Can a Business Really Do No Evil?
I took a week off last week and a lot happened while I was away (literally) shooting the stars. I want to talk about two of those events today, the Oracle / Java debacle and the Google / Verizon debacle.
First, let's recap. Google and Verizon partnered early last week on a proposal sent to the law makers in the US on their vision of net neutrality ... on mobile devices. As anyone could have predicted, that was not a great way to make friends on the Internet. The proposal itself is interesting, but what makes it really interesting for me is that Google's own philosophy and motto over the years as always been "Do no evil". Not sure many people still agree with this one.
This was followed earlier this week by Oracle's move with regards to Java. When Oracle bought Sun, it acquired amongst other things Java, a piece of technology that's kinda-but-not-100% open source. Actually, a big part of it is, but it ends up the tech is certainly not free of patent issues. In a move best described as a great way to kill off any good will you might have had with the open source community, Oracle decided to go after the money and sued Google for its use of Java in Android.
And in a move that proves that Oracle is not afraid of completely destroying it's open source credibility in just one week, the company announced the end of Open Solaris.
If I was a MySQL developer, I might be nervous right now. Remember when Sun bought MySQL and we were all nervous about what they would do? Well, the shark has been eaten by an even bigger shark and this one's not afraid to shake things up.
All of this and more importantly yet, the reaction to all this online reminded me of something I've been saying for years : a public company is neither your friend nor your enemy. It's a company whose primary goal is to make its investors richer by making the action trade higher. Good / bad products, open source good will, good reputation, etc. are all just by products of this goal. It's true for Oracle and it's true for every other business out there.
I'm a big fan of Apple's products lately, but I'm under no illusion that the goal of Steve Jobs is really to make the company more profitable. Often I don't mind their decisions, but sometime I do (as with the ipad being unable to share the iPhone's data plan).
Being a fan of a company is fine, but we need to keep in mind that these entities are not our friends.
It’s Not About The Rendering Engine Anymore
Today, RIM launched their new 6.0 OS (and the new BlackBerry Torch) and by doing so, added its name to the ever growing list of products using WebKit as the basis for their Web browser. RIM's move isn't really all that interesting: they had no good browser anyway and it's not as if they are first to do this.
The interesting discussion in my opinion is what Microsoft should do. Back in the Netscape / IE war, Microsoft was convinced that Web browsers would ultimately replace desktops apps (they weren't wrong) and they invested a lot of money in creating Internet Explorer. That war is still on, although nowadays the players have changed. With IE, we're now talking about Firefox and Chrome as the main competitors.
But what really changed however, is that the HTML/CSS rendering engine shouldn't matter that much. We went from a 1 browser = 1 engine model to a model where we now have a couple of really good open engines powering many browsers.
Controlling the world's browser market is one thing, but as Google is proving, that doesn't mean you need to have your own engine. Chrome is built on top of Web kit, just like Safari is and countless mobile web browsers are. These products are still competing with each others and are still different from each other yet they are built on the same foundation.
What that means of course, is easier Web development and less browser-specific bugs. This is why I think Microsoft needs to stop developing its own engine and start using either WebKit or Gecko. Both of these are well done, support many web standards and are fairly easy to integrate in a product.
Of course, such a change can't happen overnight and it's a difficult thing for Microsoft to do, but I do believe that in the long term, it'd make the Web a lot better. Trident, Microsoft's rendering engine since IE 4 isn't exactly renowned for its spectacular support for standards. And really, I'd much rather see Microsoft invest 18 months developing Internet Explorer proper rather than waste 80% of that time coding the engine.
The Sad State of The Tech Journalism
I've been insanely busy for the past 2 months (gotta love moving), but I should be back on track for regular posting now. Since my last post the iPhone 4 has been released to the world and has been selling very, very well. 3M units in 22 days is nothing to scoff at.
Of course, the release was covered by just about every tech outlets in excruciating details, but before the iPhone had become old news, these sites got a gift : the AntennaGate. I don't plan on spending too much time on the problem itself, although I have to say that as someone who has an iPhone 4 and who has a friend who has one (in Canada, the phone isn't out yet so it's not common), I have had no problem with the signal. The proximity sensor issue is much more prevalent in my opinion.
That doesn't really interest me though, I don't care about the issue enough to spend a lot of time discussing wether or not there's a problem. As I said, I have no problem and it seems there's a lot of people that are quite happy with their phone. Then again, the signal degradation does exist under certain conditions (if your signal is weak in the first place).
My biggest issue is the coverage of the problem. The problem with tech journalism is that it's all on the Web and everything on the Web these days is driven by the number of clicks you can get. Because of this, Techcrunch, Mashable, Endgaget, Gizmodo, Twit.tv and all the others decided they needed trashy headlines and incendiary content. Thus was born the "AntennaGate". It's not enough anymore to just report the news, you have to drive clicks. You have to create a problem where there is none or make a small issue a big one. After all, who would read a story titled "iPhone 4 antenna can be attenuated under certain condition. Might affect some users.".
And I'm not just saying this because it was bad coverage against Apple. It's true for every tech businesses out there, from Microsoft to Google to Apple to others. I really wish there was a respectable tech news site out there, one that isn't about getting the most clicks. It's sad that we're to the point where tech journalism is at the same level of professionalism than tabloids in Hollywood.
Make it More Expensive : A Valid Strategy
Today, the great team over at 37signals launched their first iPad app : Draft for iPad. It's a nice little app, that allows you to quickly draw on a black background using either white or red pen color. The key feature in this case is the tight integration with BaseCamp. The kicker? The 10$ price point for the App.
That's an interesting move because there are some very good competitors that are much less expensive. Penultimate is my current favorite, but there are others. Twitter users quickly reacted to the price, with many saying it was too expensive. @dhh (37signals co-founder & Ruby on Rails creator) actually answered me with this line:
Thanks, Jonathan. We built Draft for us. Selling it at a higher price means less customers w/ poor expectation fit. That's good.
37signals are not the first to use that strategy. Apple is doing this very same thing in a way. If you want to buy a computer, it's easy to find one cheaper than even the cheapest Mac. On the App Store, the also-excellent OmniGroup also used this strategy with OmniGraffle for iPad (50$). Last I heard, OmniGroup was quite pleased with their results.
So is the strategy good? Well, certainly I suspect 37 Signals will sell a lot less units, despite strong initial sales. Once the buzz goes down, they'll sell a steady stream of units to their customers, but have a smaller set of customers is not always a bad thing. As long as you make money on the App and that your customers are happy, then why not? Less noise, less distraction.
At 0.99$, the app would have attracted a lot of new customers to 37signals, but how many of these would have been good fit with the rest of the services offered there? At 10$, you're attracting professionals, users who need Basecamp as a tool to do their work.
The other point to consider is product valuation. A great local software developer here in Montreal is Druide Informatique. They create the best french-language dictionary and corrector for the Mac & PC. When they launched their app for iPhone a year ago, they decided to price it at 20$. The reason? The "real" (desktop) version is priced at 129$. It's a very good product and it's well worth its price tag so for the iPhone version, they didn't want to devalue the desktop product and price it at 0.99$. The result? The president of the company told me several months ago they were very satisfied with sales.
So the strategy is maybe not for everyone, but it can certainly work. Are you better off with a few sales at an higher price or many sales at a lower price? Let's wish the 37signals team the best of luck. These guys are talented and deserve the success they've been having.
Is Objective-C Really a Bad Thing For Apple?
Whenever flash on iPhone is debated, one of the thing that's mentioned is that Objective-C is really terrible and Flash (or Action Script) is a much easier language to learn and to use. Of course, Action Script is loosely based on Javascript, a scripting language and Objective-C is a layer on top of C, so that does confer Action Script an advantage when it comes to ease of use.
What people seem to be forgetting however is that there's more to life than ease of use. By using Objective-C and the Cocoa Touch APIs, Apple has a set of technology that's not that hard to use (really, try to learn it, you'll see) but also, a set of technology that while open, is also pretty much only used by them. I've said this before in my last post, but forcing people to learn Apple technologies is not a bad thing. It's certainly a bad thing for flash developers looking to make quick bucks by quickly porting existing code, but for the rest of us, it means the developer has to spend some time on the Mac, learning how it works, what the UI paradigms are and why things work the way things work. Ultimately, this leads to a developer that might spend more time thinking about the UI issues and how to really optimize the interface for an iOS device.
Objective-C has been pretty successful for Apple on the desktop for years. When Apple "forced" developers to ditch Carbon APIs (C APIs) for Cocoa APIs a few years ago to benefit from the latest advances in the OS, many balked and predictions of doom were also thrown by many. As far as I can tell, my Mac seems to have survived and so did all of the apps I've used. Certainly it means that companies like Adobe and Microsoft had and have a lot more work ahead of them rewriting large portions of legacy code. You know what though? At the end of the day, we get stuff like Outlook for Mac, a newly written app that takes full advantage of Mac OS X instead of Entourage.
During WWDC, Apple announced that Farmville was coming to iOS. It'll be interesting to see if that version will take advantage of iOS 4's Game Center feature when it launches. By being a native app, it certainly has the potential.
Meanwhile, iOS 4 is coming out today for all users. Grab it, it's a great update.
Apple Versus Flash : Round 1
Something funny happened lately and I'm not talking about me moving and me being away from this blog for several weeks. No, I'm talking about Apple and the fact that everyone and their mother seem to now be against them.
Of course, that's not a bad thing. It usually means you're doing things correctly when your competitors start considering you as a worthy opponent. With the many weeks away from the blog, there's so much to talk about. Let's start with Flash.
When Steve Jobs wrote his open letter explaining why Apple wouldn't support Flash, it started arguments all over the Web between Apple fans and Adobe fans. Clearly, Apple believes Flash is bad for the Web and they have no intention of caving in. Adobe obviously disagrees. Unfortunately for Adobe however, Jobs' points are pretty good. Sure, you can laugh at the irony of Steve Jobs admonishing Adobe for creating a closed platform, but at the end of the day, performance of Flash on Macs (and Linux) has sucked for years and years. Why should we think it'll be different on a mobile device? Ends up it's not. Shocked yet?
That whole thing is just stupid anyway. Flash, clearly, isn't that good. It's not good for the Web, and it certainly isn't a good tool to create mobile apps. Not because Adobe makes it, but because Adobe has never been able to make Flash performance acceptable on OS X. They've had more than 10 years now. If I was Adobe, I'd create great tools to easily create HTML5 and JS/Ajax piece of software. Instead of creating Action Script, output to standard JS.
Google, itself in a fight with Apple was quick to ally itself with Adobe and announce Flash support in Android during Google I/O. If I was Adobe however, I'd be a little worried because during that same conference, Google spent a few minutes on Flash and the rest of the conference talking about how HTML5 was the answer and how their JS engine was faster than the competition. Google is Adobe's friend for now, because it gives them a way to differentiate themselves from Apple, but let's face it, Google isn't a huge fan of Flash. Just look at all the Google products. None of them ever use Flash, except for Youtube. The same Youtube that's slowly moving to HTML5 and H.264.
Some people have construed by Anti-flash tweets as being anti-android but that really isn't true. I'll be blogging about Froyo soon, but I'll say right away that I'm quite impressed and I'm glad to see some great competition for Apple. iPhoneOS needs to innovate. Hopefully that competition will help speed things up.
Flash for me is in the same category as IE6. It used to be great, it used to be the best way to go, but we've moved past and now it's time to put it to rest. Adobe loves to say you don't get the full web without Flash on the iPhone and iPad, but for the most part, all I'm missing these days is flash banners. Somehow, I think I'll live.