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Category: Apple
November 23rd, 2009
Tim O'Reilly and the Cassandra act
Tim O’Reilly delivered a dire warning at his Web 2.0 Expo over the weekend.
The Web is under threat from closed applications, from Google and Apple to Microsoft and Amazon, and from content vendors like News Corp. building moats and raising high the drawbridges.
I felt great sympathy for Tim, reading his words. I issued similar warnings over the dot-boom, starting from when I launched A-Clue.Com as a weekly newsletter in 1997, having been laid off from CMP’s NetGuide.
Watch out, be wary, I wrote. This Internet commerce thing is just a bubble. It’s going to pop and all will be carnage.
Turns out there is little value in being Cassandra (right, from Wikipedia). When the dot-boom burst, which I date from AOL’s purchase by Time-Warner, it did me no good at all.
I went from having 17 writing gigs to zero. I had joked during the boom that I would gladly write for nothing — in 2002 and 2003 I did. Ha-ha.
The point is that, while I was right, I was powerless to do anything about it.
Tim O’Reilly is not powerless.
And the first thing he needs to do is get straight about the issues.
- The “threat” from Google and Apple is a feature, not a bug. Mobile telephony has been wholly proprietary from its birth 25 years ago. There is not and never has been a mobile Internet, just whatever data carriers wished to let pass on their networks.
- It has always been possible to erect paywalls and registration walls. The New England Journal of Medicine and many science journals hide much of their content behind registration. Publishers like England’s The Spectator are constantly trying to get paid.
- Clouds like those of Amazon and Google may only support software their owners choose to support. Trying to make clouds vanilla discriminates against rocky road and tutti-frutti.
There have been proprietary threats to the Internet practically since the moment the Web was spun. That’s what the browser wars were about. Microsoft was going to add proprietary hooks to Internet Explorer and we’d all be gutted like fish on a line.
Since the Web was spun, there have also been elite audiences, narrow niches for whom payment and registration is a business advantage. Not everyone wants the hoi polloi coming in at all hours so they can spend the next day digging quarters out of the couches. Velvet ropes hold a business model.
So long as I’m not forced to buy News Corp. content, in other words, there is no threat from News Corp. hiding its face from me.
On the other hand, there are real threats O’Reilly didn’t mention. ESPN, for instance.
When ISPs are charged for content, and those ISPs have monopolistic control of their subscribers, that’s a real problem. ESPN has quietly engineered this. Don’t like sports but need a cable modem? You are buying ESPN360 whether you want to or not. Every month some of your ISP bill goes to Disney (ESPN’s owners).
I’m sure News Corp. and every other big content provider would like a taste of that gravy. And it would do little good for subscribers to try and disconnect Comcast en masse — where you gonna go?
It’s the proprietary control of the last mile, and the use of that control to force users into buying things they may not want, that is the big threat to the Internet. That’s a feature of the wireless world, but we can change it. It’s a product of the Bell-cable duopoly, but we can change that, too.
Focus on the real dangers, Tim. You have the power to make change if you focus on what’s real and use your influence.
Otherwise you’re like Holly Hunter in Broadcast News, or hundreds of other working journalists. It must be wonderful to always be right, she’s told.
No, she replies. It’s horrible.
And if you can’t do anything about it, it is.
October 26th, 2009
Why Android is beating Windows Mobile
Most analysts have it wrong. It’s not about a balance of power and it’s not about Google becoming what Sun promised to be and it’s certainly not about that dread word free.
It’s about the game that the two companies are playing. Google is playing, and Microsoft is not. (Here, one of the 16 “masterpieces” in the dogs playing poker series, from Wikipedia.)
With Google Android you see where all your competitors start from. You can innovate from there. You can differentiate your phone from other Android phones.
With Microsoft there is less wiggle room. The only people who see the code are Microsoft and (maybe) the manufacturer. You are betting that Microsoft can out-innovate Apple. (Stop laughing.)
No one in the mobile business throught Apple could out-innovate Apple back in the day. Remember when Apple was playing footsie with Motorola? No one in the mobile business thought Apple had what it took to be a “lead dog” — they all wanted it in harness with an unchanging view.
So Apple did its own phone, its own way, and Apple won.
Microsoft lacks the courage to do this. It won’t compete with its own ecosystem. It doesn’t understand that hardware is software. So it plays the game the way Symbian did five years ago, even though Symbian has abandoned that game, so there is no reason to fear Microsoft, and no “there” there.
The days of control are over, unless you’re willing to bet big. Apple did, and wound up playing Monopoly on its own design. What’s Microsoft playing, Blind Man’s Bluff?
By contrast, think of Google as dealing hands of poker.
All the players at the Android table can see one anothers’ cards. Not all the cards, but enough to get a feel for what’s happening. They can keep their aces in the hole, they can innovate or compete in some other way.
The dealer is patient, you can play all day, and guess who ends up with most of the chips at the end of play?
The dealer.
Google is betting that carriers and manufacturers will play enough hands with it that it can gain some market share. Right now that looks like a pretty good bet.
Microsoft is like a gambler with a fistful of dollars that can’t find the game.
October 14th, 2009
Why Mac open source gets no respect
For a system evolved from a BSD Unix the Mac OS does not get much respect from the open source community.
There are Mac-only programs in the open source firmament. AppleJack is a nice troubleshooting assistant. The XBMC media center . has no counterpart in the Windows world. Fink connects the Mac to the Linux open source mainstream.
NOTE: The XBMC folks write to say that there are versions of their software for both Windows and Linux, as well as the Mac.
But most of the popular Mac open source products out there are familiar to Windows users. These include the Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox and Thunderbird, Gimp, and the VLC Media Player.
Why hasn’t open source made more of an impact in the Mac universe? Following are some theories. Feel free to add your own, or just heckle:
- Mac people are users. As opposed to programmers. When your initial bundle is filled with usable software who needs to go into the code?
- Steve wouldn’t like that. Apple is not friendly to open source. Their attitude makes the relationship between Microsoft and open source look like a first-class bromance.
- No critical mass. I don’t mean there aren’t enough Apple users out there, I mean there aren’t enough angry ones. Linux people know they’re on their own, and Microsoft frustration abounds. Are you an angry Mac user? Do you have any other friends?
- No profit in it. A lot of open source effort is driven by the profit motive. How much money can one make in Apple open source?
- Apple gets there first. Apple is quite adept at exploiting new niches within its own ecosystem. The capabilities of its operating system are full available in the commercial market.
- Mac people are upscale. Since Macs generally cost less than PCs, ownership of a Mac shows you are not a penny pincher. This changes the make-or-buy equation, tipping it strongly to buy.
- You’re not looking hard enough. There’s really a ton of Mac open source out there, but PC-using reporters are too lazy to go look at it.
What would you add to this list?
October 8th, 2009
Google plays a hand of Ogre with Apple
Those of a certain age will remember an early Steve Jackson game called Ogre. It was a two-player game where one player had a single piece, a powerful piece called the Ogre. The other player had everything else.
This pretty much sums up Google’s Android strategy against the Apple iPhone. Apple in this case plays the Ogre. (Picture from Steve Jackson Games.)
The combination of Apple’s proprietary iPhone design and its exclusive deal with AT&T has proven financially powerful. Apple created a market no one thought existed for a data-driven mobile Internet client and everyone else is playing catch-up.
With Dell now agreeing to supply AT&T with its version of the Android, Google now has game pieces on all four major U.S. carriers, including the one Apple plays on. T-Mobile was the first carrier to carry Android kit, Verizon is being promised a bunch of it. Sprint and Samsung will be in on the game in a Moment.
Everybody gets to play the way they want. Carriers can get exclusives on designs, and negotiate any deal on the resulting data flow they wish. Both new and old manufacturers get to play in the phone game and try to innovate on the margins.
All this work feeds back into the Android ecosystem, and all content sales feed into the Android marketplace. Google just wants a place to advertise alongside the content.
It’s a fun game, whose knock-on effects are a direct challenge to Microsoft, Symbian, and the Blackberry folks. Google seems destined to be the market’s #2 player by early next year, #2 with a bullet.
But please note this. All Google’s pieces taken together don’t yet add up to the power of Apple’s iPhone. The Ogre still has the power. But Google has the dice.
September 4th, 2009
How an open source camera will change photography
What Stanford calls the Frankencamera does not look like much.
It’s big and clumsy and you don’t get much better performance as a result of that.
(This is a close-up from our Crave blog. The hands are those of graduate student Andrew Adams. No word on whether he’s related to Ansel.)
But because the new camera is based on a Nokia N95 smartphone, whose software is licensed by the open source Symbian Foundation, it can become a lot more.
Professor Marc Levoy plans to release a complete implementation for the camera in a year, a platform on which apps can be built.
Already he has created software for the camera that does things no commercial camera can do, like extend its “dynamic range” so all distances are optimally lit, and enhance the resolution of videos with still images.
The applications are endless, going well beyond hobbies.
Cameras that take pictures of speeders could have programs that enhance and re-take those images on cars that try to gray-out their license tags to avoid detection. Any attempt to evade photo detection might be automatically countered with the right combination of hardware and software.
It seems amazing that no camera company has yet sought to build an ecosystem based on software, but this is an area where open source really can innovate, since every application will be a new one.
Open source smart phone groups like Android, LiMo and Moblin should all be anxious to replicate what Levoy is doing in their phones.
One point Levoy did not make is that the Frankencamera software could be integrated with existing open source imaging software, like The Gimp, so developers of those programs can jump-start the ecosystem.
Levoy’s idea is also so obvious it’s impossible to believe a proprietary company can’t adapt it quickly enough.
How soon before we see camera apps at the Apple app store?
August 31st, 2009
Should open source hate Apple?
Apple is not the dominant computing platform.
It’s true that Apple is just as proprietary a company as Microsoft. Some might say more so. But there is a big difference between competing with proprietary products and holding a monopoly with them which you use to keep open source down.
There is a reason that history records a case called U.S. vs. Microsoft. Microsoft has both a monopoly and a proven record of using its power to keep open source from gaining a foothold.
Apple, meanwhile, has just a 10% share of the operating system market. Sure, if they had more they might be dangerous, just like if I looked like Antonio Banderas I might be a movie star.
Microsoft did not really change its tune after the court case wound down.
- Microsoft subsidizes the channel so every PC in the store runs Windows, even netbooks where that’s more trouble than it’s worth.
- Sharepoint is designed specifically to extend its monopoly.
- Remember the OOXML standards battle, where Microsoft corrupted the standards process itself to maintain control of the applications market?
- The Novell deal, in which Linux vendors admit that 2+2=5 so Microsoft won’t assert non-existent patent claims against them, still gets me mad every time I think about it.
Now it’s true that Apple supports Digital Rights Management (DRM), and limits what users can do. The Free Software Foundation is dead set against DRM. But this was the industry’s price for even letting Apple offer a product like the iPod.
The music industry’s reaction led to Apple offering to forego DRM and may be the biggest victory open source won in this decade.
Or take the iPhone. Sure it’s designed to enforce AT&T’s control of bits, and in so doing enforce Apple’s control of what you do with the device. But it’s the Apple-AT&T relationship that is objectionable. The handset market is increasingly competitive.
The whole idea that the Free Software Foundation should go against Apple rather than Microsoft, then, is a straw man. Apple may want the control over users and markets that Microsoft has enjoyed this decade, but it doesn’t have that control, nor is it likely to achieve it.
August 3rd, 2009
What the FCC can do for open spectrum
Larry Dignan is afraid the FCC may be doing too much, just looking at possibly anti-competitive deals, trying to stay on top of the news instead of sleeping in a corner, as it did for a decade before Julius Genachowski (right) came to town.
It’s a mark of just how knee-jerk the opposition to government action in markets has become, that a mere investigation can lead reporters to fingering their worry beads.
To most people it’s pretty obvious why Apple shut down Google Voice. VOIP is competition with cellular minutes, just as it was competition for wired phone minutes, which it destroyed.
I’m old enough to remember the monthly chore of auditing my phone bill each month, creating expense bills for various publishers, with the cost of each call written down and photocopied. I don’t do that any more. The cost is rolled into my cellular plan as minutes which neither I nor my publisher has to see.
But running phone calls — a low bandwidth service — over the Internet rather than the wireless network is still a cost savings, which some customers would like to capture. Only the cell phone companies don’t want them to.
This is just one of many ways in which companies have succeeded in frustrating Moore’s Law over this decade. There is no technical reason why the price to move bits should not be going down, going down constantly, and going down rapidly. The cost of equipment, the efficiency of technology, it’s all there to make it happen.
What isn’t there are competitive markets with incentives for investment and no tolerance for monopoly.
Politics has squandered the advances of Moore’s Law, and it will take more than the FCC’s meager politics to bring them back.
So let me offer a simple guideline. Call it Dana’s Law of Technology Regulation:
Regulation should conform to the trends of Moore’s Law and maintain maximum competition in the market.
It will take real changes, not just investigations, to make that happen. We need more unlicensed channels, we need wholesaling in the last mile.
Bits may not be free, but they should be as cheap as the technology creating them allows. The goal should be encouraging the market to expand opportunity, and not making anyone’s life easier.
July 14th, 2009
Reputation key to success in an open source world
For two generations the key to success in computing has been “lock-in.”
(Picture from the 2000 film, filmed in Atlanta, “Remember the Titans.” From Monsters & Critics.)
Companies have fought to protect their power over customers by protecting their intellectual property from use by others. IBM’s hardware monopoly in the 1950s and Microsoft’s software monopoly of the 1990s spring from the same tree.
Lock-in doesn’t require a monopoly to be real. You can argue Oracle does not have a monopoly in databases. But it does have lock-in, and its profits are based on that lock-in.
The search for lock-in goes on. It has moved from hardware to software to data formats. Where does it lie in an open source world?
That world has two hemispheres, it seems to me.
On the enterprise side it lies, as Matt Asay writes, precisely where it does in proprietary software. The cost of conversion gradually rises as a system grows more complex, so that a lower price, or even no price, can’t cause the customer to switch. That’s lock-in.
On the consumer side, I think it rides more on reputation. Microsoft’s reputation hampers its ability to sell online services, even free online services, and it has for years. Google’s good reputation is its most important asset in this regard and Apple’s reputation within its niche is made of iron.
Reputation in this case creates lock-in. Your preference for Firefox over Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Google Chrome, may be based less on features than on your feelings about the maker. The same is true in other niches where open source competes for consumer attention.
There is a cycle to corporate reputation. As companies grow it becomes increasingly difficult to maintain a positive reputation. We like the underdog.
I’m old enough to remember when WalMart and Microsoft were underdogs, against Sears and IBM respectively. Their positive reputations helped get them through those fights, but now both face enormous push-back, in part because of their size.
As Google has grown, and as Apple’s share within niches like music players and phones has become enormous, both have also faced challenges to their reputations. They can easily be found in any talkback thread here. Google is evil, a threat to privacy, some say. Apple practices lock-in and seeks monopoly, others say.
Reputation, as an asset, grows in importance the more our business is done online, because other forms of lock-in drift away. Reputation is a prejudice based on personal experience, your knowledge of others’ experience, and (to an extent) the company’s advertising, marketing, and public relations.
In the end, then, the lock-in of reputation is put best by Denzel Washington in Remember the Titans.
Who’s your daddy? In an open source world, you decide.
Loading ...June 29th, 2009
Gatekeepers of open source innovation
In a highly-recommended post on Friday, our Matt Asay asks a key question.
How do we build innovation into open source? (The picture is from Wikipedia. Guess who it is, then click to get the full post.)
Taking his title from Eric Raymond’s book, Matt suggests that the proprietary model may be the best way to go here, and suggests that open core licensing, credited to JasperSoft’s Andrew Lampitt, may be the best route forward.
The problem is that innovation demands a committed team, and an ample incentive. By making the core of a product open source, then offering the secret sauce as a proprietary addition, companies can bring in the cash needed to create such teams.
There is little doubt that many in this community are wondering where the open source innovation is coming from. Every new rumor of Firefox code is seized upon by readers anxious to find some innovation in the open source mass market.
One reason for this may be that the Firefox team has both financial commitment and incentive. The best communities are built around projects with those attributes.
But there are many other areas of open source where both attributes exist. There is enormous incentive in the mobile device market, where you can get paid for hardware with open source software embedded in it.
So why are Android and Moblin still serving us leftover Apple slices?
June 8th, 2009
No penguins in Akihibara
Today in Tokyo, I set myself the task of finding Linux in the Akihibara, which advertises itself to the world as Tokyo’s electronic wonderland.
I should have stayed on the train.
To the right is the only penguin I found. It’s an ad for the Suica card, an ingenious attempt to replace the present system of paper cards with a single, renewable plastic one. The penguin in the lower right is the card’s mascot.
The ad says that you can load money into the card, through cash or credit card, in any train station, then use the card at local merchants to get a small discount. It turns the transit system into a bank, it’s safer for the merchants than a credit card, and it cuts the use of cardboard.
But that was it for penguins today.
None of the stores I saw displayed Linux on any of the devices I saw. Not the giant department-like stores, not the tiny kiosks.
Whether it was a desktop, laptop, notebook, netbook or sub-notebook like the Sony Vaio (whose ad of a Vaio rising out of a woman’s tight jeans as she walks, and her pushing it back into the pocket, is a subway ad classic) today’s Akihibara is all Windows, all the time.
You can get a Mac in the Akihibara. There are a few shops specializing in Apple, including a very nice one run by Softbank, the huge Japanese retailer. In the iMac store the iMacs are displayed running iMac ads, Apple’s trade dress is i-everywhere. And a few kiosk-sized stores sell iPods at discount.
But for the general market, here as at CompuTex, it’s Windows. There is Windows XP on netbooks and Windows Vista on notebooks, there are sometimes mentions of Windows 7 and even Microsoft Office bundles, but no Linux anywhere I could find.
After several hours of fruitless searching I found the largest store I could, the giant Yodabashi Akira, and started asking the help for Linux.
No, no, and no said the first people I talked to.
Finally I found a supervisor. “No Linux, just Windows,” he thundered.
OK, then.
The problem is one I have discussed before. There is a price lower than free. There is the money needed to drive a product through sales channels, which Linux strips out, as a feature. What’s the value to a store of something you can download for nothing? Why should they carry it? Why should they mention it exists?
I’ll let you answer that question. While you’re waking up I’ll be taking my Suica card to dinner.
May 1st, 2009
Open source brings the litigators against Apple
Lawsuits are a language all their own.
They speak of power relationships. Powerless people sue the powerful as an act of desperation. The facts may be beyond doubt, meaning an entrepreneurial lawyer is willing to risk serious money on them. Or it can be a cry for help.
Powerful people sue the powerless every day. The medium is the message. The suit tells the sued where they stand. Such suits are usually settled.
When the powerful sue one another the rest of us go for popcorn, because someone powerful thinks there is a principle involved. Such suits define the legal ground for the rest of us.
So when the Electronic Frontier Foundation joined a suit against Apple the other day, fighting its attempt to use the DMCA against a discussion of its technology, I shrugged my shoulders. Desperation.
After looking at the legal papers, and the rhetoric of the EFF, however, I’m having a re-think. This may not be a cry for help, but an opportunity for an entrepreneurial lawyer to make their bones, and deliver a powerful precedent at the same time.
Keker & Van Nest is sometimes called a “litigation boutique.” Most law firms avoid court rooms, these guys seek them out. The name partners aren’t on the complaint, but partners could come in if the stink rises high enough.
I don’t think Apple can just drop its complaints against BluWiki and expect this to go away, in other words. A scalp or a precedent are being called for.
I’m going out for popcorn and hoping for the latter. What are you doing this weekend?
March 30th, 2009
How does In-Stat predict mobile open source domination
Open source is going to beat the iPhone.
(This picture originally appeared last August at our wonderful Apple blog.)
That’s the prediction of a $2,495 report released by In-Stat last Tuesday about the mobile market, which focuses on the opportunities of “app stores” living on the phones rather than online.
Principal analyst David Chamberlain is the company’s director of consumer electronics research, with extensive contacts in China, but as our Dawn Kawamoto notes, using AdMob statistics, an open source win here would be a big market upset.
Mobile handsets currently represent a third of all Internet traffic, up from 26 percent just six months ago, so by the time this prediction is tested the mobile Internet can be expected to be the dominant form of online communication.
That’s what makes the search for a Twitter business model such a parlor game, as Twitter represents the first real bridge between today’s desktop Web and tomorrow’s mobile Web.
The In-Stat prediction is even more remarkable when you consider that the iPhone currently has about half the U.S. mobile Internet market, against 5% for the Android. Google phones are really going to go from a 10-1 disadvantage to a market lead?
The only possible way to conclude that is to believe both carriers and manufacturers are going to concentrate on the Android platform, leaving them little bandwidth for the Blackberry, Windows Mobile, LiMo, or anything else.
That certainly seems to be what I’m hearing from developers at the present time, but the question is how long they will wait for big revenue in a world where three months is a very long time.
I am personally a big booster of open source, but I can’t find any respectable Android kit at my local store. Have you seen anything?
February 19th, 2009
How much mobile Internet market will open source get?
With the World Mobile Conference now over, and most of the world’s handset makers lining up behind some open source project — Android, LiMo, Symbian — it’s time to ask how much of the mobile Internet client market open source might get, and when.
Let me be clear about what I mean by that.
There are really three mobile markets:
- Phones. Still important, still profitable, but very much the past.
- E-mail clients. Whether the President still carries a Blackberry or a Windows Mobile device, he’s got it for the e-mail. Words on a screen, maybe some smileys. He’s not going to Google News or Facebook or ZDNet Open Source on it.
- Mobile Internet Clients. An iPhone is a true mobile Internet client. It’s designed for broadband and broadband services. It’s used for browsing, gaming and ftp. Yes it’s a phone, but voice is a low-bandwidth app.
Now you can use a phone for e-mail, and you can use Windows Mobile for browsing. But when it comes to broadband there’s only one. The iPhone. Nothing else will do.
This is where open source holds promise. Big screens, real apps, broadband connections and WiFi too. I don’t think the current Android kit yet hits that mark.
The proof lies in usage statistics, and when they do hit the mark expect a lot of press releases. Heck, expect Paul Revere raised from the dead and riding down Broadway shouting “the Androids are coming.” (Paul Revere is a hit with fans of Ron Paul.) Or the LiMos or the Symbians or whatever.
What happens now is everyone goes back to their drawing boards. Reference designs, chip sets, and delivery announcements to follow.
Despite the recession expect these to happen on the old three-month roll-out schedule. Carriers are desperate to solve the iPhone problem, and manufacturers know the first to crack it has their only true market advantage.
With everyone working more or less together on this I expect a true iPhone competitor in about a year. You will know we’re getting warmer when Apple offers its pride and joy for the cost of a data contract.
February 17th, 2009
Can open source make Apple deal with Adobe?
Having failed to come to an agreement on licensing its Flash technology for the iPhone, Adobe has joined Apple rival Nokia in a $10 million fund aimed at forcing the issue.
Publicly, Adobe is saying its problems with Apple are all technical. But if the Open Screen Project, which is managing the fund, delivers on its promise, doesn’t that work become redundant?
Assuming the OSP meets its technical goals, Apple would then face a choice between accepting a standard every other phone maker accepts, and letting Adobe’s nose under the tent, or defying the rest of the market.
This is what negotiators call a power play, and what others might call a desperate gamble. Cupertino cannot be amused at what San Jose is doing here.
My question is how open source advocates should feel.
- On the one hand you have a project backed by multiple corporations aimed at providing a universal mobile video technology.
- On the other hand you have open source being used as a card in a game, one that might easily be ruffed or tossed if an agreement is reached over our heads.
I’m inclined toward optimism myself. Who cares why people offer you money, so long as they offer it. Would the work be abandoned if Apple let in Flash tomorrow? Doubtful, because Nokia and the other phone makers still need a bridge to the iPhone, and this is the best idea they have.
Those who have commented so far over at the boss’s shop seem inclined to diss Flash as a compute hog. That $10 million won’t be going to waste.
But what do you folks here at Open Source feel?
January 9th, 2009
2009 the year content is unlocked
The word this week is that Hollywood has decided it is better to have an audience on its own terms than to not have one at all.
Boxee is unlocking all those proprietary protocols aimed at keeping TV off your PC. Apple is selling iTunes without DRM. All sorts of walls are coming down.
The zeitgeist was perfectly captured by new TV star Rachel Maddow, on The Daily Show. She admitted she doesn’t own a TV, but watches Jon Stewart on “the online machine.”
Maddow, whose hair and makeup is tarted up on MSNBC but who goes on other shows looking more like Ms. Magoo (not that there’s anything wrong with that), was speaking for a growing segment of the audience, the audience of the future.
Convergence is here, whether we like it or not. Hollywood is going to try and deal with it the best it can, forcing commercials but embracing the Web, while keeping its lobbyists well fed so it can shake down consumers wherever they can.
The copyright wars are over, in other words, and the Internet won. Entertainment will change dramatically as a result. Will the Web?
In other words now that the Rubicon has been crossed what will happen to content? Will the long form disappear in favor of clips? Will TV starts start getting paid like plumbers?
We’re about to find out.
UPDATE: One indication of the future. Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales says his plea for funds over the holidays was a success, despite the economy.
December 29th, 2008
The year of the mobile app
The most popular piece I wrote here during 2008 concerned the importance of the iPhone and Google Android. It was the fourth most-read post here during 2008.
I find this interesting because, as you’ll see if you click the link, the item drew just three talkbacks.
Maybe I nailed one and there was nothing left to say.
My point in February was, and it remains, that the iPhone, the Google Android, and all their competitors are not phones at all.
They are Internet clients.
There’s a huge difference. A phone is a low-bandwidth device. Digital cellular networks routinely compress calls into just a few thousands of bits per second of bandwidth.
An Internet client is a broadband device. We’re accustomed to desktop clients that haul data at 1.5 Mbps, often faster, even in a WiFi-equipped coffee bar. Contrast this with the 3 Kbps of the average digital cellular call.
So-called 3G mobile networks are not equipped to deal with this demand.
When my wife was in Texas recently she borrowed her sister’s 3G card to do some work, having been assured it was “mobile broadband.” Hasn’t stopped talking about how slow it was.
You notice the difference when you plug in with a laptop. You didn’t notice it with a mobile phone.
With the iPhone, the lack of speed is noticeable but not annoying. Mobile apps use a lot of programming tricks to get around the problem.
They’re small compared to desktop applications, for one thing. And they take advantage of all sorts of RIA technologies, depending on software in the client to handle the presentation and moving only the data needed.
Still, AT&T engineers know who has an iPhone without having to see the ID on their network. The average iPhone user grabs 500 times more data each month than the average phone user.
With a single supplier keeping prices high this demand growth is barely manageable. As Android and LiMo devices hit the shelves this year, a firehose of demand will be unleashed.
That will be the big story of 2009.
December 28th, 2008
Cygnus files first challenge to Bilski patent standard
Just two months after a court, in re Bilski, demanded strict scrutiny of software patent claims, a small Michigan outfit has issued a direct challenge to the new standard.
Cygnus Systems, a 20-year old Midwest networking outfit, claims a March patent approval gives it control over all thumbnails used as icons on networks, and has filed suit against everyone.
Well, not everyone. Just the three biggest someones — Google, Microsoft and Apple.
At first glance this appears to be a Britney Spears claim — a desperate cry for attention. But let’s do some research anyway.
Wookiepedia (not Wikipedia) says the Cygnus B system contained a planet with giant sapient algae beds, and possibly the offices of Cygnus Spaceworks, which made shuttles and starfighters for the Galactic Empire.
Sounds like a dead end. What else is out there?
Pamela Jones of Groklaw is taking some time off, and Patent Law blog has not yet addressed the issue either. (They do wish us all a Merry Christmas.)
Revenews notes that even before Bilski patents such as this were dodgy, citing the fate of the Amazon One-Click patent.
If the Cygnus name rings a bell, an outfit called Cygnus Telecommunications LLC acquired a patent on callbacks in 1999. Their enforcement attempt against AT&T eventually failed earlier this year.
The inventor in that case was James Aleman, a researcher at Colorado University in Boulder, so this is as relevant to the present situation as Wookiepedia.
Cygnus lawyer Matt MacAndrews told The Inquirer that Cygnus owner Gregory Swartz created the technology in his spare time back in 1998, filing for a patent three years later. Of course that paper also said Cygnus is based in Indiana. Not so.
Amit Chowdhry of The Pulse pulled a flow chart of the patented technology from Google Patents. It seems to cover how such thumbnails are created (by taking screen shots) not the thumbnails themselves.
The most telling comment, however, may be from MacAndrews, who works for a Chicago firm and admitted the defendants were chosen mainly for their deep pockets as “a logical starting place.”
Hence the picture at the top of this blog post. I hear this look is all the rage in the Cygnus B system. But the Wookie would know for sure.
December 3rd, 2008
Should Apple worry about Songbird 1.0
Songbird, an open source iTunes replacement (or music browser) has hit its 1.0 release, and now everyone will start asking whether Apple should be worried.
It has some nifty features, like integration with the Last.fm recommendation engine and mashTape, which links Web content to what you’re listening to. It’s dubbed a browser because it is based on the Mozilla eingine.
But it lacks key features, like the ability to copy files from a CD or sync to the iPhone. (Both are on the development roadmap.) It’s also clear that Apple will be ruthless in trying to kill it and maintain the closed nature of its iUniverse.
Which leads me to ask this question. If Microsoft controlled key Internet formats and were ruthless in protecting them, could Mozilla itself have gotten off the ground?
That’s the situation facing Songbird. It claims support for Apple’s formats, on the PC as well as the Macintosh. Will it be allowed to maintain compatibility? Forget syncing an iPhone to it, will you be able to sync an iPod after its next software update?
If you can, then there is hope for Songbird in that, because it’s open, you can customize it. New iTunes features are either proprietary or subject to intense corporate negotiation and strategizing. New Songbird apps can merely be written.
It’s really the open source development framework that makes Songbird different. Note that Mozilla, despite its success, still has just 20% of that market. Can Songbird get half that? If it can its developers really will be Pioneers of the Inevitable.
November 28th, 2008
What might end Apple's open source pass
Apple has replaced Microsoft as the chief foe of open source. (Picture from a student assignment sheet at Bodine High School in Pennsylvania.)
This was in part a matter of necessity. Apple had to put DRM on its iPod or it would get nothing to sell. It had to become a big advocate of the DMCA to keep its suppliers.
But now those suppliers have learned the only real beneficiary of DRM technology was Apple. It cemented their monopoly and control over the suppliers. Some are rebelling, in small ways.
Apple has embraced those moves, yet it continues to use the DMCA as a cudgel, aiming to kill open source competitors with claims of copyright violation.
Will the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s latest slam of Apple, over its attempt to kill a BluWiki thread with a DMCA order, mark a turning point?
For those unfamiliar with the story, Apple began “protecting” its iTunesDB file (necessary for syncing) with a checksum hash in September 2007. This kept people from using other music programs like Winamp and Songbird, alongside iPod files.
The hash was quickly hacked. Apple created another. When a BluWiki group called iPodHash arose to find a workaround, Apple slapped BluWiki with a DMCA takedown.
Get it? Apple had a near-monopoly on music players over a year ago, and is now using encryption and the DMCA to make competition a crime.
It does not surprise me that those in the open source movement, or the free Internet movement, would protest Apple’s actions.
What surprises me is the silence of the music industry. If this breaks that silence, then we will have a turning point. My guess is they no longer love their Cupertino overlords. Time to show it.
October 29th, 2008
Will the Motorola gamble hurt open source
Motorola is betting the farm on mobile open source.
While cutting staff, the onetime giant of mobility has apparently dropped Symbian and increased its commitment to the Google Android platform.
This is a little like your favorite manager running the Kansas City Royals. It’s still a bad ball team. Supporting Android won’t turn it into the Tampa Bay Rays.
While Motorola is maintaining its market share, the fact is that sales are slowing for everyone, and the worldwide recession will only accelerate the trend. Motorola is trading at levels last seen in 1992.
I don’t want to see Android blamed if it can’t turn things around. Motorola’s problems run deep and go back decades.
In the case of Android the challenges are also enormous. What carriers want is a device that will encourage a lot more use of mobile broadband, which the iPhone does. What customers want is less carrier control, something carriers resist.
To succeed, a manufacturer has to negotiate between these two contradictory impulses, mainly by standing at the customer’s side. Will Motorola put its foot down when necessary? They have no record of doing so in the past.
Oh, and good luck to Trey Hillman, but as you already know the Red Sox are tougher than the Chunichi Dragons.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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