Sergey Brin: [Smartphones are] emasculating. You’re standing around and just rubbing this featureless piece of glass.
John Gruber: I can see the argument that dicking around with our phones in public is not cool, that we should pay more attention to our companions and surroundings, and less to our computer displays. Strapping a computer display to your face is not the answer.
Lemkin: Yep. File Google Glass away with “Because everything is waterproof, the housewife of the future will clean the living room with a hose.”
Tag: df
What Apple understands and its critics did not (and still do not) is that many people, from all walks of life, simply appreciate nice things. They accuse Apple of pretension and elitism, but it’s they, the critics, who hold that the mass market for phones and tablets is overwhelmingly comprised of tasteless, fickle shoppers who neither discern nor care about product quality. That Apple’s lead in these categories is simply because they were first out of the gate in them, not because their products are so good.
John Gruber writes what must be his most incisive, accurate paragraph in years. And he happens to write a lot of good paragraphs. There’s a lot more than a few thoughts about Apple in here; many, many segments of Our World could take a lot of useful advice by refiguring this conceptual framework into their own purview. Looking at you, Democrats. The great unwashed are a hell of a lot smarter, more engaged, and just plain interested than you ever give them credit for. Start acting like it.
Why You Should Ignore the Verge (in 44 words or less)
Josh Topolsky: I am now responding to Marco Arment, John Gruber, and anyone else who sets up a minimal WordPress blog and thinks that the ability to publish text onto the internet gives them insight into what journalism is or what I do for a living.
Businessweek: John Gruber makes an estimated $500,000 a year from his [minimal WordPress] blog Daring Fireball. [But, let’s face it, how can he possibly know about or even have passing insight into real journalism such as that practiced The Industry Leader (and daily lesson for us all), The Verge.com?]
King of Content
Predictably thoughtful take from John Gruber on the broader tablet strategy that Amazon is taking up in light of the new Kindle/Kindle Fire product line. You should read the whole thing, but a couple of points really stand out. First:
Apple’s primary business is selling devices for a healthy profit, and they back that up with a side business of selling digital content for those devices. Amazon’s primary business is as a retailer, including as a retailer of digital content. They back that up with a side business of low-cost digital devices that are optimized for on-the-fly purchasing of anything and everything Amazon sells.
This is exactly right. I’d extend the idea all the way out to its limit: Amazon should buy Qwikster from Netflix.
While this move would, to Netflix, be akin to selling Babe Ruth to your direct competitor for a few grand and a bag of balls, what other company out there understands shipping better than Amazon, has a built-in pipe for selling overstocked used discs of yesterday’s blockbuster movie, could seamlessly merge the “this isn’t available to stream, shall we ship it to you right now” experience, and, most importantly, has the leverage with the content owners to actually, you know, offer a lot of content from their streaming service? Clearly the answer ain’t Netflix. It’s Amazon, who can go to content-owners and say: “Do you really want Apple to dominate your pipeline to the consumer? We have the customers, data about those customers, and the access to them. Use us a leverage against Apple and we’ll give you a marginally richer cut in exchange.” Even in an era of increasing disintermediation, the Apple model shows quite strongly that if you pile up enough content that people want, it’s ultimately easier to sell from those fewer, larger silos. Nobody wants to search ten sites to figure out which has Transformers 18: This Time It’s Personal available to stream this week only to have said stream expire mid-movie because you had to pause it at an inopportune moment. In that model, T18:TTIP pirated torrents become king. And yet this is fairly precisely the situation we consumers and our content-overlords increasingly find ourselves in. The future is most definitely not 35 separate “Apps for that,” each of which has to be painstakingly consulted on movie night. There’s room for two, maybe three, giant content aggregators. As of today, I’d say one of them is pretty obviously Apple. The other sure seems likely to be Amazon; even more likely once they’ve sold a few million Kindle Fires. Hell, since Netflix likely won’t sell a direct competitor the keys to Quikster, Bezos should just buy both Quikster and Netflix, re-brand the sexily named “Amazon Instant Video” service Netflix and milk the Quikster “physical media” approach for as long as it makes sense to do so (as part of a broader package ultimately tied to Amazon Prime membership…which, of course, is mostly a deal-sweetening mechanism designed to drive unrelated sales for Amazon as a whole). As always: fewer choices for the consumer means more money for the provider; you draw them in with the enticing product or service, then completely empty their pockets on all the other stuff they hadn’t previously even thought of buying. It’s precisely Apple’s strategy, but attacked from the perspective of the content instead of the device.
Interesting point two:
Amazon is a data-driven company. I’ll bet the $40 premium [for a Kindle that never serves you “offers”] is based on how much money they expect to make from the ads they sell and products they promote via the special offers. Last year the special offer Kindle was only $25 less; the data must show that the special offers are worth more than $25 per Kindle to Amazon.
Taken together with the previous point, it’s clear that there’s potentially much, much more value in that premium. With Silk, Amazon will quickly have a huge dataset covering the browsing habits of their users. They already have a huge dataset on the buying habits of those users. In the user’s hand at the moment of the “offer” is a device purpose-built to grease the skids of said content purchase; just as easy to grease the skids for any kind of purchase once you know what the user wants or is looking for outside of the “content” world. And Amazon just so happens to sell that stuff, and will drop it on your doorstep quicker than seems possible with your annual Prime membership…which, oh yeah, you need because of all the content! Worth something to Amazon to be sure, but worth even more to the content owners and other potential advertisers who will presumably pay handsomely to get targeted sales…and Amazon will be able to show them exactly how well the campaign worked.
It’s simply not possible to do ad-word jiggery-pokery when an actual purchase (as opposed to a view) is the outcome metric. So I’d say it’s crystal clear that it’s in Amazon’s interest to gradually raise the heat on “offer-free” Kindles until, at some point Kindle purchases more closely resemble contract and contract-free purchases of mobile phones. That, I suppose, is when the ads start to intrude on the reading. But that’s a whole other post.
If you want to pay the New York Times to read the news using both their iPhone and iPad apps, in theory, you should be their ideal customer — you’re willing to pay, and you’re looking forward, technology-wise. But you’ll save money by getting several pounds of paper that you don’t want delivered to your doorstep every week.
John Gruber, crystallizing the fundamental problem with the New York Times’ paywall scheme. Or, as Jay Rosen might put it: the print guys won.
The paywall was supposed to be all about beginning a gradual transition away from the strictures of the printed Times (and everything that implies for the costs of operating under that overall business model). Instead, it seems to be a continuation of that model at any cost, well after said model has proven to be unworkable. Pining for yesterday won’t bring it back any sooner.
The paywall was supposed to be all about beginning a gradual transition away from the strictures of the printed Times (and everything that implies for the costs of operating under that overall business model). Instead, it seems to be a continuation of that model at any cost, well after said model has proven to be unworkable. Pining for yesterday won’t bring it back any sooner.
Here we have the man who invented the personal computer, then the laptop. He’s now destroying them. That is an amazing life.
Rupert Murdoch on Steve Jobs. I’d quibble with the “invented” being more of a “popularized,” but otherwise spot on.
Equally amazing (to me, anyway) is that the transition from “let’s sell everyone personal computers” to “let’s sell everyone wireless things that people don’t really even realize are computers” took place within the span of one CEO’s lifetime, though not one continuous tenure with Apple (since we’re talking Jobs here).
Color me unimpressed with The Daily, though. Just the sort of crap magazine I avoid in print, much less on the iPad. Reeder is the really disruptive technology if you’re asking me. And I know you are.
Equally amazing (to me, anyway) is that the transition from “let’s sell everyone personal computers” to “let’s sell everyone wireless things that people don’t really even realize are computers” took place within the span of one CEO’s lifetime, though not one continuous tenure with Apple (since we’re talking Jobs here).
Color me unimpressed with The Daily, though. Just the sort of crap magazine I avoid in print, much less on the iPad. Reeder is the really disruptive technology if you’re asking me. And I know you are.
What can we do with the idea of a “book” if we eliminate the limitations of ink and paper, rather than mimic them?
John Gruber, asking a question that seems utterly obvious and yet is seldom if ever confronted. This Push Pop Press he’s talking about sounds like just the thing for a real magazine or deep-content newspaper experience on an iPad or similar device.
Well, except for the “content as app” design. I don’t want an app for each and every book/magazine/paper, and I don’t think anyone else does either. One app to rule them all, please.
Well, except for the “content as app” design. I don’t want an app for each and every book/magazine/paper, and I don’t think anyone else does either. One app to rule them all, please.
John, that is the worst fucking song I ever heard in my life. We open in three weeks’ time, otherwise I’d take that fucking song out of the picture. I’d take it out! Out!
Harry Saltzman, as related by composer John Barry (who died suddenly yesterday). The song in question? A little something known as the James Bond Theme.
Lemkin 