iTouché-ing

I believe it’s been said many times before; while there are many other tech companies out there – Apple is the only one worth complaining about.

If Apple was actually interested in short-term value and a simple, highly-constrained, highly-polished experience, the iPhone wouldn’t do 2/3 of this things it’s purported to (still being vaporware and all) and it’d be 1/2 the price. But wait – OS X has BSD underneath it, responds to AppleScript, Automator, I can create all sorts of custom software on it, and is quickly turning into the choice development platform for developers – because of the integration of elegance and underlying access. Apple can do both – their pedigree is in making it easier for regular people to make things – while encouraging consistency.

“…it’s what user interface guidelines did in the early Mac…making all applications adhere to certain conventions so users would have a predictable method of working applications…” – Steve Borsch

On top of that, the iPhone is being positioned as the replacement for the Treo and the Blackberry (if only in price point). A new closed system will dramatically slow adoption. Adoption by a highly vocal, discriminating, influential, and well off group of people.

Did I mention, the majority of my developer friends have switched to the Mac? They expect to have access to their devices. I know I do. Lots of organizations sell controlled experiences. From Disney to our state penal system. While lock-in may have been a feature 10 years ago (AOL, Prodigy, CompuServe), today it’s a bug. Walled gardens – no matter how pretty – are simply less fulfilling on the second visit.

Oh, and Scott, by the way, all my clients are welcome to post to the Work Better Weblog. And if you want to change the layout, feel free to parse the RSS feed into something that works better for you.

Lastly, where will Apple get their next great interaction idea from – if not their own developer community?

Take 40% Off the Top

“Trees must be cut down, hauled to factories in trucks, and pulped into rolls of paper, which themselves must be transported to other factories, where they are chopped up, covered in ink, folded, stacked, and loaded onto a third set of trucks. These trucks then fan out across the region, dropping bundles at distribution points, to be transported yet again to stores and homes. It’s an enormously expensive process, constituting as much as 40 percent of newspapers’ costs.” – Michael Kinsley

What would your business look like if you cut out 40% of the overhead – while improving your customer relationship?

LATER:
40% – that’s like an entire business itself. Reminds me of the old adage, goes something like: “I know 50% of my income is from my business, I just don’t know which 50%.”

Feeling Temporarily Secure

I’ve been to handful of airports – the underlying architecture of them all is: open, flowing, permanent.

The ironic exception is the airport checkpoints – like pop-up stores in malls. Foldable tables, movable queue markers, equipment on wheels – makes it feel so temporary. Like it just might packed up and gone tomorrow.

“The tables aren’t quite at the right height to smoothly enter the X-ray machines, bins slide off the edges of tables, there’s never enough space or seating for putting shoes back on as you leave the screening area, basic instructions have to be yelled across crowded hallways.” – Matt Blaze

Demanding Markets in Absolutely Everything

“The next logical step, then, would be to make this all personally competitive. The rise of the multi-billion dollar fantasy sports industry — where people bet, or simply compete for bragging rights, by predicting and tracking statistics in everything from baseball and football, to supreme court decisions and Congressional voting — demonstrates how eager people are to compete in their idle time.” – David Hsu

‘Surrender’ Has Such a Negative Connotation

“What is killing newspapers, as I’ve written before, is…their antiquated distribution system…Dropping newspapers on driveways and putting them in corner boxes is cumbersome, compared with internet distribution.” – Shel Israel

Not to mention theft-prone:

“I didn’t want to cancel the paper because that would mean a complete surrender to the Internet and admittance of the fact that a printed newspaper is no longer necessary.” – Dmitry Kiper

Apple iPhone: The Mobile Widget Web Calls

1. It’s not extensible by third parties, only Apple. The means at the moment no RSS readers, no Slingplayers. – Michael Gartenberg

Seems to directly conflict Apple’s own messaging…especially the notion that OS X / Safari widgets can be used on the phone. RSS or otherwise.

“That it’s a cell-phone, so what?” – Rex Hammock

Yep. Which comes first:

  1. iChat calls standard phone numbers and becomes iPhone’s killer app
  2. Skype is “ported” and becomes the iPhone’s killer app

ELSEWHERE
PeterMe asks the same question:

“why use Cingular if you can just Skype?”

“It isn’t OS X proper, as you’d expect. And like an iPod, it won’t be an open system that people can develop for.” – Brian Lam, Gizmodo

Oh – so the iPhone actually won’t be able to compete with Palm’s Treo. That’s unfortunate. But, restricting it’s functionality, it is a really good way to reduce demand of a highly coveted device. Until…like replacing the hard drives in our old Macs, and the batteries in our iPods, the developer community finds a way in…..official or otherwise. Steve-O knows the value of exclusivity and crashing the party is still getting in.

Apple TV is for You and YouTube

Like complaining about the lack of a display on the iPod Shuffle, or the lack of an FM tuner on the iPod, complaining that the first version of Apple TV is only 720p is a non-starter.

HD is not the point. Home movies aren’t yet shot in HD.

Simplifying the experience of getting internet video – youtube, video blog, etc – onto a television is the point. All the current offerings are awful. I’ve talked about this before.

Maybe HD will come later. Doesn’t matter. We need faster bandwidth, bigger hard drives, and better cameras to support HD delivered this way before then. Notice there’s no DVD drive on the Apple TV.

Apple TV does for television what Airport Express did for your home stereo. Extends iTunes. Just as Steve Rubel states:

“..although certainly exciting from a consumer POV, offers very little value for advertisers. The reason is that it’s basically a media extender.”

TiVo faired pretty well on the news, their stock inched up 0.2 points. Same with Palm (up 0.8). Compare that to RIMM – down 11 points). Yahoo has the graph

More later. Maybe.

LATER
In the comments, Michael Markman is right. There’s not specific tying Apple TV to YouTube (a really good thing). Any RSS feed sending audio or video to iTunes can be extended by Apple TV. Heck, drop the low-res Quicktime home movies to your iTunes library and Apple TV will send them to the big-ger screen.

Sure, the more purchases through the iTunes store, the more big media will be available in it. From a marketing perspective Apple wants to exchange our dollars for their DRM. There’s a whole bunch of video I’ve created that I want to send to the TV. Extending iTunes to my TV is the easiest way for me to do that.

Rubel continues:

“Apple TV won’t have the any kind of impact on TV advertising.”

Well, it’ll extend the impact Netflix and DVD players have had on TV advertising. In the words of Douglas Adams – “You’ve got to build bypasses.”

ELSEWHERE

The ability for me to ‘subscribe’ only to specific shows and forgetting about the whole concept of a channel (which is essentially a hang over from broadcast) makes a damn site more sense to me.” – Karl Long

“Note that everything they are talking about is Big Machine Media, which I also have no intention of watching. I’m wanting to watch Strong Bad Emails and Ask a Ninja and Tiki Bar TV on the phone” – Dave Slusher

12 April 2007

“If you’re technically proficient enough to read this blog, AppleTV is not for you” – Dave Winer

30 May 2007

Beginning in mid-June, Apple TV will wirelessly stream videos directly from YouTube and play them on a user’s widescreen TV. Using Apple TV’s elegant interface and simple Apple Remote, viewers can easily browse, find and watch free videos from YouTube in the comfort of their living room.”

Note to Steve Jobs – the invoice for my consulting is in the mail 😉