Posts Tagged: ken segall

iPhone / observatory — 6 Comments
13
Oct 11

The Apple critics’ endless loop

When it comes to assessing new products from Apple, there are two kinds of people in the world: critics and customers.

Seemingly, only a small number of critics have the skill to think like customers. Because collectively, the majority seems to make the mistake with each new Apple product launch.

When Apple unveiled iPhone 4S last week, it was widely greeted as a “modest” upgrade. These reactions gave birth to negative mainstream press, such as an MSNBC story that referred to the “tepid response” to iPhone 4S. Bear in mind, the hands-on reviews were yet to come and customers had yet to offer any response, tepid or otherwise.

Then, surprise surprise. iPhone 4S pre-orders begin, and the hands-on reviews get published. These reviews have been unanimously positive, some even using the “magic” word. AT&T reported the biggest first-day sales of any phone in its history. All told, Apple sold over a million of them.

That’s because there is nothing modest about iPhone 4S. As I mentioned the other day, functionally it contains three major improvements (dual-core processor, Siri, better camera), compared to the iPhone 4, which contained four (processor, better camera, Retina Display, FaceTime).

It may well be, as some have theorized, that Apple will now settle into a pattern of form-factor change every two years, since two-year contracts make it tough to upgrade annually. But this hardly means that the innards will suffer from neglect.

Of course, we shouldn’t be surprised at the 4S reviews. iPad, the great game changer, received not one but two batches of “underwhelmed” responses — one for the first iPad, the other for iPad 2. Judging by the enormity of the iPad revolution, it becomes even sillier to think about those initial responses. “Just a big iPod touch.” “No breakthrough technology.” Only a minority could see the revolution within. iPad 2 got the same “modest upgrade” treatment from the critics, followed by the same “I need one right now” response from the customers.

So history repeats with iPhone 4S. What many technology writers fail to consider is that real people aren’t technology writers. They just want a reliable phone that will dazzle them with the latest features — and iPhone 4S does a pretty good job of delivering.

apple / observatory / steve jobs — 8 Comments
10
Oct 11

Steve: bringing out the best and worst in us

The outpouring of reactions to Steve’s death has been nothing less than astounding. If you were so disposed — and millions apparently were — you could have spent hours and hours reading the various takes on Steve’s life.

Some are reverential. Some go out of their way to be balanced. Unfortunately, a few live at the intersection of insensitive and clueless.

As someone who worked with Steve, I understand and respect those who point out the two sides of the man. He certainly wasn’t an angel. But one can debate forever whether an angel could ever have driven people to create the wonders they did.

What’s hard to accept are the opinions of those who so resent Steve that they can’t even accept the obvious — and will cheerfully insult those who were emotionally distraught over Steve’s death.

To me, people like this have about as much value as those who would picket the funeral of a soldier killed in service of his country.

Gawker reached a new low last week when it published an article by Hamilton Nolan entitled “Steve Jobs was not God.”

Nolan acknowledges Steve’s death as a devastating loss to friends and family, but “The rest of you? Calm down.” To those distraught over Steve’s death, he says, “this type of one-upmanship of public displays of grief is both unbecoming and undeserved.” More crudely, he says “Steve Jobs was great at what he did. There’s no need to further fellate the man’s memory.”

After displaying his heartlessness, Nolan goes on to display his lack of perception. “He made good computers… good phones… good music players… he sold them well… he got obscenely rich…. He did not meaningfully reduce poverty, or make life-saving discoveries, or end wars or heal the sick or befriend the friendless.”

Steve’s revolutions did all of the things Nolan denies, and more. Steve is the one who opened PC makers’ eyes to a better way. His devices are transforming medicine and education. His inventions — and the many that copied them — have helped people rise up against those who have long denied their freedom. They’ve enabled people to embark on careers that were never possible before.

I’ve seen the argument that if we give Steve that kind of credit, we should give the same credit to ExxonMobil. Hey, if it weren’t for their fuel, rescue vehicles could never reach disaster areas with help.

Not quite. The difference is that Steve saw the power of technology way back at the beginning. The lure of personal computers was that they allowed ordinary people to do amazing things. It’s true that no one, including Steve, could foretell exactly what people might accomplish or invent using computers. But he sure knew that this kind of technology had the power to change the world. Empowerment was his passion.

I’m not sure what Nolan’s problem is. Hatred, jealousy, you decide. Whatever it is, it’s made him certifiably blind. He concludes by pointing out that he’s never owned an Apple product, yet “here I am, talking on phones, typing on computers, and reading the Internet every day.” You know, I’ve never owned a Ford, but I still drive a car. Why all the fuss about Henry Ford?

There are a few lines in that old Think different commercial that sums the way the world responds to people like Steve:

You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward.

Technology deniers like Nolan devote themselves to the vilifying. But even in his cluelessness, Nolan can’t ignore — because Steve Jobs changed his world as much as it did yours and mine.

apple / apple news / iPhone / observatory / strategy — 13 Comments
5
Oct 11

Tale of the misnamed iPhone

What’s in a name? Judging by the cries of despair echoing in the night, apparently plenty.

Before yesterday morning’s iPhone event at Apple, the world was consumed by rumors. Seemed like we’d either see an iPhone 4S, an iPhone 5 or both. The 4S would be the economy model while the 5 would be the giant leap that got us all excited.

What we got was the iPhone 4S only. Damn! They gave us the puny one. That little baby step beyond the 4. Woe is us.

I do think Apple made a mistake. But wasn’t the phone — it was the name.

The name iPhone 4S sent the message loud and clear that this new iPhone was an incremental improvement. Meanwhile, nothing could be farther from the truth.

If Apple’s new baby was unveiled as iPhone 5, I doubt that we’d be reading articles with titles like Apple disappoints fans with modest iPhone 4 update and No iPhone 5 and no Steve Jobs send Apple shares lower.

The changes in this generational shift are actually very much in line with the changes in the last one.

When we moved from 3GS to 4, we got the Retina Display (a big leap in displays), the A4 chip (a big leap in speed), FaceTime (major new capability) and a better camera (from 3 megapixels to 5).

In this move from 4 to 4S, we get the A5 chip (a big, dual-core leap in speed), Siri (a major new capability) and a better camera (from 5 megapixels to 8, plus face recognition). So iPhone 4 delivered four major advances while iPhone 4S delivers three. But then 4S tosses in full 1080p HD video with stabilization, plus an extra hour of talk time.

So why is the iPhone 4 a huge leap and iPhone 4S only a baby step? iPhone 4S looks just like iPhone 4. And design is a very big deal, for Apple more than any other company.

One could say that Apple was just being honest. They did the same thing in the move from iPhone 3 to iPhone 3GS. The body style was unchanged, so the model number stayed the same.

But Apple, of all companies, should understand the marketing impact of a word. Or, in this case, a number. The name speaks volumes, and this name said “modest update.” That’s why people are referring to it that way — not because its improvements are insignificant.

If they called it iPhone 5, I believe things would be different today. Some would have written that the changes were modest, but those comments would have been quickly forgotten as the lines started forming again.

The happy ending, though, is that this little episode will be quickly forgotten anyway. Just like Antennagate. The launch details may get technology writers in a stir, but they have little consequence in the real world. To most, iPhone 4S will simply be the latest version of a great phone with great new features.

So why do I even bother mentioning it? It’s because episodes like this are just unnecessary self-inflicted wounds. There was no need for a bad headline to appear on the front page of CNN.com, and little things do add up over time.

I wish Apple had just called it like it is. And what it is, is an iPhone 5.

apple / apple news / iPod / observatory / strategy — 2 Comments
3
Oct 11

iPod’s last gleaming

Damn, I love product announcement weeks.

The joy of the big reveal. The expert over-analysis. The traditional pouncing upon Apple for some perceived infraction.

But in all the guesswork going on about iPhone 5, I’m struck that there’s so little attention being paid to our old and dear friends, the iPod family.

Since the beginning of time, Apple has thrown a party every September to celebrate the annual refreshing of the iPod line. For Apple fans, the September iPod event has been the starting bell for the holiday gift-buying season.

This year, we didn’t get a September event. I didn’t see a lot of grousing about that from the press or the bloggers, which probably just reflects the reality. It was fun while it lasted, but iPod isn’t the big attraction anymore.

Recent rumors have it that the iPod shuffle and iPod classic will soon be sent to iPod heaven. This makes perfect sense. There really isn’t much point to the shuffle now that the nano is almost as tiny, attaches with a clip, and actually has a screen. A touch-screen, no less.

The classic is practically creaking with age, and could easily be replaced by an iPod touch with beefed up memory.

So it seems that this year’s iPod announcement will be more about end-of-life than new life. And if that’s the case, it hardly deserves a big party. In fact, it’s really more deserving of a demotion to One More Thing status.

Surely Tim Cook is looking for some fun and respectful ways to echo his mentor, and this would make perfect sense. With some cool improvements to the surviving iPods, he could present them as being so good that the other models aren’t even needed anymore. It’s either that or use the iPod news as part of the warm-up to the main event.

The real story, of course, is that with the widening audience for iPhone, iPods have simply become less important. The numbers are declining. Apple isn’t even advertising them anymore.

In fact, it’s not hard to envision a time when iPod nano becomes the last iPod standing. It can do the one thing iPhone can’t do — go anywhere, including the gym. Seems that one day iPod touch will just be an iPhone, with the option of activating the phone part.

If it’s true that the iPod line is contracting, we should have a moment of silence out of respect. It’s almost hard to remember now, but iPod is the device that changed everything. It was the first of Apple’s modern trilogy of revolutions, paving the way for iPhone and iPad.

So thank you, iPod, for everything you’ve done. See you again next September. Maybe.

apple / apple news / iPhone / observatory — 3 Comments
29
Sep 11

iPhone 5 and the riddle of the sphinx

I’m not sure why this tickles me so, but it does.

We know that any move by Apple sets off wild speculation, but this time it was better than than ever. Within minutes of the official iPhone 5 launch invitation going out, articles were being written to “decode” its contents.

Look! There’s a “one” in the phone icon! That means no second model! Yep. It could also mean you have one message, and you’re looking at it.

Look! It says “Let’s talk iPhone.” Talk? Don’t you get it? Real voice recognition is here! It could also mean there’s one message for you, and you’re looking at it.

I wouldn’t normally get swept up in such things, but there are three other obvious clues here and nobody seems to have noticed:

1. The Push Pin. Look closely at that Map icon. See where the push pin is pointing? Not to Infinite Loop. It’s pointing to the middle of De Anza Blvd. That’s right. This event will make history (though the traffic noise may be a problem).

2. Form Factor. Sure, that’s always been the phone icon. It may also be the shape of iPhone 5. It’s been hidden under our noses all this time. They’re toying with us.

3. The Second Hand. The second hand on the clock is conspicuous because it’s atop the minute hand. Get it? “Second hand”? Apple will announce a new program offering second-hand iPhones. It’s obvious.

Let’s see who’s right.

apple / observatory / software / technology — 17 Comments
27
Sep 11

Apple’s occasionally annoying need to change

Apple has always been terrifically good at changing things. Their list of firsts in hardware and software is as impressive as it gets.

Sometimes, change feels awkward. Then the more you live with it, you realize it’s a better idea and you need to just get with the system.

Other times, the more you live with it, the more you want to find the guy who dreamed it up and slap him around a bit.

Natural Scrolling had the potential to be annoying in this way, but Apple had the good sense to make it optional. Personally, I turned it off. “Natural” is whatever feels natural to you. The old way felt natural to me, so I unchecked the option and never looked back. (Or is it that I never looked forward?)

But there’s one change in Lion that I can’t turn off, and it frustrates me every time I use it. Which is often. I’m talking about the death of Save As… and the emergence of Duplicate and Save a Version.

The problem is, now it takes me twice as many steps to accomplish the same thing.

My needs are simple. I write. I assume there are a lot of people out there like me. Oftentimes, before I perform radical surgery on a document, I’ll want to make sure I keep the current version intact. In Snow Leopard, I’d use the Save As… command. I’d give the document a new name and continue writing. Two steps. Fast.

With Lion’s “improvement,” now I have to choose the Duplicate command. This opens a new document with the word “Copy” appended to the title. I hit Save. Give it a new name. Then I close the original document, which hangs around hoping I’ll pay attention to it. Four steps. Not fast. Annoying.

This perplexes me on two levels. First, I don’t understand why a company that lives to make things simpler would choose to make something more complicated. Second, I don’t understand Apple’s thinking about where this fits into computing in general.

Do they intend to create a new standard that will become ubiquitous? Will Adobe and Microsoft follow Apple’s lead? I wouldn’t hold my breath. So now we’ll just have to remember that when you’re in iWork, you’ll have to think different.

I do understand that there are some reasons why this might be a good idea for certain types of users. You can find a long, intelligent discussion of the facts here.

I also get the argument that the new Versions feature negates the need to ever use Save As… again. Versions works fine if you’re looking for one image or one paragraph you used previously. But most writers make tons of small changes throughout their documents. To find these types of changes, you’d be searching Versions forever. It’s vastly easier to just save a new version of a document with a name that will help you find it later. Which you can still do under the new system — it just takes twice as many steps as it did before.

Versions, by the way, may not even solve your problem, should one ever arise. It saves a Version only once per hour. So unless you’ve manually saved a Version of something you’re looking for, it’s possible that it won’t be there. (You won’t find this little fact in Pages Help or in the iWork section of apple.com — it’s buried a few levels down in the Lion section.)

To me, these types of things are more evidence that Steve Jobs has been pulling back on his involvement in certain areas, probably even before his medical leave. One of his greatest talents was his ability to take one look at something people have been working on for months and say, “Kill it.”

The elimination of Save As… strikes me as change for change’s sake. It’s not better than what we had before.

Can I have it back please? Let’s call it “Natural Saving.”

 

apple / icloud / observatory / steve jobs / technology — 4 Comments
22
Sep 11

Steve Jobs: two visionaries in one

There are two kinds of visionaries in this world.

One imagines a new today and goes about creating it. The other imagines a new tomorrow — one that’s beyond the range of our current capabilities.

Steve Jobs has done a pretty good job in the here-and-now by revolutionizing computers, music, phones and tablets. But how good is he when it comes to looking, say, 15 years into the future?

This video from the 1997 WWDC provides a great insight into that. Answering a question from the audience, Steve talks about how information should be accessible from any device, anytime and anywhere, and we shouldn’t know or care where the information actually lives. It should be that simple for us. In other words, he’s describing cloud computing 15 years before it became reality.

Keep in mind, he’s saying these things before OS X, before iTunes, before apps, when phones were for phone calls and most of our data was spread out over the 4-gigabyte hard drive in our new iMacs.

The whole clip is pretty fascinating, but this highlight comes at the 4:24 mark:

One of my hopes is that Apple can do for this new type of network … with gigabit Ethernet technologies and some of the new server stuff that’s coming down the pike, and some thinner hardware clients … that Apple can make that as plug-and-play for mere mortals as it made the user experience over a decade ago. That’s one of things where I think there’s a giant hole and I can’t communicate to you how awesome this is unless you use it. And what you would decide within a day or two is that carrying around these non-connected computers or computers with tons of state in them, tons of data and state in them, is byzantine by comparison.

I suppose there’s nothing in The Official Visionary’s Handbook that requires a visionary to actually deliver on his vision. Maybe others had a similar vision about the cloud.

So let’s consider it a bonus that Steve didn’t just sit in his chair, Nostradamus-like, and imagine a future he had no intention of creating.

[Thanks to Jorge for the tip.]

dell / observatory / strategy / tablets — 5 Comments
20
Sep 11

Michael Dell’s world of fantasy and delight

Studies  have shown it’s natural and healthy for males to have recurring fantasies. But still, the ones dancing around in Michael Dell’s head may be pushing things.

To hear Michael tell the tale, life is sweet. All this talk of a post-PC world doesn’t phase him. Quite the contrary. With HP leaving the PC business, his eyes light up at the idea of gaining PC market share. So it goes in his recent comments to Financial Times.

Only a few problems with Michael’s logic.

First is the fact that HP decided to get out of PCs for good reason. Even though they sell more PCs than any company on earth, HP believes the smartest thing they can do is abandon ship. That’s because (a) PC profit margins are microscopic, and (b) it’s only going to get worse as PCs continue their descent.

Second, it’s hard to deny that demand for PCs is fading. Not only have the prognosticators lowered their global sales estimates, so has Michael’s own company. It was just one month ago that Dell cut its sales forecasts for PCs, citing “weakening consumer demand” and other causes.

Third, Michael was publicly downplaying his PC sales as recently as April, making sure we were all aware that Dell was now more focused on the enterprise, with PCs only representing one third of their business. The most positive thing he could say about PCs was that Dell made a “modest profit” on them. “I’m just level-setting what Dell is today,” he said.

He speaks optimistically of Dell’s prospects in tablets too—despite the fact that the 5-inch Streak is dead and the 7-inch model is languishing at best. For some reason, Michael’s fantasy here is that things will somehow be different when and if the tablet competition heats up. In fact, Dell will be one of dozens of tablet-makers all sharing the same OS, slugging it out for a sliver of the market.

“We are very distinct from our competitors,” says Michael in that Financial Times interview. Hard to argue with that.

At least IBM and HP stopped having those PC fantasies.

advertising / creative / observatory — 9 Comments
15
Sep 11

Creativity has many fathers

To have a bit of fun with Microsoft’s plans to put Windows 8 on future tablets, Daring Fireball recently linked to two car ads. The joke was that Windows-powered tablets are going to need some serious power — like the devices in these ads. Microsoft’s aspirations aside, the ads alone tell an amazing story.

When I viewed the ad for Nissan LEAF. I thought, “Wow, what a fantastic concept.”

When I viewed the ad for Renault Z.E.. I thought, “Wow, what a fantastic concept.”

I had identical reactions because, as you can see, they’re identical commercials. Even more astounding, they debuted only days apart. Honestly, I don’t recall ever seeing ads from major companies that are so stunningly similar.

This, of course, made me highly curious. So I turned to my inner Sherlock. I found that many articles have been written about these ads (they debuted back in May). Unfortunately, these articles tell conflicting stories.

Nissan and Renault did enter an official alliance in 1999. Some say it was an “industrial and creative partnership.” Others say no, marketing was never part of the deal. The two companies remain very competitive.

AdAge Global reported that “so far, neither automaker’s global agency is accusing the other of stealing its idea.” Stuart Smith says there is “fury” in TBWA\Chiat\Day LA (handling Nissan) and Publicis Conseil in Paris (handling Renault), as charges of plagiarism fly about.

Mysterious.

However, there’s one good reason why neither side has turned this into an international incident. That would be the ad for the Mitsubishi i-Miev, which was actually created well before Nissan’s or Renault’s ad.

And all I have to say is, “Wow, what a fantastic concept.”

apple / dell / observatory / strategy — 7 Comments
13
Sep 11

Crapware: the search for lost profit

Apple enjoyed pointing out the difference

Everyone knows that crapware is just a fact of life in the PC world.

From my conversations with people, I’m not sure they understand why.

Basically, it has to do with profit margins in the world of PCs. Or, should I say, the lack of them. When competition became fierce in PC-land many years ago, the PC makers had to compensate for the fact that they were cutting their prices to the bone. So they started renting out their spare rooms to strangers, so to speak.

It was only about three years ago that I attended an advertising meeting with the chief marketer in Dell’s consumer division. He had crafted his plan to meet sales targets for the coming year.

(Note: in marketing meetings inside Apple, we absolutely never talked about meeting sales targets. We only talked about doing good ads. The operating theory was that if we did our job right, higher sales would be the result.)

At the proper point in the meeting, Mr. Marketer made mention of the crapware on Dell computers. And yes, he called it crapware. He pointed out that margins being what they were, crapware actually accounted for just about all the profit on each sale. He invited the agency to come up with new suggestions for companies who might want to join the club — and pay Dell for the right to clutter up their PCs just a little more.

Macs, of course, don’t have this problem. You might get a demo copy of iWork, but that’s about it. Two reasons for this: (A) Macs have a very high profit margin, and (B) Steve Jobs has taste. He was no more willing to bloat a Mac with crapware than he was to slap one of those perma-bonded Intel Inside stickers on his MacBook Air.

Macs have that higher profit margin because those who buy Macs place a value on what Apple brings to the party: design, simplicity and reliability. They’re willing to pay more to get more.

The end result: while Apple makes only 7% of the revenues in PCs, its products account for 35% of the entire industry’s operating profits. Seems to be pretty good incentive for Apple to continue working just the way it does. No crapware allowed.

Now that mobile devices are dominating technology, history is repeating itself.

Crapware wasn’t even a thought on the first smartphones. Now it’s becoming ubiquitous. Same reason as above: intense competition has carriers scrambling for profits. Apple continues not to scramble.

Interestingly, in this category, it’s not like Apple products cost so much more. Thanks to Tim Cook’s operating skills, it’s not easy for competitors to undercut the price of iPhones and iPads. So even at a similar price, Apple pulls in the lion’s share of this category’s profit as well — literally two thirds of the available profit, according to Asymco’s last report.

What’s a smartphone seller to do? Crapware to the rescue!

Mike Jennings reports his crapware findings for PC Pro. In a wide range of Android phones, he found a treasure trove of crapware installed by carriers: multiple app stores, security software, game demos, etc., etc. While you can remove this stuff from PCs with a little effort, not so with smartphones. Most of it is here to stay, installed in such a way that it can’t be removed by the user.

Of course, those who don’t care about such things will continue to point out the benefits of an “open” system. Those who do care about such things will go with the phone maker who also cares about such things — and help pump up their profits even more.

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