the guts of all of Windows’ key subsystems and renovate them at the same time — because it was invincible!

The result was predictable. Now a more humbled Microsoft is limping to the finish line with a version of Windows that — whether users find it reat or so-so or terrible — will always be overshadowed by the ambitious claims once made for it. In the context of that falling off, Ballmer’s statement is positively bizarre.
[tags]microsoft, steve ballmer, windows, vista[/tags]

Microsoft sniffed at “acquiring YouTube’s technology”

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This little tidbit from the Journal’s day-one story on the Google/YouTube deal caught my eye:

A Microsoft spokeswoman said the company “evaluated acquiring this type of technology several months ago” but decided to build its own service, a test version of which opened recently.

It may be foolish to read too much into an unnamed spokesperson’s boilerplate wording, but it is unwittingly illuminating.

YouTube’s “technology” is smart: the company made a good bet on making posting videos really easy — it did for Web video what AOL did a decade ago to help people get online. But the technology itself is something that Google, or Microsoft, could duplicate for a tiny fraction of YouTube’s price tag.

Google traded its stock not for YouTube’s technology but for its massive and growing community of users. That Microsoft would describe the deal as “acquiring technology” is an indication that it’s still thinking like a packaged-software-goods company.
[tags]google, youtube, microsoft[/tags]