Scroogie Boy's blog

Not a personal resolution, but...

...There clearly are some people in the software industry that need to make a resolution to fix their messes. I'm looking at you, Apple: iTunes 11 is all very purdy and all, but would it kill you to actually make Wi-Fi syncing actually work? You know, well enough that I don't have to babysit all our iOS devices to make sure that they sync. Most of the time iTunes is way too busy showing messages about some sync issue nobody cares about to actually do its job.

Still, that leaves the special mention to the usability sadists at Microsoft -- thanks to Windows 8, I really, really don't feel bad telling everybody I know to switch. Because now my choices are: "family/aquaintance X bought a new PC with Windows 8 and can't figure out how to do anything" vs. "family/aquaintance X bought switched to a new Mac and can't figure out how to do anything." At least in the latter case, I can tell them to go to the Apple store.

Oh, this is going to be a good year. I can feel it.

$329... or: the $1 billion question

As everybody on the planet knows, Apple announced the iPad mini this morning. Very little about it was a surprise, of course. Not that it was obvious -- just that pretty much every specification had been leaked by somebody in advance...

What did surprise me (despite the leaks that indicated this would be the number) was the $329 starting price. Going over the expectations for the device, it seemed clear that this was supposed to be a great disruptor for the plethora of 7" tablets currently on the market for a lot less money. What I expected was something more like a round number, something magic like the "under $300" price of $299. So, the fact that they priced it at $329 -- which is consistent with the rest of their line-up says something.

The two factors at play here are, of course, the immediate revenue from the higher price versus the market share gains that a lower price would achieve, especially if the number is psychologically significant. Putting this into numbers reveals why the typically premium price probably wasn't such a surprise: as Tim Cook announced in his presentation, they have sold about 100 million iPads to date (holy crap!), so I would assume that it isn't out of the question that they would sell something like 30+ million of these iPad mini models during the next few years... So, 30,000,000 times $30 is $900,000,000 -- on the order of magnitude of a billion dollars (especially considering this is all back-of-the-envelope arithmetic).

Could there really be a benefit to the company to price this thing more aggressively that would make up for a cool billion dollars in cash, assuming that the iPad mini sells to their projections? Probably not.

OK, I get it now...

Now, that's the right question...

Just last week, I was disagreeing with Michael Mace's post about Apple's culture... But this week he asks the question everybody should be asking about the iOS maps mess: why did Apple trumpet it as a marquee feature when it wasn't finished?

I mean, that is the only real question here... They had to ship now. They must have known it wasn't ready. Why manufacture the embarrasment of touting its awesomeness without at least some warning that data quality it isn't quite there yet? That is a very interesting question.

As for the maps themselves, I have to admit that they don't misbehave too badly for me. The odd quirk, but I'm mostly seeing an immature pseudo-natural language parser: e.g., it isn't that it doesn't know where Odessa, Texas is located -- it simply makes the assumption that when I search for "Odessa", I mean Odessa, Ukraine. That is, it picks the larger, more prominent, result rather than the closest (I'm in Houston, Texas)... Oh, wait, Google's maps do that, too. Let me find another example...

Let's try "Cafe Brussels" (a restaurant here in Houston -- which used to return a random café in Brussels, Belgium in Google's map a few months ago) has one result in Apple's maps (the restaurant) while Google returns 10 pins in the Houston area (and selects some other restaurant as the first result). OK, not a good test -- Yelp integration apparently helps here. Time to try something else...

Well, apparently Houston map data isn't too bad... As long as I give it well-formed addresses. If I omit the city name or try some especially confusing addresses (like half streets: "E 12th 1/2 st") they do sometimes get lost. The 3D cartography is pretty good for downtown Houston, too. Nothing like the debacle in Canada, where small towns are just flat-out missing from maps (anectdotally, it looks to be the case in all provinces, not just Ontario).

Bottled Lightning

Michael Mace tries to frame the success of Apple and its world-changing products ("lightning in a bottle" as he describes them) in terms of how integral Steve Jobs was to their inception. That's probably true, but I think that there is something more to it. I didn't think of a good analogy until this weekend when we saw the movie "Julie & Julia" again: One of the special ingredients to the modern Apple story is its ability to sell something close to the equivalent of fine French cuisine for the price of premium chain restaurant food. Think "Chez Nous" for the price of "The Cheesecake Factory".

That's not so say that French cuisine should be your thing or that there is something wrong with American chain restaurants. That is simply the observation that I and many geeks I know switched to the Mac when it became not just "better" (however you choose to define that) but also cost-competitive with the general PC market. I think that was one of the modern Apple's "lightning in a bottle" moments that we forget: the moment when they got really good at competing...

iMac surgery

I finally broke down and replaced the hard drive in my 2008-vintage 24" iMac. Apart from a sick hard drive (and being slow by today's standards, of course), there was nothing wrong with the machine, so I figured that I'd give iFixit's instructions a whirl. I posted a few pictures on flickr, for the curious.

Overall, I have to admit that it was less difficult than expected -- give or take the challenge of keeping the screen surface dust-free. If anything, it is a reminder that Apple does, in fact, care about repairability of its devices (much like iFixit alludes to in their iPhone 5 teardown). The thing is, they are concerned about repairability in their authorized repair shops. Much like car companies care about repairability (because warranty repairs come out of their corporate pocket) without necessarily making it easy for us to work on our cars in the driveway, Apple does take care to make assemblies easy to get to and replace.

The thing is, the assemblies that get swapped out aren't the commodities that hobbyists want to swap out -- which is what makes it maddening to geeks -- but they are pretty efficient to work on. In the case of my iMac, it meant that the hard drive assembly includes a bunch of hardware to make it easy to clip in and out, which is easy enough to swap over, but newer iMac models use drives that have unusual thermal sensors (which makes user-replacement of the drive completely impractical, because you can't buy them anywhere). It's exactly like cars: apart from a few consumables (batteries, tires, etc.), there is really nothing generic in modern cars and, even when the parts are available, the tooling to do the job is highly specialized. Still, we do manage to get our cars serviced and repaired, the mechanically-inclined amongst us just don't do it ourselves anymore...

I think that's a fair analogy: for the vast majority of car owners, "do it yourself" wasn't on the menu anyway. For those few that could do repairs on their own, things have gotten a lot harder... That's basically where computers are going (and mobile devices already are): the majority of users has long left the ranks of the technically gifted and is now regular people. The repair model is adapting to reflect that.

My iMac is old enough that it's the equivalent of a 1990s car: it's getting more sophisticated, but the consumerization hasn't completely taken over. I'm pretty sure that I won't be able to say that about my next desktop computer. On the other hand, I may not be too worried about it, either.

Update: I have to admit that I am not thrilled with the way the newer 27" iMac makes it harder to service while keeping the hard drive internal -- in a Thunderbolt-enabled era, that is kind of the worst of both worlds: there is still a reason to open the case, but it is hard to do. I do hope that the next generation iMac either makes the hard drive (even if it is a smaller 2.5" drive) accessible from the outside (like memory is) or just go all out and make internal storage flash-only (i.e., more reliable than magnetic hard drives) so that there is no reason to crack the case open.

Hulu Plus: You know who I am...

So, can you please stop showing me ads for crap I will *never* buy?

For what is supposed to be the TV industry's attempt to reinvent themselves for the Internet age, this reeks of old-media thinking. The advertising seems entirely tailored to the kind of show being watched, not who is watching it. I know that the account holder may not be the exact person watching, but it should be a pretty good hint as to what family behavior is and who they are marketing to... That is the big difference between Hulu and Hulu Plus (well, that and $8 a month) -- the customer isn't anonymous any more. Apparently, the fine folks at Hulu didn't get the clue.

Maybe that skeuomorphism isn't so bad...

Now that I've had the opportunity to use Windows 8 and it's modern (f.k.a. "Metro") look, the overwhelming feeling I have is that the vast expanses of flat colors and Segoe text look industrial and... How to put it... Tasteless? It obviously isn't true: a lot of thought went into that look and the reaction to the "pseudo-3D everything" of desktop user interfaces, but I'll have to admit that it doesn't move me at all. The canned color schemes don't help, either.

While some of Apple's more gaudy examples of skeuomorphism in the Calendar, Reminders and other applications (not to mention the OS X fake brushed metal of old) are really over the top, I think that I have a bit more appreciation for why they went there: we don't like looking at expanses of nothing. The fake linen texture in iOS and Mountain Lion is one of the ways they deal with that problem with a bit more subtlety, but I guess that they just couldn't be subtle all the time. I just wish Microsoft didn't choose to be boring all the time.

OK, this is scary...

Today's Dilbert is such a flashback to some of the people I worked for in the mid-nineties, it's scary. Only mildly less scary is the fact that it was the subject of one of the earliest posts on this blog, back in 2004...

This sh*t is hard!

Watching the freak show of the Apple vs. Samsung lawsuit going on right now, I have mixed feelings about a lot of the goings on but one thing is certain: I have no sympathy for the people who don't recognize how much easier it was for Samsung to ape the iPhone after the fact than for Apple to come up with it in the first place. Innovating is hard. Really hard.

Yes, a number of the core technologies existed prior to the iPhone (e.g., Jeff Han's work on multitouch interfaces), but the talent, dedication and perseverence to pull all these things into a cohesive whole with a distinctive look and user experience is insane. It's one of those once-in-a-career kind of things for even the really gifted people that worked on it. In the "real" world (you know, the place you and I work in), it takes years of battles and cat herding by teams of very expensive and talented people just to make a product that doesn't suck. Making something that never existed before, that looks unique, every detail having its place in a cohesive whole is nothing short of unbelievable. Coming along afterwards and saying "make me something like that" is orders of magnitude easier -- pretending that there isn't an element of theft in that is nothing short of willful blindness.

I have no idea what value to realistically attach to that, but it isn't cheap. It basically is the difference between a good industrial organization and a holy-crap! convergence of talent and vision. Just the amortized cost to Apple of building that team of people over what is basically a 5+ year effort has to be eye-watering...

(Mac) App Store confusion

While I am not a Mac developer and I haven't been an independent software developer for many years, I do have to wonder about how people perceive these platform App Stores (starting with iOS, but now on the Mac or eventually Microsoft's me-too store for Windows 8). A case in point would be the overall frustration with the policies Apple's Mac App Store (see Marco Arment's comments for example): I think it's right to be skeptical, but the reasons for the current skepticism seem pretty weird.

Let's start from the beginning: App Stores are ways for the platform vendor (e.g., Apple) to say "here some software that meets minimum quality traits and we're sure won't break your machine" -- with a subtext of promoting quantity over functionality, all other things (like quality) being equal. The latter subtext is important because, unlike Microsoft, Apple (Google) doesn't derive a huge part of its profits from additional software: there is no Office cash cow to protect, so Apple is pretty willing to devalue software if it helps sell hardware (or advertising for Google).

So, considering the "cheap, won't break your computer" basic concept, I think that it is dangerous to jump to the conclusion that this is the one and only distribution method for computer software. On phones and portable devices, this has worked out pretty successfully. On "real" computers, the gap between what we're able to express as "safe" applications and all the things people need to do with their machines is still too wide to see an App Store-only general-purpose operating sytem for a while. Obviously, Apple and friends want to get there. But to do so, they are going to need to evolve and extend the boundaries of this safety blanket. That takes time and a lot of learning on their part.

In the meantime, there are only certain types of software that make sense in the App Store party. What we're seeing right now is people correcting their mistaken enthusiasm for the distribution medium. It isn't universal -- far from it. It's pretty convenient if it works for you, but the fundamental concept of the marketplace isn't one where you can find anything, it is one where you find software that the manufacturer is willing to endorse with seal of safety. Right now, that guarantee is enforced with a bunch of painful and restrictive rules that are a huge step back from what the native operating system allows, but that's the nature of the beast. I expect that some of that will change -- and Apple seem pretty good about "dogfooding" their App Store rules in their own applications -- but slowly.

So, where do I think we should be skeptical and/or disappointed? Given the fairly large body of applications that do meet the rules of the App Store, I think that the terrible discoverability of the stores is shameful. As is the fact that the stores tend to be completely opaque to the developers -- it's really, really hard to build a long-term software business when the one point of contact with customers is so random. Actually, "long-term" is exactly what the App Stores should, but don't, deal with: they are all about the one-time sale but that isn't (at least traditionally) the arrangement between software developers and their users. It's an ongoing relationship where the developer usually continues to enhance the software over time, funded by maintenance fees or discrete version upgrades. Once the App Stores stop being the wild growth market they are today (where nobody cares because there are enough new customers to cover ongoing development), the stores are going to have to address this.

I'm not so much worried that the various App Stores aren't the place where my software belongs today. I'm worried that, hypothetically, when my software belongs there, nobody will find it and I won't be able to keep it a living, improving thing. That is far scarier.