A great Disneyland postcard that I found on Flickr:
Lots of folks—non-fans, but even some die-hards—resent the corporate logos found at Disneyland. For me, as a kid, they totally legitimized the place.
Tomorrowland especially: as much as I admired the Walt Disney Company, who were they to say what was going to happen in the future? But Disney + Monsanto + GE + RCA + McDonnell Douglas, etc…there’s a vision I could trust.
Two years ago, after enough prospective viewers had inquired about it, Netflix decided to start carrying my documentary, TILT: The Battle to Save Pinball on DVD. They purchased two hundred (!) copies, and I was thrilled: not only was the film going to be available to a lot more people; it also meant that TILT was now a real movie, in some sense on par with all the other real movies you see on Netflix. Like Lawrence of Arabia. Gone With The Wind. I’m going a little overboard here, but you get my drift.
Weeks later, TILT appeared on Netflix. I proudly put it in my queue, and moved it to the bottom. (Because let’s be real here, the last thing I need is another copy of TILT to watch.) Emails trickled in from people who watched it for the first time via Netflix, and loved it. Between this and the film’s availability on iTunes, things were great.
Things looked even better a month or two later when I noticed that TILT—still in my queue—was listed as “Availability: Unknown.” They had two hundred TILT DVDs, and they couldn’t keep them in stock?! Unbelievable! I wrote back to my Netflix contact: “Need more?”
“Nope,” he said. “Not enough demand, so we won’t send them out.”
Which patently makes no sense.
I followed up with him and, for some reason, couldn’t get a straight answer to the seemingly obvious question of why they wouldn’t mail out DVDs they already had. All his responses were in the vein of, “don’t you get it, your movie isn’t popular enough?” Which, of course, I get. The only information I did glean is that if enough people put TILT in their queue, they’ll start sending them out again.
So I’m asking a favor: put TILT in your Netflix queue. (It won’t actually go into your queue, it’ll go into that “Saved” no-man’s land at the bottom, with all the films as-yet-unreleased on DVD.) If enough people do this, hopefully those two hundred TILT DVDs sitting in Netflix’s warehouses will see the light of day again.
And thanks for your support.
P.S.: If you haven’t seen TILT and would like to: well, it should be obvious, don’t wait for Netflix. You can buy it on DVD, or buy or rent it on iTunes. (One quick plug for purchasing the DVD: you’ll get the brimming-over-with-content Extras DVD, which a lot of people like better than the film itself. You’ll also get my brilliant and insightful director’s commentary. And the deep pride of ownership that comes with possession of a finely-crafted piece of art. Okay, going overboard again, but anyway, feel free to watch it any way you’d like, just watch it!)
UPDATE: I’m told that if you only have the Netflix streaming plan, you can’t add a DVD to your queue. So in that case, we’re out of luck. But I appreciate the thought anyway.
I needed a high-quality photo of an iPhone 4 for some work I was doing. Sadly, searching the web produced no high-res images. So I decided to draw one in Illustrator. I eyeballed the placement of msot of the features, so I can’t vouch for 100% accuracy. But it looks pretty close to me.
Right-click and save the image below to download the Illustrator file; feel free to use as you please. (It’s made of those vector thing-ys, so you can scale it as big as you wish.)
NOTE: You may need to remove a “.ps” off the end of the file; the extension should be “.ai.”
There is, of course, endless speculation about what the iPad should have had, and why it will be an abject failure because of [your favorite feature]‘s absence. “Video camera” seems to be the #1 cited omission. No doubt videoconferencing via iPad would be nice, but hey, I don’t even know that many people that video chat, so I’m not sure how something used by so few people could be considered essential.
There’s one feature omission that everyone seems to have forgotten about: multi-user.
Without multi-user capability, whose bookmarks are going to be in Safari, mine, or my wife’s? Whose usernames and passwords will get saved? Whose schedule will be in the calendar app? Contacts in the Address Book? You get the idea. Without multi-user, most of the built-in apps will be, by necessity, useless, filled with data that’s not yours.
The good news is that multi-user requires just a software upgrade; maybe we’ll see it when iPhone 4.0 comes along. Until then, my iPad will be used about 50% less than it should be.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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…
