Articles by Mike Overbo
I’ll admit to liking Robert X. Cringely of PBS. Sure, his theories are wild sometimes. But they’re wild in a fun way, and he’ll revisit things that he got wrong. He doesn’t resort to trolling like some writers of his generation who happen to be friends of his, and when he does troll, it’s against something that we all hate anyway, like our mobile phone carrier. He’s a uniter, not a divider.
Cringely’s idea is that Stephenson’s recent message of a 3G iPhone next year (covered recently here) will chill iPhone sales and cost AT&T about $1 billion in market cap. That, and that Apple will be parnering with Google to buy that 700MHz spectrum. If that charge was true, stockholders should oust Stephenson for neglecting is fiduciary duty: to make them a crapload of money. If I was a stockholder, I wouldn’t forgive a billion-dollar mistake. I’m inclined to write off the spat as likely to be a rumor because Stephenson’s line is pretty much the same line we were given from Jobs. However, there is a ‘but’ in this: the possibility of Apple working with Google for spectra, that’s enough to give me pause. Like so many Cringely articles one has to file it away and see what happens in the distant future.
In other news, Apple has a $30 billion war chest. That’s Microsoft scale money.
Kevin Michaluk of CrackBerry.com reviewed the iPhone and reviews it positively. He’s got a thread going in our forums too. Someone may have asked if they could keep the 4GB iPhone until it became available on their carrier; I won’t name any names, nor will I offer proof (because I forgot to take a !@#$ screenshot). No, I’ll be content to insinuate. The other party would have accepted except that they have other immediate plans for said iPhone once the Smartphone Round Robin is over. Still, it’s an interesting proposition, and if someone had a spare iPhone to give, someone would have taken someone else up on it. If someone could dole out iPhones to people that needed interface love, someone definitely would.
Steve Jobs mentioned the possibility of a 3G back in September, when he was announcing the iPhone on O2. He was asked a question about 3G and when we’d see it in the iPhone. His response back in September was telling:
“We’ve got to see the battery life for 3G get back up into the five-plus hour range, before it’s really suitable for [the iPhone]. I think we’ll see that hopefully late next year. But right now, you make a really big tradeoff to go to 3G, and that’s really bad battery life.”
Well, AT&T’s Randall Stephenson had a big PR quotefest that you can read over at Bloomberg, and he mentions again that the iPhone would be coming out in 2008, but without the ‘late’ part. A lot of naysayers will use that to back up their crazy predictions of 3G iPhones arriving ‘May 2008.’ They may do well to note that Jobs is not so optimistic: he’s thinking hopefully late next year, meaning there’s a real possibility of 2009.
figure 1: UMG CEO Doug Morris as interpreted by artist Psillos
If you’re looking read a sob story for the music industry, Wired has your ticket. They interviewed Universal CEO Doug Morris about his woes with iTunes and how to deal with the MP3 problem, and it’s pretty revealing.
Universal in the process of starting a new subscription-based service called Total Music to replace iTunes (and Microsoft’s Plays-For-Sure, and maybe Microsoft’s other Zune marketplace too). The best part about that is he’s looking to deliver yet another format. You have MP3s, you have iTunes’ AACs, you have Windows Media’s WMA, you have other myriad formats like OGG and FLAC, and then you’ll have yet another choice.
figure 2: Mr. Non-Digital guy drinking with Mr. Internet Enabling Apple Board Member Digital Guy
Morris admits he’s not a digital guy, but… wow. his response to the threat of iTunes doesn’t make sense to me. He wants tech companies to foot the bill for at least the first few months, which I don’t think will fly. They’re just going to pass the added cost on to consumers, and after that the consumer is stuck with keeping things up. Would I need multiple subscriptions for multiple devices? If I do, that would suck. If I don’t, it would still suck, since the tech companies would still build the cost of the unnecessary subscription into the retail price of their music player. And this is assuming they don’t try to establish a 4th common format, mind you. Which they probably will, probably with the help of Microsoft (or worse, Real).
If they sell multiple versions with different music licensing — one version more expensive and with a subscription, and one much less but without a subscription — consumers get confused, have a negative experience with the platform, and return to iTunes (or Amazon MP3, or stealing music, or home taping, or whatever).
And if they get the tech makers to build in the cost a lifelong subscription into a device, what’s to stop Apple from licensing that tech besides collusion? What would be my purpose to upgrade in music-playing hardware besides capacity? It doesn’t look like it would be a good long-term deal for the tech giants either (let alone me), unless the tech giants have an elaborate plan for screwing over the record companies later.
Another part of his plan was to not renew the contract with iTunes, so they could reduce the number of songs and albums they’d sell on iTunes. Forcing customers to subscribe to a subscription service so he can escape the “golden handcuffs” of iTunes probably isn’t going to fly especially well. The market has pretty much spoken for the iPod so far — maybe something revolutionary will come along; maybe something won’t. My best guess is that whatever replaces the iPod will still be made by Apple, but whatever. The music industry’s next best hope is the Zune from Microsoft. Is that scary or what? Fleeing Apple for Microsoft is the very definition of “out of the frying pan, into the fire.”
I dunno, it seems like this guy is dancing in quicksand. In other news, iTunes accounts for 22% of all music sold in the USA, and Amazon MP3 is also an excellent choice for online music. My line in the sand: if it’s not iTunes or it’s not MP3 or some similar open format, it’s doomed. (photo via Getty, painting via Wired)
Google Maps for Mobile has unveiled a pretty sweet new feature — on a bevy of mobile phones, Google Maps is smart enough to figure out approximately where you are. Google’s system uses a method known as tower triangulation — your phone keeps a list of nearby towers, and makes note of how strong your signal is. Google accesses their database of towers and compares your signal strength and correlates it to a likely location on the map. It’s pretty slick, and has been common in parts of Europe for ages. Location-based features of mobile phones are a killer app, to be sure.
Hopefully the Apple / Google partnership is such that this feature will make it into the next iPhone firmware update. If the partnership is not such, expect me to cry and wail until Apple rectifies our pitiable situation. I blog, therefore I cry and wail.
The iPhone launches in France tonight on the carrier Orange. One of the cool things about the French launch is that they’re selling the unlocked iPhone for so much less than T-Mobile is selling it for. Maybe all the delays in launching a French iPhone were because Orange was a tougher negotiator… if that’s true, the extra time was worth it: the uncontracted iPhone from Orange is a bargain at €649 (about $975); the standard locked iPhone with one of their four simplified plans is €399 (about $600),
The customer can unlock the iPhone for €100 (about $150), which drops to free after six months. If only we could have some straight answers from AT&T and Apple about unlocking in the U.S.A.
Zach Nelson of Inc.com declared the iPhone is ushering in the next major computing platform. I agree with him, really — the ability to intelligently browse actual websites on the iPhone is a killer business feature. He’s the CEO of NetSuite, and a bit of the article is him crowing that NetSuite worked perfectly with the iPhone out-of-box, but still… it’s a good article with some fine insights:
“Not the humble cell phone, you say? It’s too small, too weak, too underpowered for serious productivity? If history matters, new computing platforms have always emerged from the low-end of the marketplace. The Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) minicomputer supplanted the IBM mainframe, then Sun’s Unix Workstations replaced DEC, and the PC replaced Sun. Now, the phone is going to surpass the PC.”
It briefly sounds like quackery, but he smartly refrains from predicting the death of the PC or the death of the internet.
“Just as there are still mainframes, mini-computers and workstations in use, the phone won’t eliminate the PC. But more and more work will get done on your phone. And the same transition we saw from keyboard-only mainframe applications to point-and-click mouse-driven interfaces is happening again, this time with designs that keep the needs of mobile users in mind. It is going to force software companies to think carefully about how they use that precious screen real-estate on the phone.
If you still aren’t convinced, just wait, and the decision will be made for you by your best and brightest new hires. Never lose sight of what the college students of today are accustomed to. Living — not just communicating — on a small, handheld device is simply second-nature. They are so tied to these devices that their dedication, and the applications already being created for the latest vanguard of smart phones, is going to transform business five to ten years down the road.” “
Electronista reports that some developers have already received an advance copy of the iPhone system development kit. Apparently the kit makes good on Jobs’ earlier promise of code signing.
The kit is apparently not a full-access type of kit; it’s more of an intermediating layer between the programmer and the actual operating system frameworks. That means that a lot of the iPhone’s possible functionality won’t be realized (at least as the SDK currently stands) as programmers won’t be getting raw access to the iPhone. As Jobs said earlier, they want to be as open as possible while ensuring that iPhone owners’ information is safe.
If that’s true, it also means that a lot of apps that currently work on hacked iPhones via Installer.app probably won’t be easy to port over to the official SDK.
The title doesn’t give an exact quote, but if I was to say there’s a gist to this interview, that would be it. CNN Money.com Fortune interviewed Apple’s Greg Joswiak, who is in charge of marketing for iPhones and iPods. As is almost always the case with an interview like this, he doles out the money quotes like Michael Jordan sticks out his tongue. Some of it we’ve heard before — they want to take time to make sure everything is going alright, and there isn’t really any new news, just that it’s presented in more detail than before:
“I think the software development kit (SDK) that’s going to be available for the iPhone is very interesting, because we think that with the revolutionary multi-touch interface and the phenomenal product that the iPhone is, and certainly having OS X underneath it, that it’s going to be an unbelievable platform for developers.
“Of course what we want to make sure we’ve done is keep the phone safe and reliable, and that’s why it’s taken us a little while to get this SDK out. Especially now that we’ll have a real SDK which means legitimate developers are going to come into the space. There are all kinds of fantastic and great things that they’re going to do.
[....]
“We do our best to try to understand what customers are going to want down the road. I’m fond of the Wayne Gretzky quote — you skate to where the puck is going to be. We try to understand as we develop our product road map, what’s going to be exciting in the future. And that’s one of the advantages we have over our competitors. Our competitors tend to put the cross hairs on where we are now, and by the time they come up with a product that tries to match where we are now, we’re beyond them. We’re one or two generations beyond, moving faster than they are.”
