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.
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.
If you’ve been creating sites for a while, you know that domain names started become difficult to find years and years ago. I remember brainstorming with a full team of 8 for hours before finally finding a domain name (barely) suitable for our business 10 years ago. Of course, new TLDs have since helped with this a bit, but it’s still an issue since everyone wants a .com. Of course, now you want not only the domain to be available, but also the Twitter and Facebook name and let’s face it, it would be best for the name to fit on an iPhone/Android home screen.
But that’s just the beginning.
With everyone and their mother now online, a new fight has begun : the fight for your digital identity. Businesses are now fighting to be the one representing you online. A year ago, when Facebook opened up custom URLs for profiles, their goal was obvious. What they wanted, and what every businesses like Facebook wants is to be your identity. If you have www.facebook.com/yourname, it might just that this is the URL you’ll give to people instead of your own domain name (if you even own one). This is huge for these sites.
Twitter has done the same since the beginning and there too registering your name is important. Google is now trying to do the same with Google Profile. Once you have such an identity, you can then increasingly use them to login on other sites with things like Twitter’s @anywhere, Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. In a way, these services are achieving what OpenID was supposed to do years ago. OpenID’s problem though, was that the name isn’t known at all. What’s an OpenID? Sure you can use your Gmail account as an OpenID, but who knows this? Because of this, it never caught on.
New social networking services come and go, but if you’re not registering your name on each of them, you’re potentially making a mistake. We live in a world where your online identity is vital. Who wants to be John4576? Register on each of them as early as possible. Some will die quickly, some will never become important, but when one of them becomes the next Twitter or the next Facebook, you’ll be good to go.
Oh, and if you’re having kids, I’m honestly sorry for you. If your parents thought finding a name was difficult before, you have quite the task ahead of you. If you name your son John Smith, wish him luck in the future. He’s going to need it. Googling that name won’t be easy.
Anytime there’s a discussion these days about the iPhone and its competitors, Flash is usually mentioned early on in the discussion along with Multitasking. Today I want to address Flash because it’s something I strongly believe we need to kill. The topic came to me last week when the news came out that Adobe was blocking the adoption of HTML5. We still don’t have all the details there, but it did remind me of my hatred for Flash in general.
Flash is a weird product. On the one hand, it did things very well. When Macromedia (now Adobe) introduced it in 1996, they managed to make it so ubiquitous that it now has 98%+ install base. That’s quite the achievement.
On the other hand, Flash is terrible and that’s something most people agree with except perhaps for Flash designers. It’s being used today mainly for 3 things : video streaming/playback, entire or parts of web sites and banner ads.
It’s too bad Web standards are so slow to be adopted because for video streaming, there’s already a much better solution than Flash. Youtube, UStream and many others are (slowly) moving to it as more and more browsers are supporting it. Of course, as always, Internet Explorer will be the one slowing us down for this. For Web sites, the “new” technologies like the latest revisions of Javascript and DOM scripting can absolutely compete with Flash.
There are 3 major problems with Flash. Let’s review:
First, the flash player is very poorly implemented on OS X and Linux. Performance is terrible and it sucks battery life out of your laptop in record time since it pegs the CPU to 100% in seconds. That makes it inappropriate for things like cellphones in my opinion. If you visit a site with banner ads and a few flash movies, does this means you will lose 20-30% of your battery life in minutes?
As a second issue, I would point out that the flash authoring app is way too pricy. In a world where everything gets pirated, it may not seem like a big deal, but Flash, unlike Visual Studio from Microsoft and XCode from Apple has no free versions for people at home to play with. Coupled with Adobe’s usual upgrade routine every 18 months, it make Flash to be extremely expensive.
The third problem is that Flash is controlled by one company. That company decides if the Mac OS X version will be performing well. That company alone decides when a new version is released.
Add to these 3 problems the fact that many Flash websites are terribly designed and would be hard to see on a smaller screen and that these sites are usually badly (if at all) indexed in search engines and you start to understand why Apple is refusing to include it on the iPhone.
Because of all this, I’m actually happy Apple is doing this. It has forced some sites to reconsider the use of Flash and I hope it’s a trend that will continue.
Hopefully more companies will be bullish like Apple and take a stand.
It’s fascinating to look at the multitude similarities and differences between Apple and Microsoft or even Google. One of the key differentiator is that Apple never releases only a software, they always pair it up with an hardware release whereas Microsoft rarely does. The reason is obvious, Microsoft chooses to work with 3rd party to create an “open” ecosystem whereas Apple does it all alone.
While there’s no denying Microsoft’s successes in the past (and even present) with the PC, embedded and portable devices are another world completely. Take a look at the iPod Touch, the iPhone or the iPad. Microsoft had a tablet PC all the way back in 2001 but the thing never caught on. It was an OK piece of software (Windows & Office, neither quite well adapted) tied to a series of OK devices by 3rd parties. Where Apple succeeds is by not only creating a great piece of software (the iPhone OS) but by also coupling it with a great piece of hardware of its own. What you get is the optimal use of that hardware and an attention to detail you don’t get when you have several 3rd parties working together to create a device.
A lot of people online clamor for a more open device from Apple or for Apple to license Mac OS X to PC manufacturers. To ask for that is to not understand what makes Apple products so compelling. You need that tight relationship with your hardware for the software to make any sense and vice-versa. An open-specced iPhone means multiple devices, some with a big screen, some with a small screen. Some with keyboards, some without. What you get, is the Android situation. A great OS tied to a potentially great App store crippled by the fact that 3rd parties are creating the phones and as such, there are tens of different configurations already and the App store is fragmented beyond belief because no small developer can support every phone. Let’s face it, none of us have 10 phones to test on.
This is why Google released the Nexus One. This is why Apple is dominating the App store business. And this is why the iPad will succeed to some extent. On day one, there will be more than 150 000 apps available for it. On day one, developers will make money on it. That’s unfortunately not the case with the myriads of other tablets that will be hitting the market in 2010.
Speaking of the iPad. I’ll have a full post on it early this week.
For several years now, we’ve seen many traditional media outlet either close or be very close to closing. From newspapers to trade magazines to even television stations, it’s obvious that the Internet and technology in general have been changing the way media works. That’s nothing new and it’s not news either.
When talking about this, one thing you often hear is that as cool and fun the Internet is, we need the traditional media because we need the journalistic integrity and ethics we associate with them. The problem with a statement like this is that it confuses the media outlets and the journalists themselves. Why care about those old media outlets? They’re old, they’re using an outdated way of bringing us the news and they’re way to costly to operate.We *do* need the journalists themselves however. People who, unlike bloggers and tweeters, will go the extra mile and research the story and hopefully present it in a neutral way. There’s one example of a local daily newspaper here in Montreal that I want to use as an example.
Because of a strike/Lock-Out, the journalists of the “Journal de Montréal” have been doing their own thing on a Web Site they started themselves. The result ? The same quality of journalism by the same people. I don’t know if they are making a lot of money with it, but even though it’s basically a “while we’re not at work” operation, they have done a fairly good job of getting their brand out there and by the look of it, they seem to be getting good numbers.
In a world where newspapers are closing left and right, it’s great to see a good journalists band together and make something happen. I hope they do get good numbers and simply leave the newspaper altogether. They’re using Twitter and their site to promote themselves and while they certainly could do better with regards to new media, they’ve been doing a lot better than their old newspaper is.
One thing to keep in mind is that what really matters is the content, not the container. Saving the containers (the newspapers) is not what we need. The content (and of course, the content producers) should be our focus. With Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Vimeo, UStream and Qik, we have more than enough container to accommodate everyone.
Ever since the beginning of the personal computing era, technology has been said to enhance our lives and ever since someone said that, we’ve been doubting that this is really a productivity boost. One area that’s interesting to look at is the effect of technology on businesses and business models. Take the gaming industry for example.
20 years ago, a team of 1 programmer could create an entire game in 2-3 months. He would write the text himself, do the graphics and code the engine. The money required to create a game was minimal and so were the risks. As time went on, teams grew first to a few more people (2-5) and then more (10-20) and again and again. As it is now, graphical technology is so powerful that it takes an army of artists , programmer, writers, Q&A and managers to create a “triple-a” game. The result is that a major game will now cost upwards of 15-20M$ to create and that 1M copies sold is now a bad result. You may well lose money on a project that has sold 1M copies. To cope with the increased price to create a game, the retail price of games have gone up.
The software industry is lucky enough that so far, we’ve been exempt from the technology race. It has actually had the opposite effect: as new processors and more memory become available, we get to be more and more lazy about the way we create our application. Gone are the days where we had to carefully plan every byte, we now have garbage collection and scripting languages to help us out.
What’s true for the gaming industry is also partly true for the movie industry. When special effects, green screens and virtual actors became the norm, the price to create a movie went up. So did the ticket prices at the local theater.
The real question then becomes when do we stop. 20M$ to create a game is a big number, but as we add more resolution and as 3D displays become standard, where do we stop? The race to create the next big “hit” means that every year the price to create 1h of entertainment goes up but as we’ve seen, there’s a limit as to how much people are willing to pay for said entertainment.
Over the last few years we’ve seen new platforms come out that has rekindled the market for smaller games. Digital games download on consoles and portable gadgets like the iPhone have enabled programmers to go back to more manageable budgets and mitigate the risks. Unfortunately, as these gadgets become more and more powerful, the budgets will increase.
So when does it stop?
