Visionary or Pragmatic?

Concerning John Gruber’s Apple’s 1997 Tablet Concept Video post, Gruber makes the point that Apple used to make concept videos about tablet computing; now, they make for-real tablet computers. I’m not sure if he’s just making a cheeky comment about the rapid advancement of technology, or about the very nature of prototypes and the kinds of products Apple should be producing. But there’s something significant here: Steve Jobs’s Apple would never produce a video like Knowledge Navigator.

When I was a product manager at Apple in 1994-1996, MRDs (marketing requirement documents) nearly always started with the prose equivalent to Knowledge Navigator, something similar to:

Richard Sanderson sits down in his leather chair, the wave of heat from his crackling fireplace cutting through the morning chill. Richard lightly touches the screen on his Apple SuperMac 3000 and it comes to life with a soft glow.

“Something worrying you?” asks the concerned voice coming from the computer, its facial recognition capable of detecting subtle changes in its operator’s emotions.

“Oh, nothing much,” says Richard. “I’m just behind in my bill paying, and I have a presentation due this Friday on delinquency rates in New York City.”

“Hmmm…I may be able to help you with those,” says the computer’s soothing voice.

I’m not kidding: that’s what they actually sounded like, more resembling the build-up in a Harlequin romance than a technical spec. Why write like this? For one, it conjured up undeniably seductive portraits of what new technology could not just look like, but feel like. But more importantly—and self-servingly—these MRDs created their own market by hypothesizing a strawman use-case that no one wanted to refute. I mean, how could there not be a market for this product? Did you not read that description? Are you seriously telling me you don’t want to be Richard Sanderson?

But at the end of my Apple tenure, it was clear this was falling out of favor. After the failures of QuickDraw GX, 3D, Apple Guide, Newton, OpenDoc, Copland, et al, it had become abundantly clear that the Richard Sandersons of the world weren’t Apple’s savior: in fact, it had become quite clear that he didn’t exist at all.

Steve Jobs is described as a visionary. Yet he doesn’t do what most people assume a “visionary” would do, e.g., gaze twenty years into the future. He’s a visionary by way of looking into the very near future—two to three years out—and realizing what’s possible with the technology that will very-soon-be-available. He recognizes the moment at which toy becomes breakthrough, and can sense when it’s near.

“These MP3 players suck,” one could imagine him saying in early 2000. “But if we crack the two reasons they suck–low storage capacity and bad user interface–they won’t. These are problems we can solve, and soon.” And here comes the iPod. Not a do-it-all super assistant, like the Newton tried to be. Just an MP3 player, transformed from technology trick into a solution to people’s real needs.

Steve Jobs wins less because he’s a visionary, more because he’s a pragmatic.

It’ll be trivially easy for Twitter to make money. Or not.

From the September 24, 2009 New York Times, in an article about Twitter raising money, and their ability to generate revenue:

“It would be trivially easy for them to turn on a revenue source today,” said Steve Broback, founder of the Parnassus Group, which runs conferences on Twitter and other business topics. “I don’t see that they are in a big hurry to start generating revenues, mostly because they want to minimize any sort of negative effect on their community.”

So in fact, what Mr. Broback is saying is that it would not be trivially easy for Twitter to turn on a revenue source today.

Just wanted to clarify that.

You should buy a Mac

A lot of people ask me about what kind of computer to buy. Unless you have to have a PC, a Mac is the way to go, for the following reasons:

• You don’t have to worry about viruses, nor install virus software. (At least until someone figures out how to write an effective Mac virus, which hasn’t happened yet.)
• Macs don’t come with a hundred useless pieces of software pre-installed on them. Nor useless stickers on the outside.
• The Mac applications for managing photos, music, and movies, are all the best of their kind.
• The automated backup system, Time Machine, is fantastic, and anyone who’s storing their photos and movies on a computer needs to be concerned about backup.
• Apple hardware tends to be better designed. And since everything comes from one manufacturer, it works better together.
• Integration with the iPhone and iPods is better and more seamless.
• If you’re near an Apple Store, the support and assistance you receive at the Genius Bars is amazing.

Macs are more expensive than typical PCs, but for all of the reasons listed above, I believe the total cost of ownership to be lower. And they’re definitely more fun to use.

That said, Macs aren’t perfect. Mac reliability is good, but not excellent. You get a year warranty on a Mac purchase; during that year, you can decide to purchase a two year extension, called AppleCare, typically for around $300. If it’s a Mac that you rely on, I recommend it. If it’s a Mac that isn’t “mission critical” and you can afford to be without it when it’s down, it isn’t as important that you get the extended warranty. Especially if you’ve been making backups, which Macs do automatically if you have a second hard drive. But even then, the extended warranty isn’t a terrible idea. (The only clear-cut case where I wouldn’t get the warranty is if I didn’t expect to own the computer for three years.)

To give you some background: I have AppleCare on my work laptop because I can’t afford to be without it long. Plus, it would cost $2500 to replace, so the $350 warranty is a drop in the bucket. On my wife’s laptop (which cost $1100), we don’t have AppleCare. If her laptop died, that would be unfortunate, but 1) she can afford to be without a computer for a few days, and 2) we’re keeping it constantly backed up, so even if we had to buy a new computer, it would be easy to restore it. Extended warranties are always difficult decisions…

If you’re going to be keeping anything important on your Mac (your music and photos count as important items), I highly recommend getting an external drive that can act as your Time Machine backup drive. The $200 or less that it should cost you is completely worth it in the case that your computer’s main drive fails. (In the best case, that can take hours to fix; in the worst–and most common–case, you’ll lose all of your data. You don’t want that to happen.) At a minimum, your Time Machine drive should be at least as big as your internal drive; 2 to 3x larger is better, but not required.

Why Amazon Did the Right Thing by Pulling Content From Kindles

There’s no shortage of outrage over Amazon’s decision a few weeks ago to pull illegally-sold copies of George Orwell’s books off of Kindles. Amazon has since stated that it was wrong and they won’t do it again, but to me, pulling the content and refunding the purchase price was the right action, primarily because the alternatives are so much worse.

The people who bought these bogus editions of Orwell’s books on Kindle are arguing, hey, we bought these books, we didn’t know they were stolen; why must we forcibly return what we thought were legitimate copies of 1984 and Animal Farm? Well, the answer is simple: through no fault of your own, the goods you purchased were not obtained legally. You didn’t pay the rightsholders. It wasn’t your fault; you didn’t do anything wrong; still, the people that owned this content didn’t get paid, and that’s a situation that has to be resolved.

Pretend for a minute that you’re one of these “rightsholders.” Suppose someone steals your book (or song, or app, or any content you can imagine) and sells it on Amazon. You discover this, alert Amazon, and after some suitable investigation on their part, they de-list it from their site. In the meantime, however, 50,000 copies of your “thing” have already been sold, with the money going to thieves. If your “thing” happens to cost $10, that means you’ve lost out on $500,000 of income. You have the following recourses:

1. Sue Amazon for allowing someone else to publish your content. Good luck; not only do they have deep pockets and better lawyers, but they’ll be able to argue that they’re not in the position of policing the property rights of everything they sell. Which is correct.

2. Sue the people that stole your content and re-published it on Amazon. Again, good luck: not only will you have to track them down, spend 5 years litigating the case, but you’ll have to hope that the thieves actually have the money to give back to you. And that your legal fees don’t overwhelm the amount you’re able to recover.

With physical media, these were the only two options you had. E-books and other digital goods allow a third option:

3. Digitally retract the material. Give the money back to the purchasers. Tell them that if they want to buy the material again, they can, and can do so from the material’s legitimate creator, namely you. The money flows to the owner of the material (you) in short order. People who purchased the content are inconvenienced for a short period, but are ultimately no worse off.*

Perhaps I’m missing something, but option #3 seems the fairest to everyone. Options #1 and #2 are, frankly, terrible, creating situations where either rightsholders have to go through protracted legal battles to recover what is legitimately theirs, or Amazon has to go through content with a fine-tooth comb to make sure published content is truly coming from the proper rightsholders, resulting in a significantly restricted–and more expensive–process for authors to publish to the Kindle Store.

I’m ready to be convinced otherwise, but I’m not looking forward to a world in which Amazon doesn’t pull illegal content off of Kindles.

* There is a tale in the above-referenced New York Times story where a purchaser of a bogus copy of 1984 lost the electronic annotations he had created while reading the book, costing him potentially many hours of time in trying to re-create them. And that is unfortunate; it would be ideal if the notes could be preserved despite the content being erased. That’s an easily-solved technical problem, however; not a reason that would trump the rightsholders legitimate claims on earning money for their work.

Something new and exciting for Disney theme park fans…

What is it? Can’t tell you yet. But visit the Wishing Stars site and follow Wishing Stars on Twitter and you’ll be among the first to know.

My first iPhone app

I released my first iPhone app a few weeks back, Countdown Calendar, based on the OS X Dashboard Widget I created a couple of years ago.

I’d been in love with the idea of writing iPhone apps for several months, and though I was overflowing with ideas on what to write, due to the success of the countdown widget, it made sense to build off of an idea that I knew people liked.

But I was stymied in that I wanted to make an app that was a pay-for app, and preferably one that would cost at least $2.99. (Any less, I thought, couldn’t make money, and I still think that’s the case unless you get pretty lucky.) How could I make a Countdown Calendar app into something worth $2.99?

I could could make the thing look really nice, and polish the experience to the point that it felt like a well-oiled machine…but that didn’t seem like enough. Then lying in bed one night, it occurred to me: what if I added a social component to the app? What if I let people mail countdowns to each other, and download them from a central repository that had all sorts of interesting dates…movie premieres, sporting events, important dates in geek history: the launch of the Apple II; the premiere of Star Wars… Would that be worth $2.99? Maybe. At least, I had my hook.

And here it is. Sales have been strong, though I’ve been a little dismayed at the way that iTunes Store ratings work. I recently put out a new release that lets you attach notes to countdowns, and out of the blue I got hit with some anonymous 1- and 2-star reviews. No idea where those came from–until then, reviews had been all 4- and 5-star–but because they happened at the same time a new version premiered, and because the iTunes Store wildly overpromotes “current version” reviews over “past version” reviews, my app effectively had a rating of 2 stars. And if there’s one thing that’s clear to me now, it’s that people don’t buy 2-star apps: sales plunged 75% immediately. Fortunately, a few days have passed and my ratings are back up along with my sales.

And I absolutely love writing iPhone apps. More to come, featuring some ideas that, if I do say so myself, are pretty fantastic. Keep watching this space…

The iPhone’s “Killer App.” (Boy, do I hate that term.)

John Gruber linked to a Paul Thurrott post this morning about the apparently delusional Windows Mobile team (prediction: Microsoft will buy RIM within 24 months). What caught my attention, however, was Thurrott’s assertion that the iPhone App Store is “arguably the biggest innovation of the iPhone.” We saw a similar sentiment expressed earlier in the week at USA Today.

No doubt the App Store is great, but I can’t say that any app I’ve purchased is truly important to me. NetNewsWire comes the closest, but still, the iPhone’s “killer app” (god, do I hate that overused term) is its usability. Nothing else comes close. I don’t know anyone that has purchased an iPhone because of the App Store; I know perhaps a hundred people that have purchased one because of its usability. (With Apple aggressively marketing iPhone games, perhaps this will change in the future; regardless, it hasn’t happened yet.)

The other mis-read of the iPhone’s success comes down in the comments, where several people assert that the iPhone is “consumer-targeted,” with the implication that if the Windows Mobile team had simply trained its sights on that “niche” market, of course they’d have something as usable as the iPhone. There are exactly two things wrong with that assertion.

The first is that the Windows Mobile team would know how to develop a consumer product. Here’s something people don’t get: developing consumer software is harder than developing enterprise software. If you’re developing enterprise software, you make money every time the customer calls you with a question. If you’re developing consumer software, you lose money when they call you. That simple fact turns the product development equation on its head: you have to make a product that completely explains itself to people who don’t want to read a manual or take a training class. That Apple developed a smart phone that my mother can use is something that the Windows Mobile team could not have pulled off.

The second is that the iPhone is, in fact, “consumer-targeted.” It’s not: it’s “user-targeted.” Not the same thing. The Windows Mobile team will likely never admit this to itself because it’s easier to accept their fate if they think that they and Apple are aiming at different targets. But iPhone 1.0 wasn’t a product unsuitable for the enterprise by design; iPhone 1.0 was unsuitable for the enterprise simply because a couple of features were left out. That those features have now been added (and that another feature–a keyboard–I suspect will be added in the future) betray the idea that the iPhone is merely “consumer-targeted,” something that will be abundantly clear when iPhone beats Windows Mobile–and probably RIM, too–in that market.

Come to the Pacific Pinball Expo this weekend

I’d be remiss if I didn’t encourage everyone to come to the Pacific Pinball Expo this weekend. If you’re within a hundred-mile radius of the Marin Civic Center in San Rafael, California, you owe it to yourself to be there. And frankly, even if you’re further away than that, you should still mull a visit over in your head for at least a minute or two.

This show is amazing (see photos); last year’s was the first, with over 300 pin games on display, almost all of them playable. This year’s show will have over 400 games, which makes it the biggest pin show I’ve ever heard of by a factor of two.

I’ll be at the show all day on Saturday and almost all of Sunday; if you happen to be there, contact me on Twitter and let’s meet up! And if for some reason you haven’t seen TILT, I’ll be showing it at 3:30 on Sunday, and probably 8pm on Saturday as well.

Hope to see you there. You won’t regret making the effort to come.

See TILT in San Jose on July 19

TILT will be showing at the wonderful California Extreme video game and pinball expo this Saturday, June July 19 in downtown San Jose, California. Showtime is tentatively set for 7pm, though that could change…keep watching this board for updates. Please come by, check out what will certainly be an amazing show, watch the film, and come say hello! (I’ll hang around for Q&A both before and after the film).

If you’re at all inclined to attend the show, staying until midnight on Saturday at lodging at the beautiful and reasonably priced Hotel Sainte Claire is an amazing way to go.

Disney’s Biggest Theme Park Mistakes

This is a refinement of an earlier article I did for LaughingPlace.com.

It started last year, as my wife and I finished our day at Disneyland and walked back to our room at the Disneyland Hotel. Not for the first time, I noticed the iconic “Disneyland Hotel” red neon sign missing, and an old sentiment awakened: “what moron decided to get rid of that sign?” (For those curious, here’s what it became.) At the start of every Disneyland trip—short of seeing the Matterhorn from Harbor Boulevard—was anything more evocative than that old sign?

I know: there’s some new Anaheim zoning law that precludes giant neon signs illuminating a several-city-block radius. Maybe Disney put up a good fight to keep the sign, but still…it seems like there exist alternatives that could have preserved the sign’s essence (red LEDs?) while complying with the regulation. Didn’t anyone at Disney find that sign as special as I did?

I didn’t stop there. Coasting a wave of indignation, I thought: what other mistakes has Disney made? This sprawling list is the result. Unlike the Disneyland Hotel sign fiasco, I decided to focus on what I consider to be the big mistakes: genuine blunders that have cost the company either 1) millions of dollars, or 2) millions of dollars in goodwill. (The “little” mistakes, like leaving that ridiculous Epcot wand up for a decade, merit inclusion on their own list…just not this one.)

So in no particular order, here we go…