Drewloid's Blog

I’m going to have to side with Warren Buffett on this.  The Wall Street types who do stock analysis are really crazy nut jobs.

Apparently the news from Apple that the WWDC will be focused on their software plans has everybody in a tizzy that Apple won’t announce the iPhone 5 at WWDC as they have typically been doing.  Let’s not forget that WWDC is about Apple’s software plans, not announcing new iPhones, and as far as I know, they didn’t exactly telegraph that they were going to talk about iPhone announcements at any of the other WWDC’s.  But I don’t know, maybe they did.  But basically, it’s business as usual for WWDC and people on Wall Street need to talk about something to justify their jobs of doing nothing for very high pay.

I won’t even get started on the whole idea that if Apple doesn’t announce a new iPhone 5 in June then it is late.

Of course these people aren’t crazy and they probably know exactly what they are doing.  For starters, they are justifying their big paychecks by creating the illusion of thinking, the way TSA provides the illusion of security for air travelers.

Their wild pronouncements on any news or non-news is how market prices of stocks move, and price movements drive trading volume, and brokerages make money by buying and selling small moves on their own accounts in addition to the commissions on trading for clients.  No movement, no money to be made.

I’d say just ignore these people, but I’ll fall short of completely siding with Warren on the idea that wall street should close up and be open only one day a year.  There are a lot of people out there who make a nice living trading their own accounts.  If you can make a nice living for yourself and your family eating the crumbs the man leaves behind, well, good for you.

Just as long as you realize that it’s all a big game designed to make money for the players, not the clients.

Wow, I haven’t posted to myself in a while.  Looking for a job keeps one busy.

I recently lived in Kailua-Kona on the big island of Hawaii.  In Kona there is only one degree of separation between you and anyone you meet.  I thought this was kind of crazy when I moved there, but I believed it could be true for people who had lived there for a good long while, because it really is a pretty small place.  Surprisingly, it was true for me too almost immediately.  I discovered this when I had been there only two months and picked up a girl at one of the beaches and drove her back to her car in town.  As we talked, we discovered we had a mutual acquaintance.  Amazing.

So I’ve been prowling around stuff and I found a blog by a guy named Anil Dash, and he’s pretty interesting to read.  I’d never heard of him before last night.  I took a look at his front page this morning and there is a bit where he is asking his friends in his social network about good pens.  If you are an afficionado of writing you will understand the importance of a good pen.  There in the second response to his request is someone I know from the destructoid gaming community.  And when I say I know someone, I have actually physically met them and engaged in conversation.  I might not know them *well*, but I try to make sure the people in my social networks are people I’ve had f2f with.  So there in this guys responses is someone I’ve actually touched in person.  This kind of surprised me.

Yeah, yeah, I know, everyone else already knows this, and I think it is pretty cool.  Seriously, when we were building the internet, I don’t think anyone I knew really imagined this.  Maybe they did, there were a whole lot of people a lot smarter than me working on the stuff.

Wired’s columnist simply nails the whole Apple subscription hoo haw.  And it is funny as hell.

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/02/alt-text-apple-subscriptions/

I saw this on DaringFireball this morning and read it.  This is the funniest shit evah.

http://blog.jamiemurai.com/2011/02/you-win-rim/

Not funny for RIM, of course, but funny for me.  This is a way way way worse experience than my team shipped in Windows CE Platform Builder in 2002 when we integrated a CEPC emulator.  Which I would not have thought possible.  Not impossible in the sense that what we did was horrible, which it was not, impossible in the sense that what my team did 9 years ago was … NINE YEARS AGO.  Which is like a billion years in technology industry time.

Dear RIM:

I have a small suggestion for the proper developer experience.  I go to your web site, enter a little bit of information and click ‘go’.  I come back in a few minutes with some fresh coffee or soda and a cute little demo app is running in the simulator on my computer and I can play with it.  I then click another button that launches a wizard that walks me through the process of building the demo app and shows me how to make some cute little modifications and then gets my new app running in the simulator.

I am ready to rock and make your platform viable in the face of brutal competition in only 10 minutes of my time.

Duh.

This is why I like Gruber, he calls people on their shit.  http://daringfireball.net/2011/02/eleventh_hour

But let’s be real about this Apple rumors game.  It is a game, meaning it should be fun and entertaining and probably even a little stupid and pointless.  It is a game.

Arguing over the veracity or quality of one’s “sources” is completely ridiculous.  It’s a bit like two monkeys fighting over who has the best poo for flinging.  It’s still poo.

Google says they are taking action to identify and return higher quality sites in search*.  Yup, that is what they say.  When I see it in the results that is when I will consider switching my default search engines from duckduckgo and bing.  But last night, and even of today, I am not seeing the change.

I have a really simple search that I’ve been using.  “How do I change my water filter”.  Very simple.  On duckduckgo the top three hits are fixya.com, partselect.com, and purwaterfilter.com.  On google, the top three are ehow.com, ehow.com, and answers.com.

Now Google is probably in a tougher position than duckduckgo.  Duckduckgo can probably get away with filtering content spam sites from Demand Media.  Google would probably get sued.

But that is not my problem.  My problem is content spam sites with useless crap at the top of my search results.  And until Google fixes their search results, they have no chance of being my default search provider again.  But that probably doesn’t matter, they have probably lost me forever anyway.  What they need to care about is to prevent a flood of defections.  Saying you are fixing a problem without actually fixing it will delay those defections.  Unless there are people who make a switch because they are annoyed by meaningless chatter.

Just as the world is better off with a *huge* variety of media sources to take sips from the giant pie of advertising dollars, so is the world better off with no single dominant internet search provider.

* http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html

I have to admit that I haven’t actually read this announcement, just a couple of blog sites that reference this announcement.  Like I said, I don’t care what they say, I care about the results of search queries.

State-of-the-art processors.  All-new graphics.  Breakthrough high-speed I/O.

I’m really not sure what to make of the new macbook pros.  One could say some things about Apple like “they are sitting still because they think they are making enough money on the line”, or even “they are milking the macbook pro line.”  But that is not the Apple I know and love.  They wouldn’t give PC vendors a whole year of catch-up just because they are greedy.  The PC vendors are on the ropes and Apple has a lot of forward momentum.  Now is the time to put the coals to the fire and run up the score.

Apple would do that if they could.  So if they don’t, it means they can’t.  Like many people, I’ve been watching the rumor mill going nutty about what might be in this latest refresh.  Sadly, NONE of the exciting stuff has shown up in the top of the line notebook hardware the PC industry has to offer.  No LiquidMetal cases.  No SSD for the OS partition.  No 1440×900 display on the 13″.  No lowered pricing.  They even weigh the same.  Thunderbolt is the most exciting part, and that’s pretty boring since there isn’t anything we can buy that uses it*.  Snoozefest.

The most interesting part of the whole announcement is the battery life numbers, which have been reduced to 7 hours across the line from 10 hours for the 13″ and 8-9 hours for 15″ and 17″.  Ars Technica acknowledges this could be from the faster processor and graphics, and is more likely from Apples “new, more rigorous battery tests.”  Well, having worked in the area for a while, I can quite assure you that that degree of hit on the battery life numbers is not due to the processors.  And why the hell would they reduce the numbers with new tests?  From a marketing perspective, I would not do that.

But business is the reason for the new battery numbers.  It simply isn’t  good that the Macbook Air looks like it has poor battery life compared to it’s bigger siblings.  Now everything looks like it lines up properly.  And if the Air line has the highest margins (as is suggested by some of the teardowns), then if I was running things I would sure as hell get rid of the perception that there is a battery life advantage in the Macbook Pro line.

Because mobility is not only the future, it is the only thing that matters.  Nobody actually needs the faster processors for anything they really use – like email and web work and document creation, etc.  Only a tiny minority of users benefit from the fastest processors.  Speeding up the MBP line with SSD boot partitions isn’t going to make a difference to anyone, and if they care, they can buy an Air or get an optional SSD.  A higher resolution display on the 13″ won’t improve Apple’s competitive position sufficiently to be worth the bother.  LiquidMetal is either not ready or not worth the bother.

It’s not just that the new MBP’s aren’t exciting because Apple doesn’t need to do it, it’s that there isn’t anything exciting left to do with them at this point in time, and there hasn’t been for 2 years.

*Except monitors – Apple describes this as “Thunderbolt digital video output”.

Gruber is telling us all the good stuff that the Apple subscription policy has for us poor users.

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2011/02/23/app-store-subscriptions

If it is so good for us and adds value, then it is worth the 30% charge and Apple can drop the bit about how the in-app offering has to be at least as good as the deal a customer can get anywhere else.  That is ultimately the only part anyone is actually upset about, and it is the most blatantly questionable (I’m not a lawyer so I won’t say illegal) part of the terms.

I’m sure Apple will make plenty of money without that restriction.  And if they don’t then market is clearly saying that Apple isn’t adding enough value.

Don’t let Apple steal your money.

I like to beat on the so-called music industry for their strange beliefs that they deserve a high fee for delivering very little value to the end user.  It’s fun and most people don’t argue with me, so it’s a little like relieving myself in brown pants.  It gives me a nice warm feeling and nobody really cares.

I read this little case study today over on techdirt:  http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20110217/01444113148/case-study-how-ted-learned-that-giving-it-away-increased-both-popularity-revenue.shtml

There is nothing surprising about this, as this is the way it has been in the music industry for quite a while.  Peter Gabriel was saying long ago (like, last century!) that he really didn’t care about his music being pirated, because he didn’t make any money from the recordings and the piracy was clearly increasing the demand for tickets at his live shows.  That is because there are freaks like me who will do something crazy like go see David Byrne 3 times in as many days and drive 1000 miles to do it, and then go see him again 4 months later when he comes back to town yet again.  Live performances are scarce and the recorded music is easy to get.  And in a world where all media is digital, it is infinite.

I’ve seen this idea lots of times and in different places, but today it got me thinking about how many different ways is it possible to apply this concept.  I was just watching the new Radiohead video on YouTube.  Once upon a time music videos had value – enough value that the MTV network was created to air these videos and also show advertisements along the way.  The cable channel was a scarce resource and so were the videos as there were no other outlets where you could see promotional videos from bands.  MTV charged the labels money to show the videos after a while.  Money money money for the thing that was scarce.

Of course the world is different today and the video is free, at least in Radiohead’s case.  When I saw Radiohead a couple years ago – clearly being able to see them live was the scarce thing.

When it comes down to it, the things that are scarce are physical objects, people, and experiences you have shared with other people.  So a great shoe or clothing shopping experience at Nordstrom is scarce somewhat like being able to go to the Radiohead show.

So I’m wondering to myself if giving away an infinite resource is going to become an integral part of selling everything?  There sure do seem to be a wide variety of products for which this is true.  A huge portion of the value of the iPhone is all the free apps that are available on Apple’s App Store.

I think one implication of all this is that marketing campaigns are going to continue to get more and more interesting and creative.  Think of all the products you buy or see for sale that have something that is freely available as part of the environment that leads to the purchase of the product.

If in the future every (scarce) physical product you buy includes an infinite and free component, we really will be moving towards a world of infinite resources and nobody will be able to deny it.

Thursday is Steve’s birthday.  It is reasonable to suggest that Steve Jobs has done more than anyone else to get computer technology mobile and available than anyone else.  He is definitely in the top 10.

Wish him a happy birthday!

http://www.happybirthdaystevejobs.com/