Quite frankly, I never expected this will ever come true, especially so soon after the release of Kindle 2. At this point, Kindle 2 is just barely hot off the press, shipping to those early adopters, and already it's being replaced by a software platform strategy. You have to wonder about Amazon's claim of Kindle success. For as long as Amazon has tauted Kindle being a hot selling, successful consumer electronic product, the company has been more than reluctant to release any sort of sales figure. During the Kindle shortage throughout the holiday season, Amazon would not divulge any production schedule or data.
Every consumer product company, regardless of industry, understands the important in marketings its own success. McDonald's with their millions of burgers served, Pepsi with their "4 out of 5 people prefers the taste of Pepsi over Coke", Apple with their millions of iPhones shipped. Publishing these numbers breeds consumer confidence, and leads to increasing momentum for the popularity of your product. So why isn't Amazon more forthcoming? Is Kindle really as much of a success as Amazon want the outside world to believe?
Within any office environment, there are always some very interesting social dynamics. Every department has corresponding personalities that one would expect knowing the stereotype. The people working in accounting department tend to be cautious and conservative, straight to the point with numbers and figures; but often seem to have a hidden wild streak to offset the hassles of rather restrained daily personality (These are most likely, the craziest and drunkest people at company parties). Engineers are often filled with plethora of trivial knowledge from all walks of life, and have a tendency to always drive meetings into levels of detail that it was not intended for. Designers are always somewhat aloof and odd in their ways, seemingly to harmonize on a different frequency than everyone else. In a politcally correct climate, we regard stereotypes as taboo, when in reality stereotypes are often established from years of factual observations.
I've been using Firefox 3 beta for a while now, and it's a definite improvement in memory usage and speed over Firefox 2. As expected, it's taking some of the addon developers quite a while to write new versions of their addon that's compatible with Firefox 3.
Granted, I don't use a whole lot of Firefox addons, but there is one addon I couldn't live without: The bookmarking addon from del.icio.us. Since I work on multiple computers at work and home, del.ici.ous has became a valuable tool to keep all of my bookmark in one place. It's also much more flexible than Google Bookmarks.
Now there is a beta version of the del.icio.us addon for Firefox 3, available here:
Just follow the link and install the new version of the addon, so far it's been working great. With the availability of this addon, my switch over to Firefox 3 is complete.
In my younger days, I used to mock my father about how far he is behind the time, the fact that he can't touch-type (he's a classic two-finger, and on occassions where he's striving for productivity, three-finger, typist) or really grasp any idea of what this whole internet deal really is. Occassionally, he still asked me whether sending me email across the ocean, from Taiwan, would cost me any extra fees (naturally, he's more worried about me having to pay for receiving the email, than the fact that he might have to pay to send email... I love my dad).
It's an old, used, beat-up cliché, but I never thought I would one day consider myself closer to my dad's category rather than being one of the hip kids that's ingrained with all of the happenings in the tech world. The fact remains that I'm moving towards being one of the old geezer of the internet. Even though I'm still a notch below thirty, I have been in this tech bubble for nearly a decade.
I can't take credit for the title of this post, it's really just a part of the discussion on one of the TWIT podcast this past week (or was it the week before? I can't remember). Last week Google announced an astonishingly underwhelming software platform. I mean, it's not horrible or anything, it's just disappointing that a lot of people were expecting Google to throw their hat in a complete consumer product, rather than a half-assed promise to deliver some sort of product nine months from now which may or may not be any good.
Well, Google released the Android SDK today. The SDK was pretty impressive, giving us a good preview of the the OS user interface (via Engadget). However, one can't help notice how much the "mockup" looks like a Palm Centro, or any myriad of Palm or Windows Mobile device that's been available so far. One also can't help but notice how the UI takes many lessons from iPhone's UI. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose, but didn't everyone expect a *lot* more from Google than just another software platform that looks just like any other software platform?
I listen to podcasts when I bike to work every morning (my form of reading the newspaper while having breakfast?), and one of the panelist on TWIT made a lot of sense, although I can't recall it verbatim (and I'm too lazy to listen through a one-hour long podcast to find the exact quote). Whenever Google can't conquer a market, they fragment.
Take for example, the "OpenSocial" initiative that Google just started. Google had their own social networking property (www.orkut.com), which was almost completely forgotten as a footnote to all their other services. Facebook became the monstrosity that overtook MySpace, which long before had overtaken Friendster. Orkut, however, was nowhere in anyone's distant memory. By introducing OpenSocial, Google is undoing Facebook's dominance in building web applets specifically for their service. In away, it seems like a move that benefits every developer, who can now develop for every social networking site (other than Facebook) and support many "platforms" at once. Of course, the "side" benefit is that Google has planted the seed that could possibly unseat Facebook from its dominance at the top, and also insert themselves as the tour-de-force of any social networking site that may eventually take the throne.
Taking a look at what they've done with Android, they've essentially fragmented any previous mobile Linux development, again inserted themselves at the helm of the movement. Furthermore, they've even fragmented the Java development community as well. CNet's Crave blog has a great post on this, which touches on some of the issues with Android's SDK and overall Java development. Of course this isn't all bad, since Java in itself is a platform that has failed to satisfy anyone. However, once again it shows Google as a very shrewd company at being able to project themselves as a kind, gentle company that can do no evil; and at the same time, position themselves as the titan that is able to undermine an entire industry in one fell swoop.
Who does that sound like? You know it, it's on the tip of your tongue, you know exactly who I'm talking about.
Google's Open Handset Alliance is exciting, because geeky programmers around the world just all simultaneously orgasmed and are now struggling to hold their drool inside what is presumed, to be their oral cavity. To be frank, that was not my first response to the announcement. I had a really, really busy day at work when Google hit the press; so my first impression was, "Oh, there are some new info on the Googlephone, great!"
It was another day of soul-searching later, that I said to myself, "Wait, is that all there is to this news? That's it? Really? You mean, I didn't miss anything? I mean.. I combed through my RSS reader for hours and hours looking for more detailed information, something more exciting, something with actual substance.... and... really? That's it?" For at least a few hours, I thought I was caught in some sort of temporal anomaly and was missing vital information that Google has apparently announced to the entire world minus little ol' me.
The truth is rather, disappointing? Underwhelming? Indeed, the news outlets were positive on Day 1, and almost all universally speculative and introspective on Day 2. How many times have we been promised a "mobile phone OS based on Linux & open-source"? This harkens back to the Linux PDA days, and we all know how that went. The only difference between Google's announcement and all the other dozen open-source mobile OS initiative, is that Google has a lot of money. Shitloads of money. Certainly a lot more money than open source Linux companies that's been trying to figure out how to make any money at all by doing, anything and everything?
Of course you'll see an impressive list of partners, it's Google for god's sake! Everyone jump in the pool! The question is, how many of those partners really have any product development plans? How many of those partners will be looking for their own competitive advantage once the SDK is out? How many of those partners will actually, actively contribute to the initiative once they realized that they are at very high risk to put themselves out of business?
The answer for now is, "It's Google, they'll make it work." We'll see what develops in the coming months. I see it as Google just throwing a piece of SDK out there, and allowing the sharks to battle it out for supremacy. After all, taking this strategy really means they have very little stake in any particular company. It's a smart way to position themselves, as a software platform provider that doesn't really care which hardware wins out. If Sony Ericsson develops something great and put HTC out of business, so be it. If Nokia collapse (well, they haven't made a commitment to the consortium at all yet, probably a smart move at this point for them), it really doesn't matter to Google either.
I'm starting to see a bunch of executives & software engineers from companies gather at a coliseum built in Google's backyard (or maybe by naval airbase or something), and someone from Google is sitting atop in the Emperor's seat and just giggling at the bloodshed that's about to happen.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the way that Google is going about this. In fact, it's probably the smartest thing they could do to get into the mobile device arena without actually becoming involved in it. The style just disagrees with me on a personal level. I like companies that design end-to-end solutions that satisfies consumer needs. For example, Tivo is a great company that threw themselves into the heat of the battle, and forever changed the way we interact with televisions.
That kind of a company earns my respect. Google's Open Handset initiative makes me wonder, "Is this just going to be a Linux version of Windows Mobile?"
Since I got my iPhone, I've been buying a lot of TV shows on iTunes, so I can carry them with me and watch them wherever I am. Most of the time that watching is done when I'm in my room, right before bed (I don't have a TV in the bedroom right now). However, the freedom of watching a TV show or a movie when I'm out eating dinner (by myself, of course, that would just be rude in the face of other company), or waiting in line at some place, is quite priceless.
So I was a little disappointed when NBC decided to have a bit spat with iTunes, and decided to pull all of their shows off of iTunes by the end of the year. What really gets to me, is how senseless the arguments the media companies are raising against Apple. This doesn't pertain to just NBC, but all media companies dealing with iTunes as a whole.
Think back to when Universal was negotiating with Apple for their new music agreement. Their argument was that they're not making enough money from iTunes Music Store, they want more control over pricing. Similar arguments has been brought up over the years with Apple multiple times, and they're all along the lines of more control over DRM, more control over pricing, more profit for the record labels. Time and time again they insist that they can't make enough money from iTunes Music Store alone.
Yet, look what happened these past few months. EMI started selling DRM-free tracks on iTunes, and doesn't seem to be hurt by it as much as bolstered by it. All the other studios started offering completely DRM-free tracks on Amazon MP3 that sold for as little as $0.89 per track, depending on albums (although the misconception is all tracks are available at $0.89, they are not. Most out-of-print album tracks are $0.99, similar to how such albums costs more than new releases at record stores). They have agreed to sell less restrictive & less expensive music on Amazon, meanwhile telling Apple this is precisely what they cannot ever afford to do.
Now with this NBC deal, they're complaining about revenue, about not making enough money. Same arguments as the record labels had with iTunes. At the same time, they're going to be bringing out their own video service that allows you to watch entire shows for free (albeit with advertisements) and even embed videos on other sites in a very web 2.0-friendly fashion. So now they're just serving up bandwidth and going back to relying on advertisement-based revenue models. Do they really make that much more money from webcasts compared to selling the shows? I'm sure the studios makes a huge amount of money from DVD sales of TV shows. Meanwhile iTunes' sheer volume may not be as much as DVD sales now, it is a developing market that will probably grow bigger over time as we steer away from solid-state mediums for media delivery.
Furthermore, NBC's little tirade about how much they've helped the iPod, and how they should get a share of that iPod sales revenue, is utterly ridiculous. Has RCA, Sony, Sharp and other TV manufacturers been sending part of their revenue to television stations? Obviously TV as a delivery medium wouldn't work without the TV stations. So why isn't NBC charging TV makers a fee for delivering their shows to millions of homes everyday?
We'll see how this whole thing plays out. In the end, AmazonMP3 might take over iTunes Music Store, but that's only because iTMS was there to pave the way first. Maybe Hulu.com will succeed, or maybe it'll be a massive failure. Whatever happens, the end result probably wouldn't impact iPod sales a slight bit. After all, no one's stopped buying TV's because NBC doesn't have any interesting shows on Wednesday nights, right?
I know at least one person who's not completely happy with the new iPod announcements. I have to agree at least in part, that the new iPods are not all that exciting. iPod Touch is really the only revolutionary product here, if you consider iPhone to be a completely different product category.
Here I think of all the announcements:
iPod Shuffle - Practically nothing new and worth mentioning at all.
iPod Nano - It's FAT. I really don't like the new look. Although I bet once I've held on in person, I'd be willing to put up with the new form factor. It is even slimmer and overall smaller than the current Nanos. The proportion of the click wheel to the width of the device is just... ugly. I wish they could've worked a little harder and done something else. I was really hoping for an iPod Nano-Touch type of device here. It's still not a bad iPod, just underwhelming.
iPod Classic - Same ol' same ol' with bigger hard drive. I do find it funny that the iPod Classic's hard drive is bigger than some of my friend's computer hard drive. Nothing new, nothing exciting.
iPod Touch - Great device, but it's not really that fresh since it's just a stripped down iPhone. Like I said, I rather wished they would integrate Nano + Touch into some device that's in between.
I'm sure Apple will still sell a ton of them, because no other MP3 player in the market has near the media dominance. The surprise to me was the $200 price drop on the iPhone. I promptly went out and got one, 2-year contract be damned. At $399 it's a very reasonably priced PDA phone, in fact, one of the most feature-rich and well priced phone you can get. I guess I'll put up with AT&T for another 2 years at least.
Wireless iTunes Music Store... In a way it's a long time coming, but I wonder how many times I'll be wondering around in middle of nowhere just wanting to buy a new song?
Although I wouldn't go so far as saying everything was "crappy"... I wasn't extremely impressed either.
Despite of how much I love the iPhone, I still don't believe in signing a two year contract for AT&T/Cingular. I've been a customer with Cingular back since when they were PacBell PCS, I have no reason to be locked down to a contract to prove my loyalty to a carrier. Especially since the iPhone isn't subsidized at all. If signing a contract meant I can save a few hundred dollars, then at least the value proposition is existent. There is absolutely no reason to a sign a contract for a phone that will inevitably be unlocked (and probably be available at the same price).
Service issues aside, the iPhone itself is simply one of the most brilliant consumer product ever made. It is a device that will completely reshape the mobile phone market. The problem is, the other phone manufacturers seem to be thinking, "Wow, the iPhone has a touchscreen, we must all move to touchscreen-only phones as well." I'm not saying that iPhone's touchscreen isn't brilliant, but it isn't the end-all solution to the woes of the mobile phone design we've seen in the past decade.
There are already several manufacturers that's decided to manufacture their own versions of a touchscreen phone. Some of which has been offering touchscreen capability for years (for example, most of HTC's Windows Mobile based phones). The problem with these phones isn't whether or not your buttons are placed on a screen or engraved into a rubber nub, the problem is the underlying unresponsive, inadequate, and sometimes down-right ugly software.
It's easy to credit an obvious invention (even though touchscreen has always been around, the type that iPhone uses, basically a type of clear laptop touchpad, is completely new to the market) for the success of a hardware product; ultimately it isn't just the hardware design, but how the hardware design interact, melds and works with the underlying software. I don't find the buttons on my Razr hard to press, I don't find the features on my HTC Windows Mobile phone to be so hard to access or inadequate; but I also don't understand why everything I do on either of these phones seems to take place 3 seconds after I've executed a command, clicked a button, or even just scrolling through the address book.
Years and years ago, there was this great, ambitious operating system called BeOS. It was built from the ground up to be a multi-threaded, multi-CPU operating system. The most impressive aspect of BeOS, was how responsive it was at handling tasks that were extremely taxing to other operating system at the time. You can run multiple windows of videos, move them around the screen, resize them and still have lightning fast response. Mind you, this was the age when most users were still living with Windows 3.1 (maybe some on Windows 95?). The software engineers of BeOS were able to achieve this, because they were very aware that the outward responsiveness of an OS is just as important to its interaction with the user as the underlying operations.
For example, while another OS will prioritize the task of writing files to the disk, BeOS prioritized the playback of that file being written, saved, copied. The writing of the file can still be finished up in the background, but the immediate feedback of that file being worked on is the most important thing to the user, and delivered a level of interactivity that was far more appreciable. The OS was instantaneously more robust because it made sure that you knew what it is doing, what you've done, then went ahead and finished up all those tasks in the background where it wouldn't bother you.
That is in essence one of the most important aspect about the iPhone. On the first week of iPhone's release, CNet even performed a real-life, side-by-side test of iPhone's UI speed against what Apple were showing in the commercial. There were all sorts of accusation that Apple had fussed with the footage, sped up some parts, edited out the lag time in between. Well, the CNet guys found that almost second by second, they can do everything that was done in the commercial with their iPhone. Sure, the touchscreen UI is slick and intuitive, but it is also the amazing responsiveness of the UI, the underlying robustness of the software, that really sets the iPhone apart from any phone that you've ever used before.
Another company named Pasen put out this video on Youtube recently:
Sure, it's a touchscreen device that completely rips off the iPhone. Look at the video, watch the number of times you had to click, double-click, drag fingers around, try to see if the device is responding. Wait, what is it doing now? Did I just select that? Is that playing now? How do I.. wait, let me click on that again.
I hope the rest of the consumer electronics industry doesn't follow suit. It's not just about the touchscreen.
