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Archive for the ‘Phones’ Category

With our obsession for newness, those of us who work in the tech industry often fail to understand the historical roots of our technologies. Case in point: telegraph operators more than 150 years ago were sending short messages called “graphs” that were surprisingly similar in form and content to Twitter tweets.

One remarkable example was recently discovered in the Museum of Telegraphy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  It is the transcript of a telegraph operator’s comments during Abraham Lincoln’s famed Gettysburg Address in 1863.  The transcript was shared with me by a friend on the museum staff, and I’m pleased to reproduce it here:

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Still waiting for the Pres. to commence his speech.  #gettysburg

Good heavens, I should have foresworn that fifth corn dodger for lunch.  #gas  #dontask  #gettysburg

Starting now.  Pres. waves to crowd. #gettysburg

Four score and… WTF is a score?  25?  #pleasespeakenglish  #gettysburg

Okay, it’s twenty.  So “87 years ago the country was founded.”  Why not just say that?  Duh.  #gettysburg

Heh-heh-heh.  He said “conceived.”  Heh-heh.  #gettysburg

“Now we are in a great civil war.”  More duh.  #gettysburg

@zebekiah1134  I know, it’s my own fault for buying lunch from a wagon.  #gas  #gettysburg

Hoping to get in two miles this afternoon.  Depends on how long this speech goes.  #gettysburg

“It is altogether fitting and proper that we should dedicate this cemetery.”  Ooookay.  #gettysburg

Saw @matthewbrady this morning, taking pictures of guys with big beards.  #muttonchopsrule  #gettysburg

“The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here.”  #nokidding  #gettysburg

Hey you in the hat.  Yes, you.  Take it off, you’re blocking my view.  #gettysburg

“This nation shall have a new birth of freedom.”  Great, finally we’ll get some details.  #gettysburg

“Government shall not perish from the earth.”  Good to know.  #gettysburg

Where’s he going?  #gettysburg

What, that’s IT?  I waited five hours in the sun for THAT??  #ripoff  #votedemocrat  #gettysburg

Maybe I’ll make it four miles. #outahere  #gettysburg

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Posted April 1, 2012

2011:  The microwave hairdryer, and four other colossal tech failures you’ve never heard of
2010:  The Yahoo-New York Times merger
2009:  The US government’s tech industry bailout
2008:  Survey: 27% of early iPhone adopters wear it attached to a body piercing
2007:  Twitter + telepathy = Spitr, the ultimate social network
2006:  Google buys SprintCopyright 2012 Michael Mace.

The reactions to the New iPad announcement this week were all over the map. 

Some places said it was basically a yawner (link), while others bought into the “end of the PC” rhetoric (link) .  Some people even warned all developers to stop programming for the keyboard and mouse, even for complex applications like computer-assisted design (link).

My take: I think the announcement was both more and less important than people are saying.  Here’s why:

This is not the end of the PC era

I’m sure I’ll get some push-back from people who disagree, but I think the whole “PC era” meme from Apple is self-serving hype.  Of course they want to convince you that the world is shifting away from a market where Apple has less than 10% worldwide share to a market where Apple has well over 50% share.  I’d say the same thing if I still worked at Apple.  And the iPad is shiny and sexy, while Windows PCs are old and boring, so I want to believe that the PC is dead.  It makes me feel all Jetson-y. But think about it rationally for a minute.

First of all, what exactly was the PC era that is now supposedly ending?  Was it the years when Windows was the dominant API for software innovation?  That ended in the late 1990s with the rise of web apps.  Was it the era when PCs outsold smartphones?  That ended last year. 

To many people, the end of the PC era seems to mean that tablets are starting to replace PCs as thoroughly as PCs replaced minicomputers.  Or that the keyboard and mouse are going away.  I don’t buy it.  We’ve been declaring the PC dead for at least 15 years, but we’re still using them today because for certain tasks, PCs are the best way to get work done.  It may be unsexy and it may seem old-fashioned, but if you’re working on a big spreadsheet a mouse and numeric keypad are incredibly productive.  And if you’re writing a report, a keyboard is still the easiest way to input text (for now) and edit (for the foreseeable future).

Kind of like a steering wheel and pedals are still the best way to drive a car.  I could do that with a multitouch tablet as well (three-finger swipe to the right means turn at the next corner, four fingers down means apply brakes), but sometimes direct control is the best approach.

And yes (comma) I have tried Dragon (pause) Naturally (pause) Speaking (pause) many times (period) (space) And I found that by the tame I went back and fixed all the types it created (comma) I had not saved any time (comma) plus it was difficult to speak in the sort of sentences I wanted to write because you know I kind of speak more casually than I write (period)

My point is not that touch and speech input and tablets are useless.  I think they’re great, and I’ve been playing with them for more than a decade.  But I’m going to have the most productivity if I can choose the best tools for a particular job, and that means I still need a pointing device and keyboard for some sorts of work.

Now, if Apple were saying that the PC will be less dominant than it was in the past, I’d have no trouble with that.  Although we’re not seeing the overall death of the PC, we’re definitely seeing a narrowing down of it.  For tasks like reading or interacting with content, a tablet is far superior to a traditional PC, and if that’s all you do with your PC, by all means get rid of it.  But PC-like devices (or maybe mice and keyboards that connect to tablets) are going to linger for the sorts of work that they do best.

So if you have a touch-sensitive screen connected to a keyboard and mouse, do you call that hybrid device a PC or a tablet?  I don’t really care; it’s a game of semantics at that point, and semantics are the playground of companies that want to score marketing points.  Which brings us right back to Apple and its enormous tablet market share.

(Oh and by the way, the tablet needs a stylus for certain types of work.  One of Steve Jobs’ strengths was his willingness to revisit his assumptions when he was wrong, and this is one of those cases.  I worry that since Jobs died, Apple may now get locked into his religious opposition to the stylus.  That would leave Apple vulnerable to a competitor who does the stylus right by tuning the hardware and software to work together.)

What does matter about the new iPad

Two things stand out to me.  The first is the screen.  Yes it’s very pretty, but that’s not the point.  The Retina display is a very nice feature in a smartphone, but in a tablet it’s far more important because tablets get used more for reading long-form text like novels, textbooks, and magazines. 

For displaying photos and videos, enormous screen resolution isn’t actually all that important; what matters most is color depth.  If you have millions of colors, the pixels blend together and most images look real even at 150 dots per inch.  But for reading, where you have sharp contrasts between black text and white background, much higher resolution is needed.  At 264 pixels per inch, the new iPad’s screen is close to the 300 dpi resolution of the original LaserWriters, which most people found an acceptable substitute for printed text, and which drove a revolutionary change in publishing.  I doubt Apple’s display has the same contrast ratio as printed paper, which is also important for readability, but I still think it’s likely to give a much nicer reading experience to all those students who are supposed to use iPads as their new textbooks.

Apple posted a clever widget that shows a magnified image of text on the old and new iPads.  I pasted an image from it below.  Yes, in real life the dots are tiny and it will be hard for some people to see the difference.  But eyestrain hinges on little details like this, and as a longtime publishing guy, I can tell you that resolution matters.

On most other hardware specs, the iPad is very good but not overwhelming.  Gizmodo has a good comparison here.  It shows that the upcoming Asus Transformer matches up pretty well on a lot of the specs, although it’s a bit pricier and has less powerful batteries.  You could be forgiven for thinking that Android’s within striking distance of iPad.

But then there’s the software, and this is the second place where I think the new iPad stands out.  As a systems vendor, Apple innovates in both hardware and software, so you have to look at both areas to understand the full iPad offering.  Apple is innovating very aggressively on the software side.  Speech recognition is now being bundled with iPad, and although as I just said I don’t think it’s ready for writing a long report, Apple has a history of tuning and improving its technologies over time, and I bet we’ll see that happen with speech.  The keyboard isn’t dead, but if Apple makes speech work well, the tablet can more thoroughly displace the PC in a few more use cases (like creating short messages).

Then there are the new iLife tablet apps, which were probably the most compelling part of the whole announcement.  I’m very impressed by the way Apple refactored photo editing for touch, and I can’t wait to play with it.

Add together the high-res screen, the long-term path for speech, and the new apps, and the new iPad looks like a formidable product. 

Hey Google, copy this

Think of it from the perspective of an Android tablet product manager.  You don’t just have to beat Apple on hardware, but you also have to figure out how to duplicate a rapidly-growing list of Apple-branded software features that are either bundled or sold at ridiculously low prices. 

Yes, Google is working to copy any features that Apple adds, but how good is it at integrating UI functionality and crafting exquisite applications?  Would you want to bet your product on Google’s ability to craft end-user software?

And thanks to Apple’s volumes and wickedly controlled supply chain, its prices are low enough that no products other than Amazon’s subsidized tablets can get down under them.  So as an Android cloner, you’re stuck at rough parity on price, and you are increasingly falling behind on integrated software features.  It’s an ugly life.

And then there’s Microsoft

It’ll be interesting to see how Microsoft deals with all of this.  Windows 8 is an effort to recast Windows for tablets, but will Microsoft be willing to go toe to toe with Apple on app pricing?  Undoubtedly not; that would involve giving up most of the Microsoft Office revenue stream.  So Microsoft has to walk a difficult line in which it embraces touch tablet functionality, but attempts to convince people that they still need to pay big bucks for good old Office.  The first try in that direction, Tablet PC, demonstrated that you can’t just cut the keyboard off a PC and call it a tablet.  Windows 8 is much more tablet-centric, but if it makes people feel like they’re buying a tablet, they may start looking for tablet-like pricing in their apps, and Office sales could collapse like a house of cards.

If that happens, we’ll all stop talking about the end of the PC era and talk instead about the end of the Microsoft era.Copyright 2012 Michael Mace.

I see where Andy Rubin said Google is building a “firewall” between the Android team and Motorola Mobility (link).  That’s exactly what we called it when Palm licensed out its OS, and actually the firewall worked pretty well.  I’m sure Google can and will prevent information leaks between the Android team and the Motorola team.  Those teams do not work in the same buildings (many of them are not even in the same state), so that’s pretty easy to do.

Most PalmOS licensees didn’t have big worries about our firewall.  They wanted to know it was in place, and they were careful about sharing information with us, but we were able to work together.  The reality is that if your OS is selling well, the licensees will put up with almost anything (look at the early history of Microsoft if you doubt me).  And if sales slow down, no amount of firewalling will keep them loyal.  Look at the, uh, more recent history of Microsoft in mobile.

The place where Palm had trouble (okay, one of the places) was that it could not figure out what to do when the financial interests of the OS conflicted with the financial interests of the hardware team.  It wasn’t about the firewall, it was about the corporate business goals.  To put it in Google terms, what happens when a change to Android will hurt sales at Motorola Mobility?

Let’s make up an example: Suppose that Motorola needs a new feature in the OS to support its next-generation product line.  It has already started building the new devices, and has…say, $200 million in parts already ordered to build them.  The orders cannot be canceled, and the parts will become obsolete if not used quickly.  The Android team has trouble implementing the feature, and realizes that it will have to choose between the feature that Motorola needs and another feature that HTC needs for its next-generation products.  It’s a zero-sum game; there are only enough engineers to produce one of the features.  Who wins?  Will Google accept a writedown of $200 million to protect its promise to HTC?

This is not a theoretical question; tradeoffs like that happen all the time when you’re developing an OS.

Want to guess how those questions were answered when Palm hardware and Palm OS were in the same company?

I think that’s the real reason why Palm and PalmSource had to be separated, and I think that’s the real question Android licensees are thinking about.  Not is their information safe, but would Larry Page accept a financial bloodbath at Motorola to protect other Android licensees?  If Google has addressed that question, I haven’t seen the answer.  It’s a very hard question for any CEO because it pits the interests of Android licensees against Google shareholders.

None of this will drive away Android licensees, but I think it will affect the strength of their interest in also working with Microsoft — which, when it abuses its licensees, tends to abuse all of them equally.Copyright 2012 Michael Mace.

I want to thank everyone who participated in the information management survey that I posted at the start of the year (link).  The survey was long and complex, but more than 400 of you responded to it.  I know you’ve got a busy life, and it was very nice of you to help.

Your responses helped to shape the work we’re doing on Zekira, the new app being developed by the startup I’m working on.  I have posted a summary of the survey findings here (link).  I know you read Mobile Opportunity for tech industry commentary, so I’m going to continue to blog on that subject here (hopefully more frequently).  I will post Zekira-related information at the Zekira weblog.  If you’re interested in information management issues, I hope you’ll visit us there.

I think some of the survey results will be interesting to folks here, so let me give you a quick summary of the highlights.

In the tech industry, we talk a lot about information overload, but we haven’t defined it very well.  What I learned from the survey is that info overload means something slightly different to every person.  It’s not a thing, it’s a range of problems caused by dealing with more information than you can hold in your head.

For some people the problem is too much e-mail.  For others it’s too many meetings.  For still others, the biggest problem is finding a way to access the archive of old files and information they have accumulated over the years.

Some of you — I guess I should say some of us — have amassed truly awesome personal archives of information.  Literally terabytes of data in some cases.  Now if only we could get the information back out of them.

A few statistics on information overload:

–More than 40% of the respondents said they feel overwhelmed by the amount of information in their lives.
–About half of the respondents experience information overload several times a week, and about 15% experience it several times a day.
–20% of the respondents receive more than 25,000 e-mails every year.
–A quarter of the respondents receive more than 100 text messages a day.
–A third of the respondents have saved more than 100 gigabytes of business files in their personal archives.

One of the biggest challenges in creating a product to help with information overload is figuring out where to focus it.  Which specific problem(s) do you want to solve?  Which people care about those problems?  And how do you put a dent in those problems with a startup’s resources?

In the next few weeks we’ll be talking about how we answered those questions.  You can follow our progress at the Zekira weblog.  And you can read more about the survey results here.

And again, many sincere thanks for your help.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.Copyright 2012 Michael Mace.

The New York Times has an interesting article this week explaining why HP’s adventure with Palm failed.  The latest explanation is that Web OS just wasn’t ready for prime time, according to Paul Mercer, who was senior director of software at Palm (link).

Paul’s an extremely bright software guy.  It’s unusual for someone with his seniority to go on the record with criticisms of his former product, and I applaud him for it because it helps us all learn.  If Paul says Web OS was unready, I’m sure it was.  But respectfully, I don’t think that’s why Web OS failed. I think the company’s business strategy was fundamentally flawed, in ways that would have almost certainly doomed Web OS no matter how it was built.

The point is important because other companies planning similar products might take away the wrong lesson from Palm’s demise.  (For example, Information Week concludes that it’s too hard for any startup to play in the mobile device market [link]; MIT Technology Review says the lesson is that you have to retain key employees [link].)  To explain what the right lesson is, I need to give you a little background on the dynamics of creating a new operating system.

New operating systems always suck

Sorry for my language, but sometimes it’s best to be blunt.  An operating system is an incredibly complex piece of software, just about the most complex software you can write.  In the first version of an OS, the list of features you want to add is always much longer than what you can implement, there are always bugs you can’t find, and performance is always a problem.  What’s worse, there is a built-in tension between those three problems — the more features you add, the more bugs you create.  The more time you spend fixing bugs, the less time you have to improve performance.  And so on.  As a result, every new operating system, without exception, is an embarrassing set of compromises that frustrates its creators and does not deliver on the full promise of its vision. 

Remember these beauties?

–The original Macintosh can’t create a word processing document longer than 10 pages.

–The original version of Windows can’t display overlapping windows.

–The original iPhone doesn’t allow third-party native apps, and lacks 3G and MMS support.

The operating systems that succeed are the ones that survive long enough for their big flaws to be fixed.  That happens if the OS’s supporter has a deep, multi-version commitment to it (Windows) or if the OS does something else so compelling that customers are willing to buy it despite its flaws (graphics on the Mac).  Your chances are best if you have both patience and differentiation.

Palm’s problem: Lack of a compelling advantage

The Palm Pre and HP TouchPad had neither advantage.  Palm was not rich enough and HP was not patient enough to keep investing after the first versions showed a lot of flaws.  And more importantly, there was nothing compelling enough about either product to make people buy it despite those flaws.

Think about it, what was the one special thing Web OS devices could do that absolutely compelled you to go out and buy them?  And don’t say “multitasking;” I’m talking about a genuine, easily explained benefit that would appeal to normal people, not technophiles.

I wrote about this problem back in 2010 when the Palm put itself up for sale (link).  To recap: you don’t run TV ads featuring a Borg hive queen if you have something compelling to say about your product (link).

Hi, I’m here because the ad agency couldn’t figure out anything concrete to say

Contrast those ads to Apple’s current iPhone ads in the US, which are basically a 30-second demo of Siri (link).

The original Palm OS succeeded because it made a great appliance for managing your calendar and address book.  That jump-started the market, and all the additional stuff empowered by the OS came later.

iPhone succeeded, in my opinion, because it was the first device to make PC-style browsing work well on a smartphone.  That killer feature bought Apple the time and market credibility it needed to enable native apps, fix the phone’s problems, and add a raft of additional features that fleshed out the product vision.

Android succeeded (in part) because Apple stupidly left a void in the marketplace that Google could fill.  In the wake of Steve Jobs’ death, there has been a lot of well-deserved praise online for the brilliant decisions he made.  But I think one of Steve’s biggest mistakes ever was the decision to wed Apple exclusively to AT&T in the US for multiple years.  That forced Verizon to find an iPhone competitor and market it aggressively.  Verizon’s choices were Windows Mobile (unpopular with customers, and a vendor with a history of shafting its partners), Nokia/Symbian (unpopular in the US, and a vendor with a history of shafting operators), or Google (sexy web brand, believed at the time to be open and non-controlling).  People outside the US don’t realize this, but in the US Verizon was the main marketing muscle behind the success of Android.  It forced the product into the market and kept pushing for a long time, giving Google the time it needed to improve Android and get it past the crucial first release.

The Pre and TouchPad had no patient sugar daddy.  And they had no breakthrough feature that would compel people to buy the first versions despite their inevitable flaws.  I think Palm’s product strategy was broken, and so Web OS was probably doomed no matter how well it was implemented.

The lesson: Who’s your daddy, and what’s your killer feature?

Two companies are working on new mobile platforms scheduled to ship in 2012:  Nokia’s next-generation Windows phones, and RIM’s BlackBerry 10.  In both cases, the press has been focusing on their development schedules.  The schedules are very important, of course.  But the real questions to ask are:

1. Do they have the financial backing to complete versions 2 and 3, which will be needed to fix the inevitable flaws in version 1? and

2. Will the products do anything unique and compelling that will cause at least some customers to prefer them even if they have other drawbacks?

I think Nokia can probably say yes to question 1; RIM is in doubt.  And as far as I can tell, neither vendor has even started to address question 2.  If they don’t, in a year or two we’ll probably be doing more post-mortems.

Copyright 2011 Michael Mace.