Nick Bradbury's Shared Items

Behind the scenes: Reinventing our Default Profile Pictures

2012-02-08T17:34:00Z

Mister Default

Here he is: our default profile picture. You may know him as “Generic Avatar”. He’s the picture you get when you create a new account and profile on Basecamp, Highrise, Backpack, and Campfire. Mr. Default is a standard guy. He’s found everywhere on the web (in variations): message boards, comments, activity streams.

He forces everyone to look like him regardless of gender, race, and physicality. He’s also very boring.

Time for a change

People don’t usually have a picture on hand to change the default avatar. What happens is none of the default pictures ever get changed. Basecamp looks boring when everyone is Mr. Default. Splashes of color and personality from peoples’ pictures bring life to a product.

We want your first experience with Basecamp Next to be colorful, welcoming, and friendly. First, we’ve improved the flow for replacing the default avatar. Additionally, we’ve improved the default profile pictures. Say goodbye to Mr. Default.

Literal Icons

Initially I thought about approaching the pictures like the game Monopoly. Everyone has a different icon much like the pieces in that board game: an iron, a thimble, a race car, etc. Here are some sketches from that session.

I had been experimenting with a painterly style for a different project, so I tried that with this literal icon imagery.

Jason Fried’s feedback: Having literal and distinct icons might cause people to want to switch one out with another, or not find a suitable match. Would we need to build an interface to “choose your default icon”? Too complicated. Maybe we should go abstract.

37signals Office Surface Textures

Another idea I had was to try our office surface textures. The 37signals office is made of so many great materials. Basecamp is basically our office. Perhaps it was worth a try.

Jason Fried’s feedback: We want people to see Basecamp as theirs not ours. This isn’t about 37signals. Who wants to be represented by cork? Also the imagery feels too masculine. Let’s go softer and more cheerful.

Abstract Paintings

I liked the painterly style of the first batch of icons. They were colorful and cheerful. What if I tried some abstract shapes and patterns?

Jason Fried’s feedback: These are closer. The patterns might be too distracting. Try shapes and lines like that one on the upper left.

Refining the Abstract Paintings

Concentrating on shapes instead of patterns was a big breakthrough. The shapes started to take on face-like features.

Jason Fried’s feedback: Loving these. These are great!

Jason Zimdars’ feedback: When I see these I think of cars. The headlights and grill make a face. I wonder how they’d look with a slight smile?

I’m very happy with the way these default profile pictures turned out. When someone creates a new Basecamp account they will be randomly assigned one of these custom painted pictures. As you’d expect, each picture can be easily swapped with their own personal photo.

The difference now is straight away, out of the box, Basecamp will have color, personality, and vibrancy as you start managing and completing your projects.

One of My Mistakes

2012-02-07T22:39:49Z

I don’t think of my app Glassboard as a competitor of Path. Though they’re both superfically about sharing statuses, locations, pictures, and so on, they have different purposes. And Path is a beautiful app that I admire very much.

Nevertheless I admit to feeling a bit of schadenfreude at first when it was discovered that Path was uploading contacts info to their servers.

I’m human, in other words, and humans often react in ways beneath them — until they try a little harder.

My next feeling was sympathy. I’ve made plenty of mistakes (and I’ll tell you about one in a minute), and other people have surely enjoyed my errors from time to time.

Here’s the thing about uploading contacts without notice or permission: it’s wrong, and the Path folks know that. But it’s also true that launching a new social network is difficult. There’s a great deal of friction. You want to make it as easy as possible for people to connect to their friends in the system and to add new friends — and people don’t want to type in a bunch of email addresses.

A new social network needs to make this as easy as possible. It should seem like magic; it should “just work.” And every app maker should have user experience as their top concern: they don’t want people to struggle to make the app useful.

It’s easy to see where a focus on user experience, on reducing friction, could lead to the decision to upload your contacts to their system. It’s still wrong, but you can understand it — because you understand wanting to make an app with a great user experience that people like. Everyone tells you that that’s the most important thing.

Here’s the question that interests me: did uploading contacts allow them to include functionality that allowed Path to grow faster than it would have otherwise? Might it even have made the difference between a successful product and an unsuccessful product?

There’s no way to answer that question.

But I’ve long had a similar question about NetNewsWire. Back in 2002 and 2003, when NetNewsWire would read a feed, it would send the URL of NetNewsWire’s product page as the referer.

That was wrong. (It’s also what other readers did, so I justified it as the then-current best practices.) It wasn’t a privacy violation — it wasn’t terribly wrong — but it was still wrong because it was misusing the referer. (The user-agent is where that info was supposed to go.)

The effect, though, was that bloggers who looked at their stats would see the NetNewsWire product page high in their referers list, and they’d check it out, and then more people would see the app and use it.

Did this make a big difference in NetNewsWire’s adoption in the early days? Did it even make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful product? I like to think it didn’t make much difference, that I could have — and should have — not done that. But there’s no way to know. And now, ten years later, I wish I hadn’t done that, even though it was the convention.

Genesis Planet

The lesson: don’t use protomatter in the initial matrix. Things will blow up.

Even after this, I trust the Path folks to deal with this and do the right things. (And I wish them well. It’s a fantastic app.)

Farewell Stack Exchange

2012-02-06T23:00:08Z

I am no longer a part of Stack Exchange.

I still have much literal and figurative stock in the success of Stack Exchange, of course, but as of March 1st I will no longer be part of the day to day operations of the company, or the Stack Exchange sites, in any way.

It's been almost exactly 4 years since I chose my own adventure. In those four years, we accomplished incredible things together. Stack Overflow is now an enormous bustling city, a hugely positive influence on the daily lives of programmers around the world, a place to learn from and teach your peers. And the entire Stack Exchange network, born out of the seed of Stack Overflow, is a reference model of high signal, low noise, no-nonsense Q&A that makes the internet better for all of us. I could quote traffic figures, but to me that's not what it's all about. I prefer to think of it building something awesome, because I know that if you build it, they will come.

And they did. I'll be damned if we didn't change our little corner of the Internet for the better. Possibly permanently. This is more than I could have ever hoped for, and I am honored to have been a founding and guiding part of it for the last four years. But I don't need to be a part of it forever – nor should I be, if I've been doing my job correctly. Stack Exchange was always about designing software and creating recipes for self-governing communities who love a particular topic. It is an honor to be a "just" a citizen of this community again, because as a citizen, I too have the power to shape its future. Just like you do.

Startup life is hard on families. We just welcomed two new members into our family, and running as fast as you can isn't sustainible for parents of multiple small children. The death of Steve Jobs, and his subsequent posthumous biography, highlighted the risks for a lot of folks:

For a long time, work was my only thing. I worked evenings, weekends, and Christmas. At those rare times when I wasn’t at work in body, I was there in spirit, unable to speak or think of much else. I wanted so badly to climb the mountain that I stopped asking why I was doing it.

I admire Steve for the mountains he climbed. At the same time, I wonder if he missed the whole point, becoming the John Henry of our time. He won the race, but at what cost?

Me? I may turn out to be a failure in business, but I refuse to fail my kids.

I've followed Brad Wardell's success for a long time, and he had a very similar reaction to Jobs' death.

In the last several years, the company has been successful enough to generate a substantial amount of capital. And with it, I have been fortunate to bring in people with great talent. And so I started thinking of all the amazing things we would do. I would put in crazy hours to do it, of course, but we would go and do amazing things.

Then Steve Jobs died.

And suddenly I realized something. What is the objective here? My oldest child just turned 15. My other two are no longer little either. And I have been missing out on them. And my wife.

For all the success and amazing accomplishments of Steve Jobs, in the end, nothing could save him. Death can come at any time. And I realized that if I found myself on death’s door, I would regret deeply not having spent more time with my kids when they were…well, kids.

You may have more discipline than I do. But for me, the mission is everything; I'm downright religious about it. Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange have been wildly successful, but I finally realized that success at the cost of my children is not success. It is failure.

I've met so many amazing people through Stack Exchange. First, the incredibly talented team of people who work for the company, many of whom I personally recruited. As far as I'm concerned, you are among the best in the world at what you do. That's why we hired you, and it has been an honor to serve with you. But more than that, the broader community that formed around a shared vision of making the Internet better through these beautiful public parks of curated, creative commons Q&A. I have continually been humbled by the brilliant minds that saw fit to work alongside us towards this goal, who selflessly contributed their own time and effort because they just plain loved this stuff as much as we do.

I will miss you all terribly.

What's next for me? I honestly don't know. I do know that I love the Internet, and I remain passionate as ever about making the Internet better – but right now I need to be with my family. In six months, perhaps I'll be ready to choose another adventure. I have total confidence that the team at Stack Exchange, and the thriving community that makes it so great, will carry Stack Exchange onward. After all, our shared voyage never ends, it just takes different forms.

Come, my friends.
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
the sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down;
It may be that we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are —
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Farewell, Stack Exchange. I hope you can understand that if I was hard on you at times, it was because I wanted you to be the best you could possibly be.

It was because I loved you.

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Hogwash: Top Mobile Designers Are Not Pushing Back Against HTML5

2012-02-03T19:00:00Z

Entrepreneur aficionado extraordinaire Robert Scoble posited a question on his Rackspace blog yesterday asking if there is push back against HTML5 by the top mobile designers in San Francisco. He cited new apps Path, Storify and Foodspotting as prominent examples of great apps with acclaimed UX that were rendered in native languages as opposed to HTML5. Are top developers really pushing back against HTML5 or is Scoble once again a little too deep in his fantasy world?

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One thing that often worries me when thinking about the San Francisco-based developer community is the fact that it is one giant echo chamber. It feeds off itself to a crescendo of memes, themes and rumors until no other reasonable arguments can be broached.

Scoble is often the mouthpiece for these developers. To be fair, Scoble and I have met and are friendly and I find him to be a fine individual but the classic argument against him is that he is the living personification of the edge case. He knows everybody, talks to everybody and does a respectable job of eating his own dog food. Companies and developers, with good reason, respect his opinion. But, the way he inundates himself with all the great innovations of the ecosystem, he sometimes misses the reality of development and utilization in the rest of the world.

With respect to Scoble, this HTML5 argument is hogwash.

Path won a Crunchie for best design. For those not in the know, a Crunchie is an award show for best startups, design and innovation in the tech community hosted by TechCrunch, VentureBeat and GigaOm. It is the yearly culmination of the San Francisco echo chamber and, while interesting, is not really followed by many outside of Silicon Valley. That is not to discount what Path has created. We have noted the splendid design of Path at ReadWriteWeb as well and it is truly a very well made app.

Path is an edge case scenario in the world of mobile app development. It integrates social messaging, location check-ins, photography and music recommendations into a sophisticated timeline (a "path") that is endlessly scrollable and visually appealing. Path is the quintessential native app.

It would also be impossible in HTML5.

The limitations of HTML5 at this point are that it does not allow device access (to objects like the camera and location services), scrolling is often limited and multi-layered sound is very difficult to implement. See our recent coverage of the "HTML5 Developers' Wish List" for a fuller understanding to the limitations of the spec. All developers agree that HTML5 is still a work in progress and there is great hope that the standard will be advanced to a degree in 2012 that many of the problems that inhibit mobile developers will be solved. The key concept to remember with HTML5 is that it takes the one true "killer" app, the browser, and enhances its functionality.

To say that the best mobile developers and designers are pushing back against HTML5 is outrageous. It is like saying that Web developers and designers (by far the most robust group of Internet coders) are turning their backs on the standard that is taking the browser to the next generation. This is simply not true.

Like Scoble, I also talk to top developers on a daily basis. Some of the most talented coders and designers I know are working on creating dynamic experiences in HTML5 for mobile devices. That includes developers from Sencha, appMobi, Zynga and other games makers, mobile cloud developers and third-party Facebook developers. All see HTML5 as a great opportunity and are fully embracing the challenge. Look at Facebook in particular. Nobody would suppose that its developers are not some of the tops in Silicon Valley. The company is working towards progressing HTML5 and the apps ecosystem around it with innovative approaches to what the mobile Web can do.

For me to believe that the "best mobile app designers" are pushing back against HTML5, I am going to need more examples than three edge case native apps that have very specific functions. There is so much more to the mobile Web than a pretty native app.

Discuss

U.S. Gov: We can update Android phones in 2 weeks

2012-02-03T17:08:43Z

The U.S. government has settled on Google’s Android platform for secure phones, mainly because the software is open and can easily be modified. CNN reported the news this morning, noting that Apple was asked to provide access to its code so the operating system could be modified specifically for secure government use. Apple declined to offer such access.

The modified Android software will be installed on commercially available handsets and can be used to support top-secret dispatches; something that the government doesn’t yet allow for. In the future, soldiers could use the handsets to locate other troops or quickly communicate orders to a group securely.

Ironically, the government group formed to manage the Android software project has already made a bold claim that makes the carriers look silly from where I stand.

Information-security director at George Mason University, Angelos Stavrou, is a contractor on the project and said when Google updates its Android software, an update to the secure Android phones can be ready within two weeks. Given that carriers can take 6 months or more to provide Android updates on some handsets, one of them should hire Stavrou away from this project!

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Silicon Valley's dirty little secret: The 'Startup Boom' is a disguised jobs fair for big corporations | ZDNet

2012-02-03T18:02:06Z

Listen to Your Community, But Don't Let Them Tell You What to Do

2012-02-03T10:18:54Z

You know how interviewers love asking about your greatest weakness, or the biggest mistake you've ever made? These questions may sound formulaic, maybe even borderline cliche, but be careful when you answer: they are more important than they seem.

So when people ask me what our biggest mistake was in building Stack Overflow I'm glad I don't have to fudge around with platitudes. I can honestly and openly point to a huge, honking, ridiculously dumb mistake I made from the very first day of development on Stack Overflow – and, worse, a mistake I stubbornly clung to for a solid nine month period after that over the continued protestations of the community. I even went so far as to write a whole blog post decrying its very existence.

For the longest time, I had an awfully Fight Club-esque way of looking at this: the first rule of Stack Overflow was that you didn't discuss Stack Overflow! After all, we were there to learn about programming with our peers, not learn about a stupid website. Right?

I didn't see the need for a meta.

Meta is, of course, the place where you go to discuss the place. Take a moment and think about what that means. Meta is for people who care so deeply about their community that they're willing to go one step further, to come together and spend even more of their time deciding how to maintain and govern it. So, in a nutshell, I was telling the people who loved Stack Overflow the most of all to basically … f**k off and go away.

As I said, not my finest hour.

In my defense, I did eventually figure this out, thanks to the continued prodding of the community. Although we'd used an external meta site since beta, we eventually launched our very own meta.stackoverflow in June 2009, ten months after public beta. And we fixed this very definitively with Stack Exchange. Every Stack Exchange site we launch has a meta from day one. We now know that meta participation is the source of all meaningful leadership and governance in a community, so it is cultivated and monitored closely.

I also paid penance for my sins by becoming the top user of our own meta. I've spent the last 2 years and 7 months totally immersed in the morass of bugs, feature requests, discussions, and support that is our meta. As you can see in my profile, I've visited meta 901 unique days in that time frame, which is disturbingly close to every day. I consider my meta participation stats a badge of honor, but more than that, it's my job to help build this thing alongside you. We explicitly do everything in public on Stack Exchange – it's very intentionally the opposite of Ivory Tower Development.

Along the way I've learned a few lessons about building software with your community, and handling community feedback.

1. 90% of all community feedback is crap.

Let's get this out of the way immediately. Sturgeon's Law can't be denied by any man, woman, child … or community, for that matter. Meta community, I love you to death, so let's be honest with each other: most of the feedback and feature requests you give us are just not, uh, er … actionable, for a zillion different reasons.

But take heart: this means 10% of the community feedback you'll get is awesome! I guarantee you'll find ten posts that are pure gold, that have the potential to make the site clearly better for everyone … provided you have the intestinal fortitude to look at a hundred posts to get there. Be prepared to spend a lot of time, and I mean a whole freaking lot of time, mining through community feedback to extract those rare gems. I believe every community has users savvy enough to produce them in some quantity, and they're often startlingly wonderful.

2. Don't get sweet talked into building a truck.

You should immediately triage the feedback and feature requests you get into two broad buckets:

We need power windows in this car!

We need a truck bed in this car!

The former is, of course, a reasonable thing to request adding to a car, while the latter is a request to change the fundamental nature of the vehicle. The malleable form of software makes it all too tempting to bolt that truck bed on to our car. Why not? Users keep asking for it, and trucks sure are convenient, right?

Don't fall into this trap. Stay on mission. That car-truck hybrid is awfully tempting to a lot of folks, but then you end up with a Subaru Brat. Unless you really want to build a truck after all, the users asking for truck features need to be gently directed to their nearest truck dealership, because they're in the wrong place.

3. Be honest about what you won't do.

It always depressed me to see bug trackers and feedback forums with thousands of items languishing there in no man's land with no status at all. That's a sign of a neglected community, and worse, a dishonest relationship with the community. It is sadly all too typical. Don't do this!

I'm not saying you should tell your community that their feedback sucks, even when it frequently does. That'd be mean. But don't be shy about politely declining requests when you feel they don't make sense, or if you can't see any way they could be reasonably implemented. (You should always reserve the right to change your mind in the future, of course.) Sure, it hurts to be rejected – but it hurts far more to be ignored. I believe very, very strongly that if you're honest with your community, they will ultimately respect you more for that.

All relationships are predicated on honesty. If you're not willing to be honest with your community, how can you possibly expect them to respect you … or continue the relationship?

4. Listen to your community, but don't let them tell you what to do.

It's tempting to take meta community requests as a wholesale template for development of your software or website. The point of a meta is to listen to your community, and act on that feedback, right? On the contrary, acting too directly on community feedback is incredibly dangerous, and the reason many of these community initiatives fail when taken too literally. I'll let Tom Preston-Werner, the co-founder of GitHub, explain:

Consider a feature request such as “GitHub should let me FTP up a documentation site for my project.” What this customer is really trying to say is “I want a simple way to publish content related to my project,” but they’re used to what’s already out there, and so they pose the request in terms that are familiar to them. We could have implemented some horrible FTP based solution as requested, but we looked deeper into the underlying question and now we allow you to publish content by simply pushing a Git repository to your account. This meets requirements of both functionality and elegance.

Community feedback is great, but it should never be used as a crutch, a substitute for thinking deeply about what you're building and why. Always try to identify what the underlying needs are, and come up with a sensible roadmap.

5. Be there for your community.

Half of community relationships isn't doing what the community thinks they want at any given time, but simply being there to listen and respond to the community. When the co-founder of Stack Exchange responds to your meta post – even if it wasn't exactly what you may have wanted to hear – I hope it speaks volumes about how committed we are to really, truly building this thing alongside our community.

Regardless of whether money is changing hands or not, you should love discovering some small gem of a community request or bugfix on meta that makes your site or product better, and swooping in to make it so. That's a virtuous public feedback loop: it says you matter and we care and everything just keeps on getting better all in one delightful gesture.

And isn't that what it's all about?

Rexplanation: The internet isn’t just technology. It’s a place and people.

2012-01-31T03:55:57Z

Partial map of the Internet based on 1/15/2005 data.

[Note: This post is a Rexplanation.]

In my opinion, there are two ways people understand the internet.

The first way is to understand the internet as something to use.

The second way is to think of the internet as something you not only use, but something people are and a place people live and work.

Those who use the internet understand it with metaphors related to legacy media and channels of communication or different types of utility and tools. To them, the internet is about reading, viewing, listening, looking-up, sharing, calling, sending, buying. Even those who use the internet’s tools of social media still think of it in terms of legacy metaphors: friends, following, hanging out, chatting.

Those who’ve reached the understanding that they are the internet are similar to those who have reached an understanding that any organization or institution is both a structure and a collection of people. It’s the same dynamic that enables the Supreme Court to rule that corporations are people. Special interests describe their special interest as people (I’m the NRA- well, not actually me, but those guys holding the gun are). Cities are streets and buildings, but cities are also people (after the May, 2010, flood, in my hometown we used the slogan, “We are Nashville” to declare our can-do spirit). In the New Testament, the greek word ekklesia that we translate into the word church refers to an assemblage of people who are “called together” — in other words, a church is people, like the internet is people.

So, viewing the internet as more than something to use, but as people and place is not a radical concept — indeed, it should be a rather simple concept to grasp.

Yet some very smart people just don’t seem to get it.

One of my favorite very smart people to use as a punchline for not getting it is Malcom Gladwell who plays school marm whenever he explains the internet as only a user could.

The recent SOPA/PIPA battle demonstrated the divide between those who understand the internet as people and those who perceive it as technology. Earlier this month, I wrote about visiting my congressman regarding SOPA and suggested then (before the legislation cracked under the pressure) that the internet had not yet demonstrated what could happen if it brought its power to the debate. It was clear to me that those who backed SOPA understood the internet as being “technology” used by people — and not as a place that people inhabit. That was their downfall.

A few days later, in a comment thread on Dave Winer’s blog, I wrote, “The tech blogosphere is filled with people who have broken through some barrier of comprehension one needs to experience the internet as a place, as well as a platform for all sorts of media and utility. So much of politics — at least at the traditional activist level and the way the US representative system is set up — is tied to an understanding of place in exclusively geographic terms. While traditional media and the political blogosphere is focused on what’s happening in some county in northern New Hampshire, the tech-blogosphere is wondering how lawmakers can be so clueless in understanding the ramifications of the entertainment industry’s power grab through SOPA — a global issue. I remember Tip O’Neill’s line, “All politics are local.” But for those of us who live on the internet, I’m not sure I know what local is anymore.”

Today, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote about a similar disconnect in the understanding politicians have of place, compared to how businesses view it — and I would argue, the way that people who understand the internet as a collection of people view it:

“Politicians see the world as blocs of voters living in specific geographies — and they see their job as maximizing the economic benefits for the voters in their geography. Many C.E.O.’s, though, increasingly see the world as a place where their products can be made anywhere through global supply chains (often assembled with nonunion-protected labor) and sold everywhere. These C.E.O.’s rarely talk about “outsourcing” these days. Their world is now so integrated that there is no “out” and no “in” anymore. In their businesses, every product and many services now are imagined, designed, marketed and built through global supply chains that seek to access the best quality talent at the lowest cost, wherever it exists. They see more and more of their products today as “Made in the World” not “Made in America.” Therein lies the tension. So many of “our” companies actually see themselves now as citizens of the world. But Obama is president of the United States.”

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not ready declare some New World Order exists because Al Gore invented the internet because the Trilateral Commission put him up to it.

However, it seems clear to me that it is time to start seeing the internet for what it is — and that’s lots more than a platform and technology.

5 Signs of a Great User Experience

2012-01-30T04:32:36Z

If you've used the mobile social network Path recently, it's likely that you enjoyed the experience. Path has a sophisticated design, yet it's easy to use. It sports an attractive red color scheme and the navigation is smooth as silk. It's a social app and finding friends is easy thanks to Path's suggestions and its connection to Facebook.

In short, Path has a great user experience. That isn't the deciding factor on whether a tech product takes off. Ultimately it comes down to how many people use it and that's particularly important for a social app like Path. Indeed it's where Path may yet fail, but the point is they have given themselves a chance by creating a great user experience. In this post, we outline 5 signs that the tech product or app you're using has a great UX - and therefore has a shot at being the Next Big Thing.

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1. Elegant UI

A great user experience isn't just about the user interface, but it helps a lot. While I'm not a regular Path user, today I opened it up and browsed for a bit. To like an item on Path, you click a little smiley icon in the top right. If you really, really like an item, you can make it a heart icon. There are three other options: a winky face, a surprised face and a sad face. So Path has cleverly created 5 different types of 'like' using subtle but obvious icons. This is something that Facebook hasn't yet cracked; it only has one style of 'like' and many people have argued for a 'dislike' option, at the very least.

2. Addictive

A nice design is one thing, but you also need to see value in it. It must either solve a problem for you, or be a pleasurable distraction. Time and time again. In other words, it must be addictive. One of the current trendy services on the Web is Pinterest, an online pinboard that has become an addiction for many. In a text-heavy social Web, Pinterest has nailed the concept of a completely visual user experience. It solves a problem, because it gives you a place to store images around topics - such as the very popular wedding dresses section. It brings you back every day, if you get hooked.

3. Fast Start

The Kindle Fire as a product is not as aesthetically pleasing as the iPad 2. The Fire is rectangular and small, looking a bit like the iPad's runty little brother. But what the Kindle Fire does better than the iPad is get the user started - and hooked - straight out of the box. With the iPad, you need to connect to iTunes or manually set up your account to get things started, which can often be a time consuming and awkward experience for newbies. But if you buy the Kindle Fire from Amazon, it comes pre-loaded with your Amazon profile. This enables most users to start downloading content as soon as they switch the device on for the first time.

Note that the rest of the Kindle Fire's user experience is not always pleasurable. But the start up is one part that is.

4. Seamless

With so many Internet-connected devices and screens nowadays, it's important to have a consistent experience. One recent example of this for me is the online music app Rdio. It only just became available in my country, but I was immediately impressed by the consistent user interface between Rdio's iPhone app and the desktop app on my computer. Rdio takes that seamlessness a step further though, in allowing you to download whole albums onto your mobile device so that you can listen to them offline. It would've been easy for Rdio to get that functionality wrong, for example by enabling download on 3G and giving you a huge cellphone bill. But by default, Rdio only downloads songs onto your mobile phone using WiFi (you can turn on 3G download if you think you can afford it). It's the little details like that which make a great user experience.

5. It Changes You

Arguably the most outstanding tech products are ones that revolutionize the way we do things. The iPhone and iPad are two high profile examples from recent years. Twitter is another. These are products that create a brand new user experience, or change old habits in a good way.

When I asked for examples of a great user experience over on Google+, Chris Brogan commented that FitBit has changed the way he manages his fitness. "The information it gathers is useful," said Chris, "plus the way it's displayed to me challenges me to do more with it."

Having an overall great user experience is difficult to pull off. Some of the products mentioned above only get part of it right, for example Kindle Fire and Path. I even said that the iPad, an otherwise glorious product, is slightly disappointing in the start up.

What products or apps have given you a great user experience recently? We'd love to hear about what's making you happy.

Discuss

Data Privacy: What Bill Gates Said 10 Years Ago

2012-01-29T04:46:29Z

Today is International Data Privacy Day, an event backed by companies like Intel, Ebay, Facebook and Microsoft, and dedicated to educating data owners about best practices in protecting the privacy of consumer data.

The need to keep people from being exploited on account of violations of their privacy is clear, well-known, intuitive and amply articulated by highly capable people. The up-side of making use of peoples' data is far less so. The two concerns are closely tied together. That's something Bill Gates is likely very aware of, if his comments 10 years ago are any indication.

Sponsor

The forthcoming era of computing is all about data. In as much as that data is associated with people, it's essential that data owners feel secure in the belief that they can make use of their data in computing without concern it will be misused.

Bill Gates got this about the last era of computing, the first instances of e-commerce and the web. He wrote a famous company-wide memo ten years ago this month all about the importance of what a controversial hardware-based security paradigm called Trusted Computing.

"If we don't do this, people simply won't be willing -- or able -- to take advantage of all the other great work we do. Trustworthy Computing is the highest priority for all the work we are doing. We must lead the industry to a whole new level of Trustworthiness in computing."

Regarding Privacy in particular, the Gates memo put some things in ways we can relate to today, but other things seem antiquated.

"Users should be in control of how their data is used. Policies for information use should be clear to the user. Users should be in control of when and if they receive information to make best use of their time. It should be easy for users to specify appropriate use of their information including controlling the use of email they send."

Users should be in control of when and if they receive information to make best use of their time! Can you imagine that? Info overload as privacy violation. It makes sense, yet it seems hopelessly antiquated too.

"In the past, we've made our software and services more compelling for users by adding new features and functionality, and by making our platform richly extensible," he wrote.

"We've done a terrific job at that, but all those great features won't matter unless customers trust our software.
"So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security. Our products should emphasize security right out of the box, and we must constantly refine and improve that security as threats evolve."

Here's how the International Data Privacy Day organization puts it today.

"In this networked world, in which we are thoroughly digitized, with our identities, locations, actions, purchases, associations, movements, and histories stored as so many bits and bytes, we have to ask - who is collecting all of this data - what are they doing with it - with whom are they sharing it? Most of all, individuals are asking 'How can I protect my information from being misused?' These are reasonable questions to ask - we should all want to know the answers.
"Data Privacy Day promotes awareness about the many ways personal information is collected, stored, used, and shared, and education about privacy practices that will enable individuals to protect their personal information.

Robert Siciliano, an Online Security Evangelist at McAfee, paints a much more negative picture in a blog post yesterday - probably even about the companies participating in International Data Privacy Day. McAfee is owned by the primary sponsor of the event, though, Intel. Siciliano speaks for many people when he says:

"Lately, it seems that barely a day goes by when we don't learn about a major Internet presence taking steps to further erode users' privacy. The companies with access to our data are tracking us in ways that make Big Brother look like a sweet little baby sister.
"Typically when we hear an outcry about privacy violations, these perceived violations involve some apparently omnipotent corporation recording the websites we visit, the applications we download, the social networks we join, the mobile phones we carry, the text messages we send and receive, the places we go, the people we're with, the things we like and dislike, and so on.

"How do they do this? By offering us free stuff to consume online and infrastructure for the online communities that tie us together. We gobble up their technologies, download their programs, use their services, and mindlessly click 'I Agree' to terms and conditions we haven't bothered to read."

It's a cynical perspective that refers to all the glory of the Interwebs as simply free stuff to consume with mindless clicks.

I think I prefer the description Gates might have offered. The global computer is now rich with features and opportunities, but those will be put at risk if people don't trust the network. Please, Mr. Zuckerberg, don't spoil this opportunity.

Discuss

How much should we trust our new information overlords?

2012-01-27T17:26:25Z

So much is possible with the digital tools we have today: Google provides information from billions of sources instantly; Facebook lets us stay in touch with friends around the globe; and Twitter allows anyone to broadcast their thoughts wherever they are. But with all this freedom comes a tradeoff, as Twitter’s censorship news reinforced for many this week. In each case, we are essentially at the mercy of the company whose network we are using (and being used by). If Google doesn’t like your name, it can block you; if Facebook doesn’t like your status, it can delete it; and if Twitter gets a takedown request for your message, it will disappear. Our freedom of speech relies on these new information gatekeepers.

On Thursday, Twitter announced it now has the ability to censor individual tweets within certain countries. Although the company made a point of stressing it will only do this in extreme cases, where it is required to do so by law — in Germany, for example, where promoting Nazi principles is a crime — the news produced a wave of criticism from users and Twitter critics about how the information network was “committing social suicide” and caving in to dictators and authoritarian governments. Although Twitter said it would be as transparent as possible, and it appears to be possible to work around the blocking of tweets, the impact of the news was still negative for many.

#TwitterCensorship. Dear Twitter, I face so much censorship in Sudan as a journalist, you were my free and safe space. I'm grieving now.—
ريم ايس كريم (@ReemShawkat) January 27, 2012

Some wondered whether the move was connected to the investment by Saudi billionaire prince Alwaleed bin Talal, while others have been muttering conspiracy theories about Twitter censoring the #Occupy hashtag from its trending topics (which the company has repeatedly denied doing). For every balanced perspective from an observer like Jillian York at the Electronic Frontier Foundation or sociologist Zeynep Tufekci, who argued that the policy was positive, there is a rant from someone about how Twitter has failed to uphold its promise as a bastion of free speech. Even high-profile Chinese activist and artist Ai Weiwei said ”if Twitter starts censoring, I’ll stop tweeting.”

Trust is the currency in our relationship with networks

Google has been riding the slippery slope of user trust recently as well, after criticism that its new personalized search features are an attempt to use its market power to promote its own Google+ social network — something that not only irritated competitors like Twitter and Facebook, but made some (including me) question whether the search giant had turned its back on the promise it made to users in 2004 to provide objective search results. The outcry over the changes then spilled over onto Google’s new privacy policy, which drew fire from privacy advocates and users despite the fact that little had changed.

The common thread in both of these incidents is trust, and the perception on the part of some users — and government regulators as well, in Google’s case — that Google and Twitter are both losing some of what made them unique. In Google’s case, an objectivity or purity in its results, and in Twitter’s case, a sense of freedom and openness (rightly or wrongly) about the network and users’ ability to publish whatever and wherever they wish. Twitter’s changes seemed especially disappointing to some because of how powerful that freedom was during the events of the Arab Spring in Egypt and elsewhere.

Facebook may not have touched off any storms this week on the trust front, but it is an old hand at disappointing users, whether it’s by changing privacy settings without telling them, tracking users even when they aren’t logged in or removing content in what some allege is an attempt at censorship of certain topics. Google and Facebook have also irritated users by requiring the use of real names, which critics argue benefits the companies and their attempts to serve advertisers more than it does users.

Principles are important, but these are businesses too

These are businesses with corporate interests, not triumphant defenders of free speech — and they each provide the bulk of their services for free, and make money by selling their users’ attention to advertisers. General counsel Alex Macgillivray says Twitter is committed to being “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” and the company says it would never use its new powers to block tweets during an event like the Arab Spring, or prevent dissidents in Iran or China from using it to further their cause. But how do we know this for sure? We don’t.

The standard response when someone criticizes Google’s privacy policy or Twitter’s new tactics or Facebook’s changes is “Don’t use them.” But what’s the alternative? Google isn’t just a search engine, but a giant email provider, and has a host of other services people need to do their jobs. Facebook and Twitter are tools that hundreds of millions of people use daily to connect and share with their friends and family — which is why “open source” alternatives such as Diaspora and Identi.ca have failed to gain much traction.

Dave Winer and other open-network advocates have repeatedly made the point that relying on a single corporation, or even several of them, for access to such important tools of communication is a huge risk. But what choice do we have? We either have to try harder to find more open alternatives, or we have to trust that Google and Twitter and Facebook are looking out for our best interests — and when they don’t, we have to make it clear that they are failing, and hold them to account.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Jennifer Moo and Richard Engel, NBC

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On the Evolution of Investing

2012-01-24T19:59:55Z

Today Y Combinator announced they are adding two new partners, Garry Tan and Aaron Iba. This announcement is unique because it does not list their academic credentials, their previous investments, the boards of companies or non-profits they have sat on, how many years of experience they have, or any of the usual badges of honor investors parade in their biographies and Crunchbase profiles.

Instead we get accolades of “rare individuals who can both design and program” and “best hackers among the YC alumni.” Take note of this moment.

I was part of a dinner conversation the other night that included institutional and angel investors, entrepreneurs, and someone who was part of the YC program. The group circled with alarming intent on grilling the YC entrepreneur: “How much time did you actually get with PG?” “It’s a cult of personality.” “The average quality of the companies has really dropped as they’ve broadened.” “I can’t wait for this bubble to pop.” I believe it was mostly in jest — few topics were spared that night — but there was some truth in the defensive undertone.

The hackers and engineers of Y Combinator are doing what hackers and engineers do to any industry, they’re efficiently and ruthlessly disrupting the traditional model of venture capital and are going to destroy far more more wealth for their contemporaries than they create for themselves, as broadband did to entertainment, Craigslist did to newspapers, and Amazon did to traditional retailers. This is what outsiders, by definition, do.

The dark humor in this is that the same people who delight and celebrate investing in disrupting other industries are blind or in denial about it happening to their own.

The question then becomes if you’re an investor with a traditional LP model (and expectations), or a more financial background than an operational one, or an operational background more in management than in design or coding, what should you do to stay relevant through this shift?

Dog Rescue: The Aftermath

2012-01-24T20:40:31Z

Given how much of my life is consumed by my two dogs, I'm surprised I haven't posted about them since adopting them a few years ago.

When I say "consumed," I mean it literally. For example, here's a couch they consumed one rainy day when I skipped their walk:

In other words, they have a lot of energy and need a lot of exercise. They're also very strong, especially Bella. She's an Alaskan Malamute mixed with white German Shepherd. Ripley, the black dog, is Bella's puppy. She's much more Shepherd in appearance and attitude, but the Malamute in both of them is apparent when I walk them.

Actually, it's not really walking. It's being dragged by beasts bred to pull large loads. I've stopped going to the gym because being pulled by 130 pounds of dog every day is more than enough full-body exercise.

It's not risk-free exercise, either. Late one night I made the mistake of letting their leashes get behind me right before they spotted another animal in the woods. They took off full speed, tripping me up and dragging me across the ground for several yards before I could right myself. My wife still laughs at the memory of me coming inside with leaves in my hair.

Another risk is other dogs. Bella is incredibly gentle and sweet with people - she loves everyone - but she's the polar opposite with other dogs, at least ones that annoy her. If she sees another dog she usually ignores it, but if it makes the mistake of barking at her she instantly changes from a big teddy bear into a raging wild animal that's very hard to control.

Barking is something my dogs rarely do, though. In fact, I've never heard Bella bark - but I have heard her howl plenty of times (it sounds like this). The neighbors probably think we own wolves.

And did I mention the fur? Both dogs blow their coats twice a year, which means everything we own is covered with either black or white dog hair for several weeks. When I brush them, they shed enough fur to build another dog with.

Sometimes I look back at the day we adopted Ripley and Bella and wonder whether I would've done it had I known how much work they would be. I have to admit, there are days that I wish I was dog-free.

But despite everything, these two dogs are like best friends to me. I've connected with them in a way I never have with other dogs I've owned. I've come to truly respect their combination of strength and gentleness, and I admire their intelligence and independent natures. I wouldn't trade them for anything.

But I am looking forward to them being a few years older, when they'll hopefully be a little less energetic.

You’re Not A Perfectionist, You’re Just Scared

2012-01-17T06:00:22Z

Why was Steve Jobs so good at what he did? Not because he was a perfectionist.

For all the talk of Steve Job’s perfectionism in the weeks and months after his death, most people tended to gloss over the cornucopia of shit products Steve Jobs managed to put out during his life. Even Malcom Gladwell falls into this trap, saying of Jobs, “He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was.” Gladwell specifically mentions Job’s obsession over the title bars on the original Macintosh, forcing his developers to go through dozens of iterations. Not only is Gladwell wrong about Job’s perfectionism, he takes away from one of the reasons Jobs was so successful.

Anyone who used various versions of the Macintosh OS prior to OSX and grew accustomed to seeing the beach ball spin endlessly, seemingly for no reason, understands that not everything Jobs touched was magic. Even if we only look at Apple hardware, there are still more than a few bad products. The one-buttoned mouse that Apple held on to for so long was always annoying. The puck mouse was downright homicide-inducing. The iTunes phone was terrible. AppleTV has been less than stellar. And that’s just a few of the bad products. None of Apple’s products are perfect, or even close to it.

But that’s exactly the point. Even Steve Jobs, noted tyrannical perfectionist, not only developed products that weren’t perfect, but actually shipped them.

Because real artists ship.

You could always refine a product. Do more market testing, see if consumers like it. Refine some more. Test again. Keep shaving and buffing and polishing and rounding off and perfecting it. There’s always a bit more to do before something is ‘perfect’, if only because your tastes change between ‘now’ and ‘perfect’. It’s this reason that perfectionism is the ultimate refuge of the scared. If you’re busy making it perfect, you never have to show it to the world. You never have to put yourself, and your ideas, and your work on the line. It’s the height of self-delusion to say you’ll ship when it’s perfect, because deep down, you know it will never be perfect. And that’s the scary part. Perfectionism is the perfect vehicle for self-sabotage.

But, back in the real world, at some point, your work is ‘good enough’. Steve Jobs was really good at identifying when that point came. Even when something was shit, sometimes that was good enough. Either because of technological limitations, or because it was still better than anything else out there, or because it was simply time to move on.

That last criteria is important to recognize, when it hits. If you’re up against a deadline, self-imposed or otherwise, it’s often easy to tell when it’s time to move on. Your time is up. Move on. But, when there is no deadline, or the deadline is flexible, it’s harder. In those cases, evaluate what kind of gains you’re likely to make through further refining, then decide whether to keep pushing, or simply move on. If a year of refining will only push your product from dog-shit up to rabbit-shit, what’s the point? Stop being scared, ship it and move on to something that will yield more important gains.

Please share this article; it's how ideas spread.

How iOS can lose: the independent developer as a canary in the coal mine

2012-01-19T16:53:35Z

Try as I might to find objective data in their financials to show the slowing of the platform, I found it difficult to observe any cracks in the iOS money-making machine. Apple is continuing to spend fewer dollars as a percentage of revenue on both marketing and engineering (the easy way to tell at a macro level that an at-scale tech franchise is sucking wind), and their integrated approach continues to win the hearts and minds of the US consumer thus keeping legions of developers working first on iOS and later on Android.

Still, it cannot be a healthy thing that the bulk of the economics are going to Apple, and not just two-thirds of the profits in the handset market but most of the ecosystem rents in the app ecosystem, music business, smartphone carrier business and whatever other industry segments they chose to enter. The fact that this may in several cases be a direct wealth transfer from X industry to gross margin dollars on iOS devices that have the same components as their Android cousins (and are in some cases made on the same lines) does not make it less healthy.

This simply cannot last. And this mind-blowing chart from Asymco tells the story of why:

(Go and read the post— and then come back to get a fantastic historical context to the waves of the personal computing industry)

It is astounding to see how quickly the smartphone has dominated all other individual computing platforms. While there are obvious reasons (truly portable computers that are always with you, ubiquitous access to the Internet, carrier subsidies), the key point is that on top of being far bigger, far faster, the forces at play in mobile (economic, technical and social) make it the single most dynamic multi-billion dollar industry in the world. Yesterday's king is today's pauper with just the smallest series of missteps.

Since those steps can't be observed from macro metrics, I thought it might be interesting to paint a picture of why the incremental developer on the platform might be losing steam with the promise of becoming an "AppStore Rock Star." After all, if Microsoft has taught the world anything over the last decade, it is that losing the hearts and minds of developers can seriously arrest the momentum of any platform, network effects be damned. While there are plenty of iOS developer surveys out there, they are hard to parse for perceived changes of momentum (though not for sampling bias in most cases) so instead, I'll focus on three reasons why we might be on the cusp of a change in the tide here:

First, while there are more iOS developers building better looking apps and standing a better chance of making money from the AppStore than other smartphone marketplaces, the reality is that app prices continue to plummet making it increasingly hard for the small team/solo cottage industry that gave us some of the AppStore's early hits to continue making a living (to say nothing of the increasing complaints I hear from developers about the opaqueness of the approval/update process). Put another way, there is now much more money going through the AppStore than is being generated because of the AppStore.

Here is a crude example in just one of many of the "through" verticals: last year Apple paid roughly $2.5-3 billion to all AppStore developers worldwide. At the same time if we take a 1% estimate of e-commerce sales that went through apps in the AppStore (haircutting the mobile 10% of ~$680 worldwide 2011 e-commerce sales by 20% for iOS and a further 50% for non mobile web) is still around $7B which at 30% gross margins is right around current developer revenue. And this is just one of the many verticals that monetizes well through the AppStore whereas the $2.5B includes games (a huge part of revenues) and in-app payments for content. Not only are the economics of app purchase not compelling (and heading in the wrong direction), but the broader platform point is that none of this money exists because of something unique to the iOS ecosystem. It could just as easily move to Android despite the latter's lower "because of" current monetization ability through the sheer power of market share.

While Apple has done a brilliant job of defending its own ecosystem through the half million bits of effort (apps) from independent developers, it has not, unlike the Microsoft of the 1990s, managed to create a thriving ISV community dependent on iOS for revenue in the way that Windows developers made their livelihood— and in some cases very large companies— on the back of Win32. Where is the Lotus of the AppStore? Thus far, Rovio (Angry Birds) comes the closest, and even they have quickly diversified to a plethora of platforms despite being in the lucrative gaming app vertical.

Second, while there is no question in my mind that the iOS toolchain is far superior to the kludge that is Android's (which is now also encumbered by increasing fragmentation (both vendor and version wise) and Uncle Oracle's ownership of the underlying language), fancy development environments and better UI toolkits don't keep developers around for the long term (see again: 1990s Win32 development), but platform ubiquity does— especially in a making money "through" era where virality is your new marketing, and more than 1/2 the market is only accessible on either Android or the mobile web. Think of viral loops and how quickly they can die when 50% of the invites fail to land on an iOS device.

Finally, there is the straight jacket that is the controlled experience of iOS, most commonly felt today in the way Apple implemented background processing on its platform. The arguments for this poor man's multi-tasking have been battery and CPU constraints but as both have improved (with the iPhone 4 and 4S) they appear less relevant. In the meanwhile interesting apps need better control over what can happen in the background (think of what comes after the "check in" for location-based social networks or almost all communications apps now being funneled through the unintuitive Notification Center). The iOS devices are now at the point where they are quite powerful computers— and the most relevant computers in people's lives— so continuing to maintain a small sandbox for third parties to exploit the possibilities will only increasingly make alternative platforms attractive. Put in a much geekier way: the smartphone is today's tricorder and in order for developers to make it that, the first place they need more control is in what happens in the background. Android gets you that today and Apple would be wise to follow.

One final point related to why developer momentum may lag in the coming years: in 2007 when Steve Jobs launched the original iPhone, he claimed that it was "five years ahead of the rest of the market," which, as it turns out, seems to have been remarkably accurate. The market has now caught up though, and outside of incremental upgrades (higher density display, faster multicore processors, etc.), Apple has given us only two "next generation" pieces of functionality: iCloud which, while promising, is far from ready for prime time; and Siri, a fundamentally transformative interface step forward— something which Apple itself is quite good at— but works far too poorly to become mainstream today. In both cases, a robust API for third parties could enable the hundreds of thousands of independent developers who got the iPhone where it is today to help iOS continue to cement its leadership position. It would be messy, and there would be ugly moments, and it would quite likely be an un-Apple move to make. Without it though, the platform may have nowhere to go but down from here.

[Ed note: before people start pointing out how much money Apple is making and how successful it is— I agree. I am looking for signs that this may end here and to that end, this is a speculative piece]

SOPA

2012-01-18T07:00:01Z

Warning: This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy or opinion. It is not intended to change anyone's beliefs or actions. If you quote from this post or link to it, which you are welcome to do, please take responsibility for whatever happens if you mismatch the audience and the content.

Are you following the huge debate about the proposed legislation in the United States to stop online piracy? It's called SOPA, short for Stop Online Piracy Act.

I'm fascinated by the debate because it's an ideal example of how we humans make decisions in the face of complexity. The proposed legislation is simple enough in terms of its purpose: Reducing piracy on the Internet. But its unintended consequences are not knowable. Critics claim the law will be overused and result in punishing or killing defenseless and legitimate sites without due process. Those in favor of SOPA say it will only make the illegal foreign pirate sites inaccessible from the United States. Based on my limited understanding of the issue, I don't know who is right. Neither do you. The best we can do is to apply unscientific methods, i.e. fancy guessing, that we might label intuition or common sense to make us feel better. Let's see where that takes us.

Rule of Thumb

Thanks to Republicans, and Ron Paul in particular, the idea that more government is always bad has gained a larger following than ever. That's doubly so when we're dealing with the Wild West of the Internet. It's a simple rule of thumb: The more the government interferes, the worse off we are.

By that filter, the SOPA question boils down to this: What is worse - allowing legitimate businesses to be robbed of their intellectual property, or having the government try to stop it? There is so little trust in government that most people prefer being robbed over the alternative of having the government get involved and making things worse.

Bottom line: If you apply the "more government is bad" rule of thumb, SOPA is a bad idea.

Pattern Recognition

If you strip out the details of the SOPA debate, the form looks like this:

Opponent: That law will cause huge problems because (reason).

Supporter: If you hold that opinion, you must have read the law wrong.

And...

Opponent: The requirements of the law are totally impractical.

Supporter: Something like SOPA is already being done successfully in other countries.

Pattern recognition often gives you the wrong answer because coincidences can look like a pattern. On the other hand, if ten political ads from the same candidate fail the fact-checking filters, there's a high likelihood the eleventh won't be much better. So pattern recognition does have its place.

In my own life, I find that when people disagree with my opinions, they are more often than not disagreeing with a misinterpretation of my opinion, not my actual opinion. And when a law is being used successfully in one place, it raises the odds it can work in another place.

There's also a pattern that tells me I shouldn't put too much stock in claims that a proposed law will rob my freedom and destroy the economy. Every law robs citizens of one sort of freedom or another, and costs money too. And yet most laws are sensible and work just fine in the long run. On the other hand, stopping piracy feels a lot like Prohibition, and that didn't work out.

Speaking of the liquor analogy, bar owners are in an analogous situation under current laws. If a bar over-serves a customer, or serves minors, it can lose its license. And yet most bars inadvertently over-serve customers, and every bar has served minors that have good fake I.D.s. Here's an example where the government could easily over-apply the law, but it rarely happens. I owned two restaurants, and I would say the draconian laws were helpful in keeping the over-serving to a minimum, and the I.D. checking to a maximum. So there's precedent that makes me optimistic that reasonable humans wouldn't apply SOPA death sentences to web sites in cases of trivial copyright infringement. But you never know.

Bottom line: The supporters of SOPA have an argument structure I most often associate with the superior argument. That doesn't make them right. It's just an observation about the pattern of the argument when you strip out the content.

Expert Opinion

Lots of heavyweight corporations and organizations oppose SOPA. Some of the opponents are kidnap victims with guns to their temples (GoDaddy.com). Other supporters look like Stockholm Syndrome types. Still others have a financial interest in passively aiding and abetting the theft of intellectual property. Some have no credibility whatsoever, e.g. anyone in Congress. And it's hard to trust anyone with a balance sheet who claims to be fighting for my freedom.

Then there's the philosophical bias problem. Ron Paul and others would presumably forgo a million dollars of benefits if it required one extra dollar of government expense, or one extra law that reduces freedom. For some folks, it's the principle of the thing, and I respect that point of view. But are the anti-big-government people comparing the size of the benefits to the size of the costs, or are they simply rejecting anything that looks like a government overreach, complication, or interference?

Some big-name lawyers say SOPA will be a nightmare if implemented. But I'm guessing the law itself was crafted by lawyers, and presumably those lawyers have a different opinion.

And who came up with SOPA in the first place? Wasn't it a bunch of corporations who wouldn't mind pushing some costs on other people if it helps their profits?

Bottom line: Money and philosophical bias make all of the experts in this case unreliable.

Self-Interest Crossover

You would expect artists and content owners to support SOPA, and you would expect the people who would be caught in legal dragnets to oppose it. The interesting people are the crossovers: The parties who take the "wrong" side of the issue. And indeed, many creators do just that, publicly arguing against SOPA even though it is specifically aimed at protecting their financial interests. But at the risk of being unkind, a lot of people become artists because they aren't good at things like math and legal analysis. When I want an opinion on the Constitution, or economics, I rarely consult an artist.

Bottom line: The crossovers aren't persuasive.

My Self-Interest

I have one of the most widely stolen intellectual properties in the history of the world. Emotionally, I'm okay with that. It feels like a compliment. Financially, I have no idea if piracy has hurt me in any meaningful way. I made the decision years ago to make Dilbert available on the Internet, including the entire archive. To the surprise of most observers, sales of Dilbert to traditional newspapers continued to grow briskly.

Bottom line: As a creator, my bias is in favor of protecting intellectual property. But in my specific case, SOPA probably wouldn't have any impact on my life or income.

Verdict

I'm unbiased in the sense that SOPA probably wouldn't have any impact on me one way or another. And I'm not qualified to look at the language of the law and make judgments about its unintended consequences. When I look at the applicable rules of thumb, the pattern of the argument, and the expert opinions, I don't get a clear answer about SOPA. And when I don't have a clear answer, I default to the "do nothing" point of view. Therefore, I conditionally oppose SOPA, not because I know it will be bad, but because I can't predict its impact.

I reserve the right to flip-flop at any moment. Make your best arguments in the comment section and see if you can flip me.

Free and Low-Cost Apps

2012-01-17T10:00:00Z

After stirring some interesting discussion yesterday with a 2-year-old post about price deterioration in the App Store, I thought the topic worth revisiting. Much has been written about it, but most of that was done in 2008 and 2009 when the trend appeared most dire. I don’t think we’re much worse off at this point — most of the damage was already done — but I do have lingering concerns about the long term viability of selling mobile apps and the impact that may have on the entire mobile industry.

Here's the quote I posted to Twitter yesterday:

The downward spiral in app prices caused by the Top 100 list and Apple’s relatively hands off approach during the first year of the App Store has created completely unrealistic pricing expectations that may haunt the entire mobile software industry for years to come.

When the App Store first launched, iPhone users were blown away that they could buy games like Super Monkey Ball for a fraction of what it had been selling for on consoles and other handhelds. But excitement about the $10 price point was quickly eroded as developers slashed prices to get attention and take advantage of the App Store's unit based charts. The high end of the App Store gaming market quickly slid from $10 to $5, and within a year most great games were launched at 99¢, or quickly put on sale for 99¢. Today, only AAA games from EA and the like do well at $2.99 or more. And even those go on sale frequently to gain momentum in the charts.

In July 2009 the average price for games was $1.39 and all apps combined averaged $2.58. Today it’s $1.01 for games and $2.12 for all apps. Prices do tend to drop in a free market as competition, increased efficiency, economies of scale, and other factors come into play, but I still contend that Apple's policies and the design of the App Store itself initiated and even accelerated the race to the bottom. It’s clear to me in hindsight that this was either Apple’s intent, or at least something they didn’t actively discourage. To Apple, apps are merely complements to their highly profitable hardware sales. And as Joel Spolsky posited, “All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease.”

To the average consumer, the value proposition of buying an iPhone is amazing given the plethora of free and low-cost apps. After spending $200 on the iPhone 4S, it takes just a few bucks to load it up with Angry Birds, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Camera+, Yelp, Pandora, and a host of other great apps. If each of those apps were $10 and it took several hundred dollars to load an iPhone with great apps, the value proposition would be completely different.

iOS development has done nothing but accelerate, even as the average price of apps has dropped through the floor, but in my view, the App Store is far from the healthy, vibrant market it could be. Just look at recent trends...

Words With Friends, the current top paid app in the App Store, was released in 2009 as a 99¢ app and had a free, ad-supported counterpart. The developer, Newtoy, was purchased by Zynga in 2010. The app now shows ads and annoys users in a variety of other ways even though users still pay 99¢ for the privilege. Zynga has made it clear they think the value of Words With Friends is much higher than the 99¢ Newtoy was charging, and I agree, but I wholeheartedly disagree with their approach to remedying the pricing gap.

Temple Run, the current top free app in the App Store, came out in August of 2011 as a 99¢ app with some relatively benign digital consumables available via In-App Purchase. After seeing limited success, the app went free and shot up the charts. Even though the app is completely free to play, and the paid consumables don't radically alter game play, Temple Run is currently the top grossing app in the App Store. The top grossing list is littered with similar free-to-play apps, and most of them are not nearly as generous as Temple Run with the mechanics of digital consumables.

Temple Run is a great success story and the developers, Keith and Natalia of Imangi Studios, are incredibly cool, thoughtful folks, but Temple Run and similar apps still concern me. Almost 10 million people are playing Temple Run daily and most are not paying anything for that entertainment. They’re not even paying with their attention by viewing ads. This may seem great for users, but I’m not sure it’s great for the long term viability of mobile app development.

The pool of time users spend on smartphones is staggering and growing rapidly, but it is not infinite. The more time people spend with useful/entertaining free apps, the less need they have to actually pay for apps. That doesn’t mean people will never pay for apps — the market for paid apps has continued to grow alongside free and freemium apps — but users have been conditioned to expect more and more for less and less.

The 99¢ price point works for mass-market apps that manage to gain momentum in the App Store, but those are few and far between. Many great apps languish even at 99¢ and few developers are able to charge much more than 99¢, even for high quality niche apps. I was reminded of that earlier this week when reading an App Store review of my app Gas Cubby: “The other downfall is the price. At $5 this is an extremely expensive app. But it does work well!” To most App Store shoppers, $5 is “extremely expensive” even for an app like Gas Cubby that “does work well” and helps users save time and money.

The two business models that seem to work best for free apps are freemium and “burn through VC cash until we figure out a business model or get bought.” In my experience, ads from iAd, Admob, etc. make very little money, even in a relatively popular app. Developers can work directly with larger companies to sponsor apps and/or direct sell more profitable ads, as I've done with Gas Cubby FREE, but it’s incredibly challenging to develop and maintain corporate sponsorships. At WWDC Steve Jobs positioned iAd as a way to help developers make money on free and low-cost apps, but iAd has thus far been a big disappointment. Stacking digital pennies is precarious work.

Eventually, paying for apps may be more the exception than the rule, much like the web, but the business models that are evolving to make that work are often user hostile. On the web we see Facebook's incessant push to dissolve privacy as they work on monetization. On the iPhone we've seen the rise of free-to-play, and other frequently abused attempts at monetization.

Ultimately, the users become the product, not the app. Selling users to advertisers and pushing in-app upgrades/consumables is a completely different game than carefully crafting apps to maximize user value/entertainment. It'd be a shame if the mobile software industry devolved into some horrific hybrid of Zynga and Facebook.

The evolution of the web does give me hope. Paying for software, services, and entertainment on the web is still the exception, but niche sites that deliver value are able to monetize through reoccurring subscriptions and other palatable means. App developers may eventually be able to charge for upgrades in the App Store and lots of great developers are desperately looking for amiable business models for survival in the world of free and low-cost apps, but the pricing expectations mobile app shoppers make it an uphill battle.

Opportunities are prevalent. Money is being made by the truckload. The gold rush is still in full swing. But as the industry matures, I hope we like what we’ve created. And I hope I’m still building apps. Neither is a given at this point.

david

We need to talk about piracy (but we must stop SOPA first)

2012-01-17T14:51:36Z

Much to my happiness, the internets are in a frenzy about the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (aka SOPA). Congress is currently in recess, but the House announced a hearing on the potential impact to the Domain Name Service on January 18 and everyone expects the Senate to begin discussing a similar bill “PROTECT IP Act” when they return to DC on January 24. There’s a lot to these bills – and the surrounding furor – and I’m not going to go into it, but I recommend reading the actual bill and Open Congress info, the Wikipedia article, EFF’s blog, and the various links at Stop American Censorship. Tomorrow – January 18th – a bunch of geeks are planning a SOPA Blackout Day to voice their discontent.

I abhor SOPA for the same reasons as other geeks. I’m horrified that Congress has crafted a law that will screw with the architecture of the internet in ways that will undermine free speech. I love Josh Kopstein’s post “Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works.” And I’m glad that geeks are getting vocal, even if – as Clay Johnson has pointed out – geeks don’t quite get how Congress works. I’m stoked that the White House has asked for a civil conversation around piracy (while also opposing SOPA’s key pieces). And I find it utterly hysterical that Rupert Murdoch has come to geeks’ turf (Twitter) to convey his pro-SOPA opinions, even as Obama steps in to state that he opposes SOPA.

In talking with non-geeks, I can’t help but be fascinated that the debate has somehow been framed in the public eye as “pro-piracy” vs. “anti-piracy.” Needless to say, that’s the frame that Murdoch is advocating, even as geeks are pushing for the “pro-internet” vs. “pro-censorship” frame. What’s especially intriguing to me is that the piracy conversation is getting convoluted even among politicos, revealing the ways in which piracy gets flattened to one concept. Teasing this issue out is especially important when we’re talking about regulations that are meant to help with piracy. There are many different aspects of piracy, but for simplicity sake, I want to focus on two aspects that feed into bills like SOPA and PROTECT IP: piracy as a competitive issue vs. piracy as a cultural issue. This can often be split as software piracy vs. media piracy, but not always.

There are actually reasons to not be in favor of all forms of piracy, even if you’re an unrepentant media pirate. Imagine that you are an appliance manufacturer in the United States. You make things like toasters. You are required to abide by American laws. You must pay your employees at least a minimum wage; you must follow American safety regulations. All of this raises the overhead of your production process. In addition, you must also do things like purchase your software legally. Your designers use some CAD software, which they pay for. Your accountants use accounting software, which they pay for. Sure, you’ve cut some costs by using “free” software but, by and large, you pay a decent amount of money to software companies to use the systems that they built.

You really want to get your toasters into Wal-Mart, but time and time again, you find yourself undercut by competitors in foreign countries where the safety laws are more lax, the minimum wage laws are nonexistent, and where companies aren’t punished for stealing software. Are you grouchy? Of course you are. Needless to say, you see this as an unfair competition issue. There aren’t legal ways of bending the market to create fair competition. You can’t innovate your way out of this dilemma and so you want Congress to step in and make sure that you can compete fairly.

Combating software piracy in the supply chain is a reasonable request and part of what makes bills like PROTECT IP messy is that there’s a kernel of this issue in these bills. Bills like this are also meant to go after counterfeit products. Most folks really want to know what’s in baby formula or what’s in the medicines they purchase. Unfortunately, though, these aspects of piracy quickly gets muddled with cultural facets of piracy, particularly once the media industries have gotten involved.

Since the rise of Napster, the media industry has been in a furor over media piracy. Not only do they get pissed when people rip and distribute media content on the internet, they throw a fit whenever teenagers make their own music videos based on their favorite song. Even though every child in America is asked to engage in remix in schools for educational purposes (“Write a 5-paragraph essay as though you were dropped into Lord of the Flies”), doing so for fun and sharing your output on the internet has been deemed criminal. Media piracy is messy, because access to content is access to social status and power in a networked era. Some people are simply “stealing” but others are actually just trying to participate in culture. It’s complicated. (See: “Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property” and “Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates” to go deeper.)

Most in the media industry refuse to talk about media piracy beyond the economic components. But the weird thing about media piracy is that Apple highlighted that the media industry could actually innovate their way around this problem. Sure, it doesn’t force everyone to pay for consuming content, but when was that ever the case? When I was in high school, I went over to friends’ houses and watched their TV and movies without paying for them. Even though the media industry is making buckets of money – and even though people have been shown to be willing to pay for content online when it’s easy – the media industry is more interested in creating burdensome regulations than in developing innovative ways for consumers to get access to content. (Yo HBO! Why the hell can’t I access your content legally online if I don’t subscribe to cable!?!?) I guess I shouldn’t be surprised… It’s cheaper to lawyer up than hire geeks these days.

Of course, it’s not like there aren’t a bazillion laws on the books to curb media piracy. What frustrates the media industry is that they don’t have jurisdiction over foreign countries and foreign web servers. Bills like SOPA aren’t really meant to curb piracy; they’re meant to limit Americans’ access to information flows in foreign countries by censoring what kinds of information can flow across American companies’ servers. Eeek. I can’t help but think back to a point that Larry Lessig makes in “Republic, Lost” where he points out that there are more laws to curb media piracy on the books than there are to curb pollution. Le sigh.

Don’t get me wrong: there are definitely piracy practices out there that I’d like to see regulators help curb. For example, I’m actually quite in favor of making sure that companies can’t engage in unfair competition. I agree with the White House that certain kinds of piracy practices undermine American jobs. But I’m not in favor of using strong arm tactics to go after individuals’ cultural practices. Nor am I interested in seeing “solutions” that focus on turning America into more of a bubble. Shame on media companies for trying to silence and censor information flows in their efforts to strong arm consumers. This isn’t good for consumers and it’s certainly not good for citizens.

As we go deeper into an information age, I think that we need to have serious conversations about what is colloquially termed piracy. We need to distinguish media piracy from software piracy because they’re not the same thing. We need to seriously interrogate fairness and equality, creative production and cultural engagement. And we need to seriously take into consideration why people do what they do. I strongly believe that when people work en masse to route around a system, the system is most likely the thing that needs the fixing, not the people.

These issues are challenging and they require people to untangle a wide variety of different conflicting and interwoven practices. Unfortunately, challenging cultural conversations are really hard to have when the government chooses to fast track faulty legislation on the behalf of one industry and to the detriment of another. SOPA has turned into a gnarly battle between old and new media, but the implications of this battle extend far beyond the corporate actors. My hope is that SOPA goes away immediately. But I also hope that we can begin the harder work of actually interrogating how different aspects of piracy are affecting society, business, and cultural practices.

In the meantime, I ask you to stand with me to oppose SOPA. Learn what’s happening and voice your opinion. Legislative issues like this affect all of us.

Lockdown: The coming war on general-purpose computing - Boing Boing

2012-01-17T03:29:08Z

Fragmentation Is Not The End of Android

2012-01-15T00:27:04Z

The fragmentation of Android is very real and very problematic for end users, developers, mobile operators, device manufacturers, and Google. However fragmentation does not mean Android is going to “die” or “fail” as some seem to think.

On the contrary I think we can count on Android playing a significant role in our world for a long, long time. I also am confident that Google has already lost control of Android and has zero chance of regaining control. This post explains why I’m so confident about this.

TL;DR

Next time you say/hear “fragmentation sucks/is not a problem” consider for whom.

Fragmentation will cause Android to continue to grow.

Google has lost control of Android due to fragmentation.

You’ll, hopefully, note that I intentionally separate Android from Google. Repeat after me: Android is not Google and Google is not Android. Android has become something that is independent of Google (or anyone else, for that matter).

Let’s break down this whole mobile platform fragmentation thing. This weekend Jon Evans of Techcrunch apologized to MG Siegler for disagreeing about the relative quality of the Android and iOS developer tools. In that post, Jon argued that Android device fragmentation is relatively minor for developers, but OS fragmentation is a real problem:

Android’s fragmentation has become a giant millstone for Android app development, leaving it worryingly behind its iOS equivalent. It’s not the panoply of screen sizes and formats; the Android layout engine is actually quite good at minimizing that annoyance. It’s not the frequent instances of completely different visual behavior on two phones running exactly the same version of Android; again, annoying, but relatively minor. Device fragmentation is just an irritation.

OS fragmentation, though, is an utter disaster.

- Jon Evans

Jon points out two of the 5 axes of fragmentation: Device & OS. The other three are User Interface, Marketplace, and Services.

The 5 Axes of Mobile Platform Fragmentation

User Interface
Device
Operating System
Marketplace
Service

For a mobile platform, a different degree of fragmentation can exist along each of these axes. For example, Apple’s iOS platform has almost no fragmentation along the Marketplace axis because Apple has been so hardcore about ensuring that the iTunes marketplace is the only marketplace supported. A relatively small amount of fragmentation on the User Interface axis exists because Apple has been extremely consistent with UI. Likewise there is a bit of device fragmentation in iOS due to different generations of iPhones having different hardware capabilities (such as a front facing camera).

The fragmentation of Android is severe, across all of these axes, regardless of how Eric Schmidt tries to spin it. And because of the complexity of the mobile ecosystem (and the other ecosystems Android is part of) the effect is more multiplicative than additive.

Revisiting the Mobile Ecosystem

You’ll recall in my “Windows Phone is Superior; Why Hasn’t it Taken Off?” post I broke the mobile ecosystem into its market sides: Developers, Users, Carriers, Device Manufacturers, and OS Providers (see how I put Developers first? Wouldn’t want someone to think I don’t believe they are important, for heaven’s sake). As I pointed out, the mobile ecosystem is highly complex and, due to the desires & behaviors of the various sides, not efficient. There is not enough clean value exchange between several sides of the market and too much friction.

But regardless of how virtuous the virtuous cycles within the mobile ecosystem are, it is clear each side of the ecosystem is impacted differently by each fragmentation axis. In some cases, some combinations of fragmentation/market side are actually positive (one could use the word “diversity” instead of fragmentation in these cases). In many other cases fragmentation is bad. Bad with a capital B. In still other cases fragmentation can be a double-edged sword for a player on one side of the market.

Examples of positive fragmentation (diversity):

Market Side	Axis of Fragmentation	Positive value
Users	Device	Some users like physical keyboards. Some don’t. Some like pink. Some don’t.
Carriers	User Interface	Carriers want to differentiate from competitors, and differentiate within the products they carry. Carriers want their brands to pervade the experience.
Device Manufacturers	Service	Device manufacturers want higher margins & recurring revenue that can come from providing services such as search & location.

Examples of negative fragmentation:

Market Side	Axis of Fragmentation	Negative value
Developers	OS	Developers want to be able to reach as many end users as possible. Lots of OS variants means either investing in more dev/test or limiting market.
Carriers	User Interface	Each new UI requires carrier’s customization to have to be ported. Raises costs. (Note this is an example of fragmentation being a double edged sword in some cases).
Users	Marketplace	End users want to be able to discover and acquire apps from as few places as possible.

Any commentary about fragmentation either needs to include all market sides and all axis or be very specific on which aspect is being discussed. Jon’s article above is clearly about developers. You can obviously take the tables above and expand them to cover the entire 5 x 6 matrix. But even if you did, and tried to document all 60 rows, you’d quickly discover the following:

Not all players on a market side are the same; they differ in the value they provide and the value they expect to extract from others . This is most pronounced on the OS providers side, and this gets to the core of the point of this post:

Google lost control of Android a long time ago and nothing it does will allow it to regain control. In fact, almost anything I tries will simply increase fragmentation along most fragmentation axes.

Remember we are talking about a complex multi-sided market (6 sides) with high-impedance between key sides of the market (see my “superior” post). The OS providers side of the market is dominated by Apple and Google. Microsoft is serious about being a 3rd player, and I believe they will push, push, push until they are. There’s also RIM and a few others, but it’s safe to ignore them here (Cue Scoble: “Charlie says Bada is dead”).

OS Providers Perspectives

Apple – Makes the vast majority of its money, by getting paid ~$150 up front from mobile operators per iPhone sold. The high-margin iPhone business will becomes a smaller relative portion of the overall Apple business. They are motivated to keep propping up this high-margin business as long as possible and to start leveraging their significant market share to grow revenue from services. Apple has caused an imbalance in the ecosystem by cutting 3rd parties out of the device manufacturer side of the market.
Google – Invested in Android believing they could own mobile search like they own web search by tying Android to Google search. At one point believed they could disrupt the carriers(but got slapped back, hard). Now, their desire to continue to invest in Android is still about search, but also about owning a social graph (via Google+) and being pissed as hell that Apple is so successful. Google is deeply frustrated with the fragmentation of Android and has been trying all sorts of tactics to rein it in.
Microsoft – Feels stuck between the Apple & Google models. Going it alone, ala Apple, is not possible due to the fact that no carrier will ever let anyone else do what Apple did to them again. The Google model is way too similar to what the old Windows Mobile was like (irony much?). Microsoft sees mobile as a means to an end (as Google does). But the end is different. Where Google has only really one service it can monetize via mobile, Microsoft has several (Office, Xbox LIVE, etc.). In addition Microsoft has a cash cow that is at serious risk due to Microsoft not being a key player in mobile: Windows. Microsoft must be relevant in mobile or Windows revenues will plummet because everything is going mobile. I think Microsoft really likes the fact it generates revenue from Android, but I doubt it has that much impact on the bottom line.

Only Apple directly profits from being an OS provider in the mobile ecosystem. For Google it is a cost center. Apple is the only OS provider that leaves device manufacturers out in the cold.

Smartphone device manufacturers now have two choices: Android or Windows Phone 7. As I noted in my “superior” post, Microsoft’s strategy of focusing on the quality of the user experience (which tends to minimize fragmentation along most axis) is counter to what device manufactures really want. I am glad Microsoft is following this strategy; it is pretty much the only strategy that makes sense given the hole they dug with Windows Mobile. But this strategy does cause friction between Microsoft and device manufacturers/carriers when ideally you’d not want friction.

Google, on the other hand, gave device manufacturers exactly what they wanted with Android: Extreme flexibility and an open source license. That model is like crack cocaine for the likes of Samsung and HTC. They have had years to get addicted to it and, from their perspective (selling boatloads of devices) it’s working just dandy for them.

The carriers tend to encourage the device manufacturers here. They demand a variety of devices. They demand differentiation from their competitors. They control the marketing money spent on advertising. When Verizon writes something like $10B+ worth of checks every year for devices, who do you think they write them to? Hint: not Google.

Google’s Options

Google has some tactics that it might try (is trying) to use to rein in fragmentation. None of these will have a significant impact; in fact, most will make fragmentation worse.

Investing in the Nexus brand.Nexus is Google’s “pure” Android play. The idea is a phone with a more rigidly defined user experience, more consistent hardware, the latest OS with a consistent upgrade policy, a single marketplace, and consistent (Google endorsed) services. I love this strategy from an end-user’s perspective. Nexus phones will sell fairly well. But the numbers will pale in comparison to the non-Nexus phones sold. But Nexus will only be “fairly” successful because it is counter to what the carriers want and every dollar Google spends on advertising it incents the device manufactures and carriers to spend more on advertising their differentiated products. Nexus actually worsens fragmentation along most axes by introducing yet another “Android model” into the mix.
Wishing Everyone Will Upgrade. This actually seems to be Google’s primary tactic. As Eric Schmidt said last week: ‘With Android, Google’s “core strategy” is to get everyone on Ice Cream Sandwich, the latest version of the platform.’ Google is trying to do this two ways:
Holding Back Access to Google Services. “Follow our rules or you can’t use Google Search”. This just pisses Google’s partners off and smells like anti-trust. Not that it matters, because Google can’t really do this because there are enough reasonable alternatives to Google’s services now. In addition, the battle of the social graph is causing Google to push Google+ everywhere. What strategy tax at Google do you think will trump the other: Android consistency or Google+ everywhere?
Holding Back Access to the Latest Version of Android. “Follow our rules or you don’t get Ice Cream Sandwich, etc…”. Uh, it’s open source. Fork. More fragmentation. Simply. Will. Not. Work.

None of these tactics will work, primarily because none of the other sides of the market have any motivation to help (other than end users, who would benefit, but consumers don’t really have enough power). Secondarily, these tactics won’t work because Android has already been so fragmented and such a market success (in terms of units).

The early fragmentation of Android (across all axes) was the proverbial camel’s nose under the tent.

Buying Motorola Mobility, under-investing curating the marketplace, redesigning the user interface every release, not forcing the device manufacturers/carriers to consistently upgrade, and Google’s monopolistic behavior with search got the camel into the tent up to its first hump.

Android’s massive unit growth mean the camel is now already IN the tent. Android has become so successful that Google has lost control of it. And this, in turn, means Android, as a brand, will have a significantly diminished value over time.

Oh, and if after reading the above tome, you still don’t agree. Consider this article about television. Remember, Android is not just about mobile…

I’d love to hear your comments. Keep it clean…