Category Archives: Computers and Technology

Let me put a little perspective into the discussions about what developers want out of their platform. Much of this is aimed at Apple, because IOS is the dominant revenue platform, but it’s true of all platforms to some degree or another; each has its strengths and weaknesses and possibilities… 

Ex-Apple Employee Reveals The Biggest Complaints Developers Have About Working With Apple – Business Insider:

If you want to know how iOS developers really feel about working with Apple, just ask Mike Lee. Lee has had plenty of interactions with developers

[….]

Apple has not done enough to crack down on knock-off apps.

This one keeps coming up. I talked about this a few months ago the last time it came up. The bottom line is that at best, this is difficult to do. In practice, if Apple DID become more active about this, it’d simply open itself up to a different set of complaints, and some nasty legal liabilities. It’s a no-win situation for Apple. And back when I was working with webOS developers, some of the apps they bitched about not deserving to be in the catalog also were some of the better sellers among the general public. quality and crap are in the eye of the beholder.

A big complaint that developers have is they are cut off from their customers,” Lee said. “If I have a customer who is unhappy with my app for any reason, the customer should be able to write me telling me they have a problem.

Guilty as charged. Which ties into another version of this being discussed (again) right now, that developers should have some way to respond to reviews. And get reviews removed removed from the app catalog. 

But think about it from the customer point of view — they have a say here, too. Many don’t want to be contacted. They especially don’t want to be marketed to. 

The core problem here is twofold: customers who write critical reviews, and customers who try to use the review feedback as a support channel. 

the first problem? Frankly, customers have a right to their opinion, even if that opinion is stupid or wrong. Developers don’t have to like it (and don’t. trust me), but just because a developer doesn’t like it doesn’t mean it should be removed. That’s why my review policies were built around whether or not a review was appropriate, not whether it was positive or negative. Frankly, some developers I worked with wanted any review that wasn’t a glowing 5 star removed. Part of my job was to protect the integrity of the reviews seen on the phone from developers who wanted it managed purely as a marketing vehicle for them. 

What SHOULD matter in terms of discoverability and ranking is the consensus opinion, and a catalog should know how to figure that out and promote it. the webOS catalog frankly sucked at that. Apple’s is better. Amazon’s got a good handle on this, and I don’t know why any site building a catalog doesn’t just start with what they do as a baseline requirement. 

The whole “customer using reviews as a support channel” is a different beast. The webOS catalog was terrible at helping a customer figure out how to get support, so they took the easy way out, and stuffed it all into reviews. The answer isn’t to let developers reply to reviews. I also don’t think the answer is handing customer data over to developers — you open up a situation where developers start pressuring or badgering users over negative reviews, and frankly, I don’t want to be in the middle of those arguments trying to mediate (have you folks seen how toxic things can get over on eBay where negative feedback or the threat of it turns into outright extortion at times, and is horribly painful in general?)

What the catalogs need to do, IMHO, is twofold. First, I think the catalog needs to help educate users how to get support and make it easy for them to find the support channel. Many end users will do what’s easy and convenient, not what’s appropriate, and if posting a review is easy and finding a “get help” channel isn’t, they’ll simply dump things into the review. So thought on the user interface and documentation needs to go into how to route things into the right place. 

I also tried — and failed — to create a way for developers to add a note to their catalog entry, something kind of like what Apple does with the per-release release notes on updates. Not give them the ability to respond to reviews, but to create a paragraph or two they can use for warnings or explanations or documenting their support channel, or whatever they felt made sense. Give them a way to communicate back to users on their way to the review area, but not get into direct replies on a review by review basis. 

What I also tried to convince people we needed (and honestly, I was about as successful as an Erdu speaker at a Cherokee bar-mitzvah) was that the whole review area needed to be a social system, where reviews got reviewed and users effectivess was ranked and their impact on the community depended to a good degree on how their peers ranked their contributions. As a first approximation, send Amazon and Stack Exchange off for a long weekend, and you start to see what I’d like to see in these systems. I also tried to convince people that the support channels should be THROUGH the app catalog, making that connection as easy as possible for the end user. That would allow us (as owners of the catalog itself) to manage the conversation between developer and end user without disclosing contact info to the developer explicitly, but by doing so, give the end user the option of sending that info over or using our brokered conversation system — and if we did that, the user would have a “do not let that person contact me again” button in case of problems with the developer. Creating this kind of intermediary communication setup would solve a good chunk of the issues around support problems that end up in the review area. Not all; some users are just plain old stupid or mean. But in aggregate/consensus, those users get filtered out. 

And if somebody doesn’t like my app, I should be able to give them their money back.”

Really, REALLY bad idea. Really. Trust me. you want to open the system up for abuse, start allowing refunds into the system.

The most common complaint I’ve heard is that there’s no pro-level support for developers inside Apple,” Lee said. “There’s nobody you can call to answer your questions or help you when you’re stuck in App Review or some such.” However, Lee says Apple does have a Partnership Management program, which is intended to provide this kind of service. The problem, he said, is that this program is a “pure meritocracy.” He added, “You don’t call them, they call you.” Nobody really understands how the app approval and rejection process works.

How much do you want to pay for it? that kind of support is expensive. That said, Apple does a poor job of that, and this was one of the things we targeted with webOS as a way to differentiate ourselves to developers. And our webOS developers appreciated the ease of access and hands-on we tried to give them. It helped draw developers onto the platform we wouldn’t have gotten otherwise, and it made a difference.

It’s also one that would be a real bear to scale. But as a platform attempting to boot itself, it was a competitive advantage to “not be Apple” here. Google does this a lot better right now, and is one of the ways I think Google can pull developers away from IOS over time, or make itself more viable for developers where the revenue trails what Apple brings. 

I could go into a long rant about how Apple is messing this up, but maybe some other time. The TL;DR version is this: you create goodwill during good times by being good to your partners, and then when you hit the rough spots, the partners will be more willing to help you through them. You instead take those good times and act like the 800 pound gorilla and boss everyone around, when you hit that rough spot, everyone stands back and applauds. And IOS developers, by and large, are looking for excuses to applaud. Apple will some day regret treating their developers the way they do, but by the time this comes home to roost, it’ll be way too late to fix the problem. 

Apple’s entire app process is just too opaque.

Yup. It’s one way alternative platforms can compete against Apple for developers: openness and transparency. Changing Apple to be more open and transparent towards its developers isn’t an easy thing, but if I were involved in WWDR, I’d certainly be arguing that it was necessary to figure it out. But traditionally, this hasn’t been part of Apple’s core values, which drove down direction from Steve Jobs. It may be under Tim Cook this will change over time (I hope so), but right now, it’s right up there with “apple going social” in terms of likelihood of happening. 

(hat tip: brent)

Apple’s Podcasting Stroke of Genius | Cult of Mac:

The rumor and/or speculation is that Apple will spin podcasts out into a separate app (but keep it in the desktop version of iTunes). This prediction is supported both by funny business in the app, and also inside information from unnamed sources “close to the company.”

The prediction that Podcasts will get their own app sounds reasonable. But the interesting part is: Why?

Why would Apple put music, movies and TV shows all together in one app, but create an entirely separate app for podcasts? Sounds dumb, right?

Actually, if Apple is doing what I think they’re doing, it’s a stroke of genius.

This single change could align Apple’s organization of services on iOS with multiple strategic objectives at once. Here’s what I think Apple intends to accomplish.

Make ‘iPodcasts’ a Brand

Interesting idea, but I think it’s wrong. My guess is the reason for this is a lot simpler.

Back in the day, I had a conversation with one of the people who put podcasts in the iTunes store. At the time, nobody had a clue whether podcasts would be huge or not; it definitely wasn’t about driving revenue — but they knew they could help drive awareness of podcasts this way, and if podcasts did turn into something big, they didn’t want to risk having iTunes aced out of the discussion. 

I think it’s fair to say podcasts have become a moderate success but not a world changer, and that iTunes helped drive their acceptance some, but I wouldn’t give it primary credit. I also think this whole space is still growing into maturity — if you look at what 5×5 and Geek and Sundry and what Adam Savage and the folks on Tested are starting to do, there’s a lot of innovation happening, in part driven by improved inexpensive video tools and in part by the growth of broadband making video more practical. So maybe podcasting has made it to teenaged status; it’s definitely still growing up.

But to be honest, I’d be stunned if Apple chose now to try to brand or trademark this stuff, or try to make this a big deal or a serious promotion. If there was interest in doing that, it would have happened long ago.

I think the real answer is a lot simpler than that: it’s iCloud.

We are continuing to see tighter integration of iCloud and IOS and MacOS. Starting with iTunes Match, Apple began a migration where your content lives there instead of on your hard drive, and I see that continuing and expanding to all kinds of consumable media. 

I think Apple’s ultimate goal is simple: if it lives in iTunes, it lives on iCloud. 

Is Apple going to offer that status to podcasts? My bet is no. And since they won’t, podcasts are exiting iTunes for their own app. That app will store and sync settings to iCloud, but not the actual podcast content. 

Some content — your music, your videos, your eBooks — is going to be hosted by Apple using iCloud, and that content will be managed by iTunes (or whatever replaces it in its next generation). 

Other content — podcasts, for instance — is going to be hosted by others, and apple will reference and coordinate access, but not actually manage its storage directly. As long as podcasts aren’t a licensed content the way music and videos are, I expect podcasts to be treated like this. 

And since Apple doesn’t license the podcasts for redistribution (and I see no reason why they might consider doing that), they won’t host it on iCloud. And if it’s not in iCloud, it won’t be in iTunes.

And that’s why I think you’ll see a Podcast app in IOS 6. It’s a way to make this transition without abandoning podcasts, and also without kicking the existing podcast app developers in the knee too hard. 

Not as much fun to speculate on, but I think it’s a lot more likely, given how Apple thinks about these things…

iFixit Tears Down The MacBook Pro With Retina Display, Deems It Nearly Impossible To Repair | TechCrunch:

iFixit states “[The MacBook Pro with Retina Display] is, to date, the least repairable laptop we’ve taken apart.” Apparently the new MacBook Pro is built like a MacBook Air and an iPad in that everything is custom and designed for the thinnest possible end product. The batteries are glued into place, the RAM is soldered to the logic board, it uses a custom SSD, and, worse yet, the screen assembly is all one piece, which means owners will need to replace the whole thing if something happens to any part of it. This nonsense sort of signals the end to hometown Mac repair shops.

Allow me to take exception to the phrase “This nonsense sort of signals….”

Why is this nonsense?

But first, a story. amuse me, I’m an old fart.

Back in the day, when I was working for Mama Fruit, we were selling a machine called the Mac IIfx. Like it’s older brother, the Mac II, it had seven (count them, seven!) expansion slots. One was required for the video card. The rest were for users to stick stuff into.

Apple later came out with a newer model, known as the Iici. It only had three slots, including the video card slot. There was a hue and cry, gnashing of teeth, the geeky pundits of the mac world declared this to be the end of the universe as they knew it, etc. etc. 

The Mac IIci t4urned out to be one of the best selling, most reliable and highest rated computers of its era. 

What Apple knew, which the pundits didn’t (and didn’t CARE to know) was that the average number of slots used in a typical machine was under 2, and only about 3% of the seven slot machines had three things in its slots. There might have been a couple of people stuffing all seven slots, but you could almost count them on two hands. 

Sit back and listen to the WWDC crowd on twitter talking about the new Macbook pro (for instance, Jason Snell, but he’s far from alone). What are the biggest complaints? How big and heavy it is, and how they’re so used to their Macbook Air’s and 13″ MacBooks that much as they love the retina display, a large chunk of those power users are going to wait until the Retina slides down the product line to the smaller screens. For that matter, that’s my opinion on the new Retina machine as well — it looks like an awesome machine, but my current laptop is a 2010 model and I’m in no hurry to upgrade, and I really am not looking forward to going back to a 15″ monitor (I have one of those at work, and carry it to meetings, and it’s heavy  compared to my home device).

What most users are asking for — power user or not — is smaller, lighter, better battery, faster units. 

Lack of repairability is important to iFixit (for obvious reasons), so of course they’re going to complain about this. I don’t blame them. But stop and ask yourself this: what percentage of users repair a device through anyone OTHER than Apple? 

5%? unlikely. 

What percentage of users upgrade RAM on their device over the life of it? 

10%? probably not. It used to be higher when RAM prices in the Apple BTO store were margined like crazy, but now, getting your box built with all the ram isn’t painful, so I expect a much larger percentage of users do it that way now. 

Repairability is not free.

Expandability is not free.

Connectors cost money. Connectors cost space. Connectors KILL reliability. They add complexity and support costs. So fi you want your device to be upgradeable, if you want to be able to replace things on it or have someone tear it apart and fix it, you’re going to pay more for that device up front. 

By removing those aspects of the product, Apple can make them more reliable (if they don’t break in the first place, who needs them repairable?), increase performance and reduce the cost. 

This is a replay of the “oh my god, Apple is dead, I can’t swap my macbook battery” complaint from 2009. And as we’ve seen since then, that big “controversy” turned out to be a huge nothing (as I said it would at the time). 

Fact is, unless you’re one of that 3% or 5% that use a company like iFixit, or you’re iFixit’s CEO, nobody cares about this. AppleCare is endemic and is bought by a huge percentage of users; the Apple repair process (via Fedex or Apple stores) is easy and painless and reliable. Apple doesn’t need devices to be repairable, and there’s no reason why consumers need to pay the extra money for a device to have repairability engineered in. 

And in fact, if you look at how sales have gone for Apple devices, consumers have voted with their pocketbooks already; iPhone and iPads are non-repairable for the most part, and buyers are increasingly going for the smaller and lighter devices over the bigger ones. How does Apple make these things smaller and lighter? One important and relatively easy way is to remove things like the space and weight and cost associated with connectors and module bays needed to support your ability to swap RAM or replace a battery. 

If you were given a choice between two features: “replaceable RAM” or “one more hour of battery life”, which one do you think most buyers would choose?

Yup. they’d configure in the ram at purchase, and go for the battery life. 

And with these changes to their new retina macbook pro, Apple is doing exactly that as well.

So unless you’re the CEO of iFixit, this is a good thing. 

But if you buy one of these, you should consider Applecare to be a mandatory accessory now. Just in case. 

Time For Apple To Get Serious About Apple TV:

It needs to be the hub of the home theater — look at what Microsoft is doing with Xbox 360 (I love mine, by the way. Microsoft needs Blu-ray, too).

Right now, it’s a stub on the home theater, tied to another mac. It needs to become the central player in the home theater, more like a console, less like an iPod. We’re not THAT far from where a computing system tied to the television is what ties all of the other devices in the home together. Apple TV has to decide to be that computing system, or it’ll be just another peripheral tied to something.

Right now, microsoft and the Xbox 360 is closest to what I want. I’ve been considering upgrading the DVD player to a blu-ray. originally thinking about a Playstation 3 (not a bad investment once you decide you’re buying a blu-ray anyway), but after Microsoft announced the netflix deal, I’m waiting again; rather see Xbox 360 add a blu-ray and buy a second blu-ray for the TV set than buy a PS3, and Playstation’s home theater strategy doesn’t impress me.

The next year is going to see massive changes in this space, a lot of maturing, really fast. and two years from now, the fight will be basically over. Here’s hoping we see Apple TV updates for the holiday market, if Steve waits for MacWorld in January, he may be too late.

That’s what I wrote — in 2008. It’s now 2012, and Microsoft has been building the Xbox into a really interesting media center, and Microsoft’s new announcements show that this is the year that the fight for the living room — which platforms and which companies are going to dominate the fight to own the living room — finally happens. 

Why has it taken so long? It takes convincing the media-creating companies to go along, and that’s been a long, involved process. And online video takes a lot of bandwidth, and in the U.S., adoption of high speed broadband has trailed other developed countries, and companies service consumer broadband have implemented limits and caps. Since most homes are served their internet by their cable company, is it any surprise those companies aren’t in a hurry to make it easy for companies like Apple or MIcrosoft to disrupt their high margin cable-TV businesses? 

But it’s happening, slowly but surely. Microsoft has made it clear it’s gearing up for the fight. All of the rumors indicate that this year’s WWDC is when Apple will remove the “just a hobby” label from Apple TV. Sony and Google have both been pushing their platforms into this space with less enthusiasm. 

What’s clear is that this space is finally going to get very, very interesting. And right now, it’s gearing up to be a dog fight between two old friend-foes: Apple and Microsoft. And it wasn’t that long ago that both of their platforms (Apple TV and Xbox 360) were declared failures by the pundits with no long-term vision. Fortunately, both companies were willing to let things mature as they needed to, not with the geek-pundit-demanded speeds.

I found myself pondering whether I should get an XBOX as a media center (my original XBOX was retired a while back because I never turned it on, since I just don’t have that much time or interest for hard core gaming — now, I use parallels and use the window’s version of games that aren’t written for Mac or IOS). Then I realized any decision on this had to wait for WWDC and what Apple might say, but it’s clear we’re almost at the point where I can make decisions about the next generation of the in-house entertainment suite. 

right now, the plans between now and the end of the year are leaning towards a broadband speed upgrade, bringing in a computer to act as hub for the home media platform (either an iMac or a Mac Mini; leaning towards the iMac as my new Lightroom processing system as well), upgrading the DirecTV system since the existing hardware’s a bit long in the tooth (first ten HD receivers), and making a choice about which platform will drive the home media onto the screens, Apple or Xbox. And I fully expect this to be my last DirecTV upgrade, although I don’t see any way I’m going to cut those cables for the next few years, unless Apple really, really surprises me. 

That’s all subject to change, of course. But I do believe the directions this is all headed are being set, at E3 with Microsoft, and soon, with Apple at WWDC. And I’m fascinated watching this all come together. 

In the comments to my previous post, Suzi asked a question that deserved a detailed answer, so I’m turning it into another blog post…

so, do you think the webOS way (developer mode) is better choice? 

I think that for webOS, it was the right choice, and I spent a lot of time arguing for it and supporting it internally. Is it always the right choice? I’m not sure I can make that blanket statement. With webOS we needed to create an app ecosystem; it wasn’t easy to build a financial case to get developers to write for a new and unproven platform, so we looked for ways to change the dynamics. One thing we did was subsidize development indirectly through the contests (which injected a couple of million dollars into the developer pool) and through bundling app dollars into phones. But we also felt that if we could encourage the hobbyist/individual programmer onto the platform with non-financial reasons and incentives, that would help us grow the platform faster than device sales alone, and that would help us grow the app ecosystem, which would encourage device sales. There’s a chicken and egg problem here, which every new platform needs to find solutions to. 

So we felt we could attract developers to the platform by making them welcome, as opposed to Apple’s model, which is one of, well, an indifferent hands-off approach that borders on arrogance. Well, sometimes Apple wanders over the border to arrogance. Other times, it simply treats developers as if they don’t exist, or are infinitely replaceable. There are reasons why they do this; there are reasons why I feel strongly they’ll regret this some day. It’s all about karma, and at some point Apple’s attitude towards developers will come home to roost. But right now, you can’t argue about their success. 

So we didn’t just tolerate homebrew, we encouraged and tried to embrace it as much as we could, to make developers feel welcome on the platform. That brought us some really good developers that otherwise wouldn’t have come to the platform, and they did some really nice apps, so I think it was the right, and a successful, set of decisions.

But building in developer mode, making it easy to side load apps onto the device, is not a panacea and it creates risks and challenges. A mobile device is a very resource limited device, and so a misbehaving app can do all sorts of things that can degrade or damage the device, and unless you understand what’s going on, it’s easy to blame the deviice for the problems (this is especially true of poor battery life, and webOS battery life was a challenge on the best days; it’s really the #1 reasons why I moved back to IOS full time when I left Palm/HP.)

The easier you make side loading apps around the “official” channels, the easier you make piracy, and the harder you make managing that problem. And even on webOS, this was a problem and I was talking to developers on a regular basis about pirated copies and ways to try to get the binaries offline — with limited success, given that easily 80% of the complaints brought to my attention included the name “megaupload” attached. 

You also create a channel for malware and scam ware, one that can be tough to plug. The things that enable a homebrew app to do things to access the private bus and restricted APIs also allows apps to access private data and do things that aren’t caught by whatever things your app review process might be doing, which I won’t explain further other than to say the app review process is about more than seeing if an app crashes during testing. 

And what should a vendor do about a side loaded app it had no review or control over? Do you pull the kill switch on it? What’s the vendor’s responsibility to protect a user from herself? This turns into a slippery slope very fast. What if someone wrote an Angry Birds clone and the Angry Birds people wanted it kill switched, even though it was never published in the catalog? Where do you draw these lines? Most users would expect the vendor to kill switch an app doing identify theft, even if it was homebrew loaded, but once you make a decision to step in there, it creates legal questions about an implied liability to step in on other legal issues — and would a court force a vendor to kill an infringing Angry Birds clone? Most users would probably be pissed, based on my experience, but my guess in a court might well enforce that requirement. Tech lawyers (and community managers, and app review geeks) get ulcers having meetings about stuff like this… 

What’s this mean for Apple? Should it take its jailbreak community and embrace homebrew the way we did? 

Honestly, I’m not so sure. Because the easier you make these side loading capabilities, the more likely people will do it. And the larger the group of users doing it, the larger the percentage of users who only see the fun, and don’t understand the responsibilities and side effects, of the choice they’re making. And those are the ones that when it blows up in their faces demand the vendor fix the problem and trash them online for a problem the user created for themselves — and I just don’t think Apple needs that set of headaches. By tolerating but not encouraging the jailbreak community, they limit how large it grows, and it tends to limit the size of the population to people who understand that if they do this, then don’t blame Apple when bad things happen. 

I’m not kidding when I say I used to recommend that turning on developer mode should have been done by a big red button that made it painfully clear that if you do this, here there be dragons and there’s no calvary coming to save you. 

That’s the flip side of the unwalled garden. You really CAN’T have it both ways: the walls protect you from the evil nasties that live in the forest. If you tear down the walls, you can’t complain when the owners of the walls don’t stop those evil nasties show up and kill your dog. and your family. and send off your personal info to Moldova. And yet, people still do this, and then blame the vendor when the nasties show up.

So I don’t blame Apple for not encouraging homebrew. There’s no market or business reason for them to. It’s a potential customer support and PR nightmare. The audience it’d likely serve is already jail breaking anyway.

So while I think we did the right thing for webOS, Apple is doing the appropriate thing for it, and for IOS. Which is probably not the answer the geeks want, but Apple doesn’t design and build their products for geeks, and haven’t for a long, long time.  Nor, given their success, do they need to. Which, of course, pisses off the geeks, who want to think they’re the center of the universe… 

No, iOS is not a prison – Technovia:

I too wish that Apple would introduce an optional ability to install unapproved apps. Although, when you think about it, jailbreaking provides that ability right now, which means that the world isn’t all that far from Lee and Eckersley’s desired state.I also share the authors’ alarm over Microsoft’s decision to allow the distribution of Windows 8 Metro apps only through its own Windows Store. Microsoft would never, ever have made that move without the App Store’s example, so sure, let’s go ahead and blame Apple for it.

 This was something we talked about a lot back in webOS land. 

When it comes to consumer products — in other words, things built to be sold to your mother and your sister the hairdresser, not to you the geek — you have to stop thinking about how to make them usable for geeks. Not that you will, because geeks are like that, and geeks tend to think everyone OUGHT to be geeks. (This is one of Apple’s core advantages in the market. They get consumers and that they’re different from geeks, and aren’t afraid to tailor their products for consumers instead of geeks. But I digress….)

With a phone, you really have two options; you can create an infrastructure that protects a user from the malware and jerks out there (that’s your walled garden, your “only through the App Store” model), or you can let users install anything. And as soon as you do the latter, the hackers start playing the identity theft, steal-your-info game, and as soon as that hits the press (which it will), the vendor is put under immense pressure to fix it. And the way you can fix it is to build walls around your garden. Seriously. 

Here’s the other challenge: if you let “just anything” on the phone, it’s typically the PHONE’s fault when things start crashing, at least in the eyes of the consumer. And if the consumer decides the phone is unreliable or crappy, guess what happens? It goes back to the phone store and is replaced by a different model. And if enough phones get returned to the stores, the stores stop pushing your phone. And if enough stores stop pushing your phone, your friend the carrier stops returning your phone calls, and you suddenly realize their TV commercials now feature someone else’s phones. And then you’re screwed. 

So a practical reality is that geeks like open, but only a tiny percentage of a phone’s audience is geeks. Most of the market likes simple, but really, what they want is for it to work. And once you open it up to outside code (aka, third party apps), you lose a lot of control over just how reliable it’s going to be. So as the vendor, now you’re figuring out which set of compromises you have to make to allow for diverse app ecosystems — without that ecosystem creating situations that cause your platform to fail, either because the users return your phones, or because the carriers stop selling them, or because the developers stop writing for it (killing the ecosystem). 

If you can navigate that set of ulcer-creating compromises, THEN you can start worrying about how to also keep the geeks happy. Apple’s choice seems to be to tolerate (sort of) the jail breakers, as long as jail breaking isn’t TOO easy (meaning too many consumers start doing it and then screaming when bad things happen as if it’s Apple’s fault); with webOS, we went with homebrew and more openly embraced it. And yes, we did have have long talks about whether to enable homebrew with a big red flashing button that says “if you do this,  we can’t protect you from the big bad world any more”. 

The problem comes when people want both the openness of an unregulated ecosystem — and for the vendor to be responsible that nothing bad happens when they go unregulated. Apple forcing you to jailbreak IOS more or less limits jail breakers to people technically savvy enough to understand “on your own”, although nothing’s perfect or 100%. 

Stop and think about it. How do you have an open phone — and protect that phone from the kind of apps we’ve seen on Android; Google was a lot more open about it’s app market to start, and had to figure this out the hard way.

Consumers don’t think like geeks. Nor do they want to. They want it to work. They want it to do the things they want done. they don’t want to have to jump through hoops, and they aren’t really tolerant of a phone that doesn’t do that. They will replace the phone if it messes up too often, and you live or die with a carrier on your sales AND your return rates. When that return rate goes up, bad things happen. (or so I’ve heard).

So the question of limiting access to only vendor approved apps through a vendor approved app store is never really a question. A phone is a lot more limited environment than a desktop computer, with a lot of sensitive user data to protect. And users are a LOT less tolerant of their phone randomly crashing than they’ve been conditioned to be about their Windows XP system crashing… 

I thought we struck the right balance between the walled garden and giving users an open alternative in a way where they knew what the tradeoffs were. I definitely like the webOS approach of enabling homebrew more than the IOS model of  tolerating jail breaking; but no vendor has delivered a phone that is truly open and unmanaged that’s sold more than a token number of units, nor will they. That’s the nature of the mobile device. 

Think about it: if anyone thought that being unwalled was a competitive advantage against Apple, don’t you think someone would have gone up against them with that strategy by now? Yet everyone emulates Apple’s setup. There’s a reason for that: it works, and the alternatives don’t. 

They sound good, until the first time you find out that tip calculator you downloaded shipped off all your credit card info to Moldova, and the phone vendor and the carrier can’t do anything about it because the garden has no walls. People love to complain that the walls hinder their view of the landscape — until the Huns come over the hill and flash their swords as they move towards the village… 

But by bringing up the prison thing, the EFF’s authors aren’t making their case more compelling. Instead, they’ve giving readers a convenient opportunity to roll their eyes and reject their argument. 

When you take extreme, no-compromise positions and use extremist rhetoric like this, you do a disservice to your cause in a couple of ways. One is that as noted, you make it easy for people to write you off and write off your position (good points and all). the other is that you get minimized out of the discussion because you’re simply unpleasant to deal with. It’s the more moderate voices that tend to sway and move, not the zealots. think about it. As much as I’ll give credit to Stallman and company and the early editions of the GPL for bringing forward the open source movement, in the last decade, most of the real innovation and energy in the movement has been because of more moderate positions and voices (especially the people driving the BSD license, or instance). 

Call Me Fishmeal.: The Mac App Store Needs Paid Upgrades:

The Mac App Store has been a huge boon to Mac software developers, but has an enormous flaw: it needs to allow developers to charge existing customers a discounted price for major upgrades.

Right now developers selling through the Mac App Store face a lose/lose choice: either provide all major upgrades to existing customers for free (thus losing a quarter of our revenue), or create a “new” product for each major version (creating customer confusion) and charge existing customers full price again (creating customer anger). Why The Mac App Store is Nice

 

This was one of those things I got to talk about with developers a lot back in webOS land. All developers want this. No app store (with any significant audience, that I can find…) implementation provides it. Why the disconnect?

Behold the three stages of product manager hell:

• Okay, to make this date, what features do we absolutely positively have to have for launch? Upgrades? We can add that later. It waits.
• The SAP geeks say it’ll take eight months to add support to the back end for this. We need to launch in Botswana. It’ll have to wait.
• I know the developers are asking for this, but we seem to be doing pretty well without it. It just doesn’t seem to be a priority right now, not compared to [REDACTED].

Now, throw in a random “oh my god, do you know what this will do to our tax liability and reporting requirements in Lithuania?” and you get some sense of how you end up down this path. I’m sure no software developer has ever had discussions like this about their product, right?

Just sayin’

My view on this: I see the developers pain. I see what the expectations users have for this. One of the things I asked for when we implemented coupons (aka promo codes) was the ability for a developer to send out discounts to existing users so they could release “Delicious Monster: TNG” at list and give existing users a code to upgrade at 20% off. Did I get it? (hollow laughter).

If you look at what Apple does (since it doesn’t actually say anything) and guess to their intentions, I’m guessing — based on what they’ve done with Aperture — that their model is moving forward without upgrade discounts. Instead, they’ve cut the cost of the product up front. What used to cost $200 now costs $79. When they release Aperture 4, it’ll cost $79. And Aperture 5 will cost $79. And if a user complains about paying full price for each release, Apple can ask if they’d rather go back  to paying $200 for the package and getting upgrades for $99. it’s actually a persuasive argument, if your business plan can handle it and you don’t mind getting hit on the head a lot while explaining it.

And so, if you’re building product, that’s what I’d recommend you plan for. No upgrade discounts. Which implies setting your pricing scheme so that you can make a good “cost over the life of product” argument to users, and make sure each release has persuasive upgrade features (I’m looking at you, Adobe CS 5) or users will simply yawn and skip the release.

Honestly, as a user, I can live with that model. And yes, if I think a product is overpriced or the features of a release are not persuasive, I will skip it (he says, as a proud owner of CS 3; neener, Adobe, I spent my money elsewhere — but happily upgraded to Lightroom 4, because it was worth it. hint hint). It’s going to require retraining users who expect discounts. that will be painful. But I think Apple has set this standard, and I think that’s going to be what it is moving forward. I don’t see a persuasive reason for them to change their strategy.

And whether they admit it or not, I bet a lot of product managers for app stores on various platforms have the “if Apple isn’t doing it, why should I?” test for feature requests. And then they go off into a closet and come up with reasons for the powerpoint that don’t sound so, well, reactive and lame.

 

The Mac App Store has been a great new source of revenue for Delicious Monster — we’ve seen almost double total sales of “Delicious Library 2” through it. And although paying ~⅓ of our gross to Apple is pretty steep, if Apple’s finding new customers who wouldn’t have found us before the Mac App Store,

 

 

Of course, if you remember back to the good old days… Not the good old days of selling downloads on your own site, but the REAL good old days, if you could have gotten your software INTO a store like Best Buy, you’d have to pay for physical packaging and distribution, and deal with returns and all of the sales and management of your retail channels — and those channels would suck about 50% of your sale price off on top of it for THEIR margins.

And FWIW, that 30% margin they take is maybe break-even. they certainly aren’t paying for expensive cars in the parking lot with it. App stores aren’t cheap to run. Or so I hear.

About “The New iPad” and other updates…. @ Chuqui 3.0:

I like the new iPad. As someone who is still using a first gen tablet, I’ll probably upgrade. But not right away. Let the lemmings beat their head against the brick walls of the apple store to get first access to day one bugs. have fun, guys. I’d love to upgrade to an LTE device and turn it into my tether hotspot — but the cost for data is too high, so I’ll stick with a wifi tablet and my iPhone hotspot for tethering when I need it.

 

 

The Verge has come up with updated (read: correct) pricing on the LTE plans for the new iPads:

New iPad LTE data plans: no mobile hotspot with AT&T at launch | The Verge:

Apple has been shuffling the data plans that it shows for the Verizon and AT&T versions of the new iPad with LTE service in the past day, and it’s a little confusing — AT&T’s $30 plan was originally indicated as 2GB instead of 3, and buyers still can’t see all four Verizon plans that are available. Here’s the definitive word on the commitment-free offerings from both operators:

AT&T (3 plans total)

250MB $14.99, overage $14.99 per 250MB 3GB $30, overage $10 per 1GB 5GB $50, overage $10 per 1GB Verizon (4 plans total)

1GB $20, overage $20 per 1GB 2GB $30, overage $10 per 1GB 5GB $50, overage $10 per 1GB 10GB $80, overage $10 per 1GB Perhaps more notably, Verizon’s plans include hotspot service across the board at no additional cost

 

I went and spent some time on the ATT wireless web site (which is just such a joy to work with) trying to figure out when I bought our iPhones and what our usage is to see what might make sense moving forward.  If I’ve read this right, my iPhone 4 is right around 18 months old, since ATT is almost ready to offer me “a deal” to upgrade to a new phone (with new 2 year agreement. of course). Laurie’s was bought about six months later, so she won’t get that special deal until fall.

The corrected info on the LTE charges isn’t as bad as the original pricing people were quoting. I seem to be averaging about 700-800 meg a month on my iPhone, laurie less. Neither of us is a road warrior, so working through Wifi is available most of the time, and even adding in an increase in usage because of the retina display, faster network and 1080P capabilities, it still doesn’t seem unreasonable.

So… I still have no plan to upgrade to the new iPad immediately. But when I do, I may well decide to upgrade to an LTE version. Because ATT isn’t doing tethering, I’d do this via Verizon. And to put it bluntly, while I’ve been moderately positive about ATT over time (because I live in an area where it works pretty well; sprint, not so much, as I found out in my life in webOS land), increasingly you can see how they’re slow to the game on things like tethering, and those things are becoming more important to me. So, ATT, consider this advance notice. I expect new iPhones to be released by Apple sometime in 2012; Laurie and I are skipping the 4S because with our phones, skipping generations works just fine for us — but we’ll be moving to the next one. And when we do, I fully expect to shift from ATT to Verizon as the carrier. And it looks like it makes sense to do the tethering via the LTE iPad on Verizon vs. using the phone as the hotspot, although if I haven’t bought the iPad by the time the phones come out, I might change my mind. we’ll see.

But in looking how both Verizon and ATT are setting up their plans and support models here, I’m convinced: it’s time to move off ATT, because it’s increasingly not competitive with how these devices are used and are going to be used, because ATT hasn’t gotten their networks up to snuff to be able to let us use them that way. (but ATT is a damn site further along than Sprint is…)

All of this of course subject to change. but I doubt it…