Have you ever woken up, made a fresh pot of coffee, only to open the refrigerator and not be able to find the half & half? After digging through the olives and hummus, you FINALLY find it.

But your experience was frustrating, especially considering that was pre-coffee. Your day is off on the wrong foot.

Designing a website, app, or other digital product is like organizing your refrigerator.

Think about how you organize your fridge. You might have a section for cheese. Then there’s your meat section (or soy products), condiments grouped together, with the most frequently eaten foods in the most accessible places. Perhaps you try to shape your behavior by making healthier foods, or those with less of a shelf life, more accessible. When food rots, you clean the fridge (technical debt).

When you start designing an app, website, or any type of digital experience ask yourself – where do I put the most used items? The occasional indulgences? Time-sensitive items? The same rationale for refrigerator organization applies to website design.

The fridge might have more lock-in power than your average website or app – you can’t download a new fridge or move your food to a new one – but you get the point.

Now go organize that fridge!

In the U.S., Chrome has 39% market share, behind Apple Inc.’s Safari browser, which has 52%. UC Browser has less than 1% market share in the U.S. – WSJ (subscription required)

The article from the WSJ is about how Google Chrome lags UC Browser (owned by Alibaba) in Asian markets but wow — that stat speaks to the competitive advantage of Apple having Safari be the default browser on iOS. I don’t see any other way they can be that far ahead of Chrome in US market share.

Looking backwards, this is what the antitrust case against Microsoft was about. Long story short (see the Wikipedia link for more) the two parties eventually settled. But Netscape and the Justice Department took issue with Microsoft’s business practices around bundling Explorer with Windows and said it constituted monopolistic behavior.

A Data Gatekeeper

Controlling the mobile browser is of great strategic importance to both Google and Apple.

First, that owner plays a role in being the gatekeeper for mobile ad tech. Safari’s recent moves towards a more privacy-friendly approach to web tracking doesn’t bode well for ad tech companies that rely on the mobile browser to deliver targeted ads.

Second is around data policies and how that data is used to target ads. As an advertising company, Google has more of a vested interest in having more ad-friendly policies for Chrome. Unlike Google, Apple’s goal with the browser is to create the best user experience.

Portals Over Search?

One reason for UC Browser’s success is its tiny app size and portal-like approach to showing news, scores from sports like cricket and soccer and other content. – same WSJ article linked above

History reversing itself? Google helped transition users to a search interface on the web browser, and away from portals like Yahoo! But who’s to say that the mobile browser is conducive to the same user interface? In certain environments less screen space could result in a need for specific, targeted, curation.

Using the mobile browser also means less worries about how much space mobile apps are taking up on the device. This makes a big difference in Asia.

I’m not sure if this will become an issue in 2018 or ever, but it’s interesting to look at Apple and Safari in iOS today and draw parallels to the browser wars of the 90’s, when Microsoft bundled Explorer in Windows.  I don’t think the browser is as important as it used to be, but it’s still a key strategic component for consumer tech platforms.

If you’ve been hearing about cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and want to understand what all the excitement is about, start with blockchain technology.

Bitcoin couldn’t exist without blockchain technology, but explaining the technology (blockchain) isn’t as as easy as explaining the currency (Bitcoin). We’re all familiar with the idea of money.

I’m going to expand on a common phrase used to explain blockchain — encrypted, decentralized, ledger — and how each word can help you gain an understand of blockchain.

en·crypt – to convert data into a cipher or code, especially to prevent unauthorized access

The blockchain is composed of connected “blocks” – a set of transactions where each transaction is represented by a large number. Each block includes an encrypted signature of the previous block, creating an  unchangeable and linear record of activities. As more blockchain transactions take place, the system actually gets more secure.

Public key cryptography – using a public and private key for verification – is used to establish ownership in the blockchain. The private key is like your signature, and providing it is like shaking someone’s hand to seal a transaction.

de·cen·tral·ize – the transfer of authority from a single entity to many

The benefits to Apple Music from the Shazam acquisition are clear. The Music Industry Blog did a great job outlining the prospects of Apple using Shazam’s underlying data and customer knowledge to boost Apple Music.

I want to look at it from another angle – HomePod and the voice-controlled speaker market. This is an area with intense competition from the big players (Apple, Google, Amazon) and one where Apple is falling short.

We know HomePod will have to be great at matching words to a song (“Siri, play Dear Prudence”), but what’s the case for having HomePod be able to listen to and recognize a song from another device?

What if you could play a Spotify playlist for HomePod, and HomePod used that song data to build out your listening profile? It’s like importing your music taste “over the air”.

Your listening data is hugely valuable to companies like Apple and Spotify because it helps them tailor the music they recommend to you. Because of this and other reasons they keep tight control of your listening data, and don’t open it up to third party services.

Maybe Shazam can change that. Speakers like HomePod were build to react to audio input, and it may not be a big leap (I’ll leave that to the experts) to go from the human voice to a song.

Granted, this idea is a little far out – but might as well think different since Apple is going to have to compete with more established Amazon devices!

Summary: If Apple decides it’s a design company, it risks not being about to launch game-changing products. Apple should be a product company, and navigating the balance between engineering and design is the company’s secret sauce.

Neil Cybart from Above Avalon’s post on defining Apple as a design company got me thinking about the natural (and healthy!) tension that exists between design and engineering, what it means for Apple, and how that manifests itself in all tech organizations.

No matter the size company you work for, if there is a design team and an engineering team, understanding this dynamic is key.

Engineers focus on what’s achievable (and how), designers focus on what’s ideal, and a great product lies somewhere in between the two. Getting to that “somewhere” is where technology (engineering) and the liberal arts (design) meet.

Apple Today

I don’t think that Apple is a design company — calling Apple a design company doesn’t do the engineering team justice, and vice versa for calling Apple a technology company.

Apple is a product company. The product is where engineering and design meet, and Apple is world class in both. It’s succeeded because of its ability to manage this natural tension.

How? By having respected, opinionated, and visionary leadership that has the authority to make key product decisions. For many years, it was clear who had that voice at Apple.

Apple’s industrial design team shouldn’t have the final say on product, nor should engineering. They should constructively clash, and the final decision should be made by someone objectively removed from both departments. In Apple’s case that’s Tim Cook and his “inner circle” (Jeff Williams, Eddy Cue, Phil Schiller).

There are risks to having this structure in a product driven company. First, if the engineering or design orgs don’t fully buy in or respect the decision of that group, that will erode the culture. It also could result in decisions-by-committee, which can lead to numerous compromises since each member has their own point of view.

But the biggest risk is that products don’t get launched (more on that below).

This new inner-circle decision making structure is a dynamic that I think Apple is still adjusting to.

Too Much Design

Is it possible to focus too much on design? I think so, and if you do, the risk is that you never launch anything because what you’re aiming for simply is not achievable.

The reason a company aims for something not achievable might be because engineering isn’t as involved as they should be during the early stages of product definition.

The process of how you define what a product will be is key to shipping something you can be proud of.

I’m sure that the design studio at Apple creates lots of prototypes that never make it past prototype stage. The question is for the ones that do get the green light to move on — how successful is Apple in turning prototypes into successful products?

There Won’t Be Another iPhone, But…

The lack of a groundbreaking new product has been a familiar refrain from Apple critics.

Judging the success of the Apple Watch depends on what you compare it to. Personally I think Apple can call it a success, given that it’s introduced the concept of smart wearables deeper into culture than any previous product.

But there are numerous signs of trouble at Project Titan, Apple’s car initiative. Apple also reportedly wanted to ship a TV set and invested significant resources to do so, but that didn’t work out.

Designing a car or a TV set, while a challenge, might just be the tip of the iceberg.

If Apple is now considering itself a design company, I wouldn’t take that as a good sign — trying and failing to build beautifully designed products is not an efficient way to run a business.

What if You’re Not Apple?

Any great CEO, Product Manager, or other role focused on launching products should excel at navigating this balance between engineering and design.

It’s important to empathize with both teams, while ultimately keeping the customer or user in mind. Doing so takes listening, learning, making your opinion known, and building respect from all teams.

In technology, and specifically software, where your competitor is oftentimes just a click (or tap) away, having a superior product is key to building a long term business.

When was the last time someone cared about Apple?

It seems like Jony Ive is on his way out. The Apple Watch is doing ok. AirPods sound promising, but where’s the Apple hype machine? And do headphones have game-changer potential, representing a step forward for humanity? Perhaps in the promise of a better ecosystem…but in and of themselves no. I also get the sense Apple wasn’t ready for the level of demand/interest we’ve seen for AirPods.

To have this low a level of anticipation for the Apple product pipeline is unusual.

Much of this is based on what I’m seeing in the media. Historically Apple has played the press like a fiddle, but right now there are so many other stories ahead of Apple.

Perhaps I’m speaking from personal experience, but have you been reading as much about what’s in the Apple product pipeline as you used to? Are you as jazzed about it as you once were?

This post on Above Avalon asks all right questions…and there are A LOT of them.

It feels like Apple isn’t leading the way anymore in how technology can be used to change the way we live.

Apple’s services business is strong, but Apple isn’t a services company — it’s a product company (“north star”). Services are “the only major segment of the company’s business that grew last quarter” (Recode).

They’ll never compete with the likes of Google and Amazon in services. It’s about the interaction between the hardware and the software and the experience that creates.

All the being said, I predict that 2017 brings big change to Apple. Perhaps even the end of Tim Cook’s reign.

I truly hope that Apple is not becoming just another company. But I fear that’s where we’re headed.

Here’s my shot at predicting what 2017 will bring –

1. Privatization – Federal government programs from healthcare to social security will be under constant threat of privatization. It’s already been floated for the VA healthcare system. It’s not a fun year to be a federal government employee – our institutions will be scrutinized like never before. It will be a disorganized privatization, much like what happened when Communism fell in Russia. A premium will be put on relationships to government leaders – not capabilities in delivering goods and services. An American oligarch class starts to form.

2. Engaged Youth Culture – Young people (< 25) start engaging around hard news on the usual platforms – FB, Instagram, and Snapchat. Conversations turn to more serious topics as social issues take center stage. Likely topics include gender rights, civil liberties, and the environment. A social movement not seen since the 60’s starts to emerge. There will be culture leaders in comedy, film, and music. Teen Vogue has already started publishing articles critical of the President-elect.

3. The Class Divide Widens – The rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Poverty increases. Trickle-down economics based on tax cuts results not in a reinvigorated middle class, but a wealthier “management class”. Luxury markets like art and high end real estate flourishes. This leads to…

4. Social Angst – By the end of the year an angry, underserved segment of the population will start to speak up. They will say that Trump promised them a return to greatness but has delivered nothing but the same. There will be opportunities for the Democrats to ride this wave back to relevance.

5. A War on Media – Newspapers take on a more important role than ever. The Washington Post will lead the charge. Expect a high profile court case around an explosive report by the Post, akin to Watergate. Trump may target Amazon since Jeff Bezos owns the Post. Amazon stock may suffer. The Supreme Court gets involved.

Happy New Year! 2017 could be a doozy.

Yesterday Google and Facebook both announced they were cracking down on “fake news” sites that are using their ad networks to make money.

First some background: Google and Facebook have publisher networks that display ads sold by Google or FB on their site.  The revenue from those ads is split between the Publisher and Google/FB. For publishers and companies that don’t have an Ad sales team, or bloggers that doesn’t have time to sell ads, these programs earn them income.

Google and Facebook will start banning publishers that distribute fake news from their networks.

What is a Fake News Site?

Neither company provided much context on how they’ll be determining what news sites are “fake”, and by extension which news sites are real. Oddly, I couldn’t find any post from the companies announcing the change. The most detail was found in quotes in the Wall Street Journal, emphasis mine (behind a paywall).

From Facebook –

“While implied, we have updated the policy to explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news,” the spokesman said…”

Google, being the big Company it is, was more forthcoming –

Google said Monday that it is updating its policies to ban Google ads being placed “on pages that misrepresent, misstate, or conceal information about the publisher, the publisher’s content, or the primary purpose” of the website. The policy would include sites that distribute false news, a Google spokeswoman said.

We have Facebook deciding what is real vs. fake, and Google having plenty of leeway deciding the existential purpose of a site.

Should we trust Google and Facebook to make those determinations? I trust that they’ll bar sites that use hate speech, violent images, and the like, but we should acknowledge this is a slippery slope.

When anyone – the government, a news agency, or a tech company (!) – is making a moral determination based on content, transparency is needed.

With Great Power…

There’s little doubt the recent election is playing into these decisions.

Maybe swaths of employees at Facebook and Google posited that fake news sites helped Trump win the election and this was a solution to having the same problem again. They built support across the company and couldn’t be ignored. Good for them! And I mean that, no bitterness whatsoever.

Yet we should take pause here. I won’t go into the rabbit hole of the meaning of the words real and fake, but Facebook and Google will play a role in the reality we live in. They are deciding what is fake and what is real news, and influencing the financial stability of those sites.

Think about it.

“The question is, are people really going to watch what we make on a computer screen or not,” said Bewkes. “I think an awful lot rides on whether that happens or not.” – Jeff Bewkes in 2000 at the time of the AOL/Time Warner merger (to Kara Swisher)

AT&T is in the process of acquiring Time Warner. There are politicians raising flags but this is business as usual. The likely outcome is the deal goes through, perhaps with some organizational adjustments to preserve the journalistic integrity of CNN.

Living in a Multi-screen World

Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes justifies the deal as a necessity due to the fact that we now live in a multi-screen world. Content has been set free.

It’s not people watching on “computer screens” as Bewkes’ quote from 2000 suggests, but the fact that computers have permeated everything we do from watching TV to talking on the phone to reading.

Each of these touchpoints becomes an opportunity to consume video content.

This upends the traditional content distribution business because there is no longer a single access point. AT&T controls distribution (I’d argue AT&T is a distribution, or maybe a data company. Certainly not a phone company) and can help Time Warner reach multiple screens in a simplified, cost-effective manner.

The Disruptors

Apple and Google are the barbarians at the gate in this battle, and to a lesser extent Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon. They’re the companies promoting new distribution methods (YouTube + Chromecast, Apple TV) and control the operating systems (Android and iOS) in our life.

The biggest obstacle the disruptors face is access to popular content. That’s controlled by companies like Time Warner and the AT&T acquisition can be interpreted as a defensive move against a computer-centric future.

That being said, fair access to content is one aspect of the deal regulators would be wise to analyze. Perhaps some protections could be put in place to ensure Time Warner doesn’t heavily favor AT&T in their distribution deals.

Consumers deserve choice, and in this case it’s the choice to watch what they want how they want to watch it.

(Update – Today AT&T announced DirectTV Now which is being positioned as a $35 “skinny bundle”. Think the timing was a coincidence? Nope! They can now point out to regulators that they are supporting innovation, just like Apple and Google. But the devil is in the details – we’ll see how broad the content is and how easily accessible and independent the service is.)

Just A Matter of Time

I’m betting on a future where consumers reach content, as opposed to content reaching consumers.

Consumer behavior is changing as people become more willing to put in the effort, and have the know-how, to find cost-efficient ways to watch what they want to watch. As demographics change a more technically savvy generation will be in the majority.

And that’s one thing that old media can’t fight.

I recently started a newsletter using Nuzzel and have found it to be one of the most well thought-out curation platforms out there. As a news junkie now I can curate my own daily newsletter instead of sharing links throughout the day using different mediums.

For Curators – Nuzzel Newsletters

Nuzzel Newsletters are a new product from Nuzzel which enables people to curate their own daily newsletter. You can read more about the thinking behind Nuzzel newsletters in this blog post and see an example of my newsletter here.

My favorite part of the newsletter is how easy it is to add stories. For the most part I use the iOS extension (see screenshot) and Chrome bookmarklet. As a heavy Instapaper user I’m already comfortable with saving articles for later using my phone and the browser. Adding stories to my Nuzzle newsletter is a natural extension of that behavior.

There’s also ample room for editorial content. You get to name each newsletter, add a summary, and can comment on any story. Very nice!

For Content Consumers

Twitter is a firehose and it works well as a living stream of real-time content. But if you’re the type of content consumer that doesn’t have the time to sort through a flood of tweets a well-curated Nuzzel newsletter is like a drink of water in the desert.

A big question is how you could discover the newsletter(s) that are right for you. The onus is on the newsletter creator to acquire subscribers. Nuzzel provides tools to import contacts and promote your newsletter on social platforms, but if you don’t have a large pre-existing network subscriber acquisition can be a slog.

If you ask me, this is the biggest challenge for Nuzzel newsletters – how do they create the network of curator/consumer connections that Twitter has? That’s a moat that’s not easily replaceable.

Integrating with a Read Later Service?

My one wish is for Nuzzel to combine in a smart way with Instapaper or another read later app. It would be cool if I could add to Instapaper and my Nuzzel newsletter at the same time. And if my Instapaper highlights became Nuzzel comments, and so on.

In summary, Nuzzel Newsletters provide me with an outlet that I’ve wanted for a long time! You can subscribe to my newsletter here.