By John Gruber

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Galaxy Note 5 Design Flaw: A Backwards S-Pen Can Permanently Damage the Device ★

The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war.

iSight vs. FaceTime Cameras ★

Regarding my confusion over the weekend over which camera, front or rear, is the “iSight” camera on an iPhone 6, Wikipedia explains:

Apple introduced iSight at the 2003 Worldwide Developers Conference, intended to be used with iChat AV, Apple’s video-conferencing client. iMovie (version 4 and later) could also be used to capture video from the device. In April 2005, Apple released a firmware update for the iSight to improve audio performance. As of December 16, 2006, the external iSight was no longer for sale in the Apple online store or in retail locations.

Meanwhile, Apple began using the term to refer to the camera built into Apple’s iMac, MacBook, MacBook Air, and MacBook Pro computers, and Cinema Display. In November 2010, Apple began calling them “FaceTime cameras”. However, the term was not retired, as the third-generation iPad, the fifth-generation iPod Touch, the iPhone 5S, the iPhone 5C, iPhone 5, the iPhone 4S, and the iPhone 4 all incorporate an “iSight” rear camera in addition to a front-facing “FaceTime” or “FaceTime HD” camera.

So “iSight” used to be Apple’s name for front-facing video chat cameras. Then they started calling the front-facing cameras “FaceTime”. Then they brought back the “iSight” name for rear-facing cameras.

Speaking of ‘Glory Days’ ★

Speaking of “Glory Days”, here’s my favorite live performance of the song, from the 1993 series finale of Late Night With David Letterman. Springsteen’s appearance was a true surprise, and served as a perfect ending.

Time Slips Away, and Leaves You With Nothing, Mister ★

Microsoft, commemorating the 20th anniversary of the release of Windows 95:

On Aug. 24, 1995, Windows 95 arrived. And if you were around then, you may remember the song that accompanied the commercial introducing it: “Start Me Up” by the Rolling Stones.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of this release, download the classic song for free until 11:59 p.m. PST from the Windows Store.

I humbly suggest a more apt song to mark the occasion.

Pac-Man 256 ★

Jason Kottke:

From the developer of Crossy Road (aka Infinite Frogger) comes Pac-Man 256, a Pac-Man game with an infinite board that gets eaten from below by the kill screen glitch from the 256th level of the original game. I love riffs on old school video games like this, and the infinite board is a particularly clever one.

Curse you, Kottke. Curse you. I play very few games, but Pac-Man 256 gives me joy.

(Unlike Kottke, I think the option to buy unlimited “credits” with a one-time $7.99 in-app purchase is a fair deal. Think of it as an $8 game that you can optionally play for free if you’re willing to watch ads. That’s a good price for a great game.)

Real-World Results of iOS 9 Safari Content Blocking ★

Owen Williams, writing for The Next Web:

The effect of using a content blocker on iOS is, to be honest, something publishers should be deeply afraid of. I don’t really care about advertising actually appearing on sites, I just care about how fast the site itself loads over a constrained connection.

Bloomberg and iMore are some of the worst offenders — both sites have almost finished loading entirely with Crystal enabled, before the page with advertising even shows on the screen.

Like I wrote last month, a reckoning is coming. iOS 9 Safari content blockers will dramatically speed up web page loading times, and they will remove unwanted cruft junking up the page. Everyone who finds out about them will install and use one.

Alan Adler, Inventor of the AeroPress Coffee Maker and Aerobie Flying Disc ★

Great short film profile of inventor Alan Adler by David Friedman.

Tim Cook to CNBC’s Jim Cramer: Still Bullish on China ★

Tim Cook, in a statement given to CNBC:

As you know, we don’t give mid-quarter updates and we rarely comment on moves in Apple stock. But I know your question is on the minds of many investors.”

A large part of the current market sell-off is driven by fears about China’s economy, and a significant factor in Apple’s valuation is the company’s extraordinary growth in China. So this is a rare case where Apple’s recent stock price drop is arguably rational: investors see problems in China’s economy, and it is a fact that China is Apple’s second-most important market. And in the long-term, it’s quite possible — inevitable, perhaps — that China will one day be Apple’s most important market.

I get updates on our performance in China every day, including this morning, and I can tell you that we have continued to experience strong growth for our business in China through July and August. Growth in iPhone activations has actually accelerated over the past few weeks, and we have had the best performance of the year for the App Store in China during the last 2 weeks.

Obviously I can’t predict the future, but our performance so far this quarter is reassuring. Additionally, I continue to believe that China represents an unprecedented opportunity over the long term as LTE penetration is very low and most importantly the growth of the middle class over the next several years will be huge.

Translation: Apple is still doing great in China, right now, but the real prize remains the long-term opportunities.

The trading day isn’t over, but as I type this, Cook’s email seems to have resonated.

Advice After Stock Market Drop: Take Some Deep Breaths, and Don’t Do a Thing ★

NYT investing columnist Ron Lieber:

Nobody knows for sure whether we’re in for a decline in the stock market of 25 percent or more. But if such a decline does happen and you are a regular investor, you’ll be buying more when prices are lower.

Which brings us to point No. 4: Long-term investors have time to recover. I know too many 70-year-olds who sold all of their stocks in 2009 and are healthy enough to live to 100. They’d be going on a lot more vacations now and be worrying less about long-term care if they had held firm.

Buy low, sell high.

Saturday, 22 August 2015

Mapbox Mobile ★

My thanks to Mapbox for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Mapbox Mobile for iOS, their newest open source SDK for adding maps and location to any app. Mapbox comes with beautiful, pixel-perfect vector maps in a variety of styles: detailed streets for navigating cities, terrain for adventuring, and satellite imagery for seeing the world up close.

Mapbox’s analytics dashboard provides a continuously updated view of the map usage in your app, from places where your app is popular to average daily users. Mapbox’s Cocoa API works just like Apple’s MapKit — just swap out MKMapView for MGLMapView. Their “First Steps With the Mapbox iOS SDK” guide shows just how easy it is to switch. Start developing with Mapbox Mobile for free today.

iSight Camera Replacement Program for iPhone 6 Plus ★

Apple:

Apple has determined that, in a small percentage of iPhone 6 Plus devices, the iSight camera has a component that may fail causing your photos to look blurry. The affected units fall into a limited serial number range and were sold primarily between September 2014 and January 2015.

I wonder how many people know which camera, front or rear, the “iSight” camera is? Apple clarifies in the third paragraph, but I guessed wrong.

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Friday, 21 August 2015

Headline of the Day: MarketWatch: ‘Don’t Expect iPhone 6S to Save Apple’ ★

Nothing can save Apple at this point. Time to pack it in.

Research on the Predictability of Android Lock Patterns ★

Dan Goodin, writing for Ars Technica:

Marte Løge, a 2015 graduate of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, recently collected and analyzed almost 4,000 ALPs as part of her master’s thesis. She found that a large percentage of them — 44 percent — started in the top left-most node of the screen. A full 77 percent of them started in one of the four corners. The average number of nodes was about five, meaning there were fewer than 9,000 possible pattern combinations. A significant percentage of patterns had just four nodes, shrinking the pool of available combinations to 1,624. More often than not, patterns moved from left to right and top to bottom, another factor that makes guessing easier. […]

Data breaches over the years have repeatedly shown some of the most common passwords are “1234567”, “password”, and “letmein”. Løge said many ALPs suffer a similar form of weakness. More than 10 percent of the ones she collected were fashioned after an alphabetic letter, which often corresponded to the first initial of the subject or of a spouse, child, or other person close to the subject. The discovery is significant, because it means attackers may have a one-in-ten chance of guessing an ALP with no more than about 100 guesses. The number of guesses could be reduced further if the attacker knows the names of the target or of people close to the target.

Interesting research. It’s human psychology — our natural tendency toward laziness — that makes something like Touch ID so much more secure than a passcode in actual practice.

When Will New iPads Launch? ★

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors:

This morning, analytics company AppSee found an “iPad6,8” with a resolution of 2,732 × 2,048 in its logs. We asked AppSee to check what version of iOS the iPad had installed on it, and as it turns out, it’s running iOS 9.1, suggesting Apple’s work on iOS 9.1 coincides with the development of the iPad Pro.

Rumors this morning have also suggested the iPad Pro will be entering mass production in September or October, pointing towards a late October or November launch date. It’s possible Apple plans to stick to the same October iPad unveiling timeline it’s used for the past several years, introducing the iPad Pro in mid-October and shipping it at the end of the month.

More than “possible”, I’d say it’s probable that Apple will introduce new iPads at a second event in October.

First, Apple is a company of patterns. Sometimes they change those patterns, and sometimes (but rarely) they make exceptions to those patterns, but all things being equal, they stick to them. And for the past three years, Apple has held two product introduction events each fall: an iPhone event in September, and an iPad event in October.

It’s certainly possible that Apple could introduce new iPads alongside new iPhones in a single event, but that seems unlikely. My guess is that the September event will be: new iPhones, iOS 9, Watch OS 2.0, and the new Apple TV. Maybe throw in some new bands for the watch, in time for the holidays? That’s a lot to cover in one event, especially if the new Apple TV platform is as ambitious as rumored, with a new UI, new input device(s), and an App Store.

If a brand-new 12.9-inch “iPad Pro” is indeed imminent, there is no way Apple would rush through the introduction in a brief segment in an already crowded September event. They’d hold it for October, just like they did in 2012, 2013, and 2014, and use the second event as an opportunity to show off the release version of OS X El Capitan (10.11).

Research Firm Claims Apple TV Has Fallen to Fourth Place in U.S. Sales ★

Parks Associates:

A new Parks Associates report on streaming media devices reports four brands — Amazon, Apple, Google, and Roku — accounted for 86% of all units sold to U.S. broadband households in 2014. […]

“Roku continues to lead streaming media device sales in the U.S. with 34% of units sold in 2014. Google is second with 23%, and new entrant Amazon overtook Apple for third place,” said Barbara Kraus, Director of Research, Parks Associates.

I’m curious how they assembled these numbers, given that Apple doesn’t reveal sales numbers for Apple TV, and Amazon doesn’t reveal sales numbers for any of its products. (I presume they conduct a survey, which, like political polling, can be pretty accurate.) But there’s a truthy ring to the basic gist of their story: Apple TV is slipping.

The stakes are very high for Apple with next month’s new Apple TV. In some ways, I’d argue they’re under more pressure than they were for Apple Watch. Apple Watch’s biggest competition is the idea of wearing a watch at all. It doesn’t really compete against other smart watches. If you own an iPhone and want a connected digital watch, Apple Watch is it. If you don’t own an iPhone, you can’t use an Apple Watch.

With TV it’s different. There are serious competitors already ahead of Apple in market share, and their products are generally well reviewed. There are some tie-ins between iPhone and Apple TV — we all presume Apple Music, for example, will be available on the new system. But it’s not like the watch, where they’re tied together. iPhone owners can (and do) easily use Roku or Chromecast or Amazon Fire TV. Apple TV has to win on merit.

Thursday, 20 August 2015

Gawker Is Really Great ★

Julia Greenberg, writing for Wired:

Gawker wants you to know it’s great — like really great.

So great, in fact, that acting executive editor John Cook publicly shared a memo he sent to staff this morning (and that Gawker’s PR sent to us) touting the company’s great reporting.

Someone’s feeling insecure.

Wednesday, 19 August 2015

Game Developers Wring Their Hands Regarding the Long Slow Death of Adobe Flash ★

Patrick Klepek, writing for Kotaku last month:

Basically, people want to kill Flash on the web. Before he died, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously wrote an open letter to Adobe about why the iPhone wouldn’t support Flash. He spent hundreds of words explaining his reasoning, but here’s the summary: Flash totally sucks.

“Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. We have been working with Adobe to fix these problems, but they have persisted for several years now. We don’t want to reduce the reliability and security of our iPhones, iPods and iPads by adding Flash.

Jobs was mostly right. But while Flash might suck, that doesn’t mean it’s not vital or important.

Jobs wasn’t “mostly” right. He was totally and completely right about Flash.

“Steve Jobs and his ‘reality distortion field’ was probably the worst thing to happen to Flash,” said Newgrounds co-founder Tom Fulp. “There were valid concerns about the security of Flash but the reality was that Steve had an ax to grind with Adobe ever since they didn’t have his back when he returned as the head of Apple. […] But he was a dick, so that’s how it goes.”

This is just delusional. People who see themselves as being tied to Flash — either because they’re Flash developers or because they run websites that heavily rely upon it — are kidding themselves if they think Flash’s demise is the result of some sort of personal, petty vendetta on the part of Steve Jobs.

Flash’s decline was mostly certainly precipitated by iOS’s extraordinary popularity and Apple’s steadfast refusal to support it, but Apple’s opposition to Flash was first and foremost on technical grounds — terrible security, terrible performance.

How Is the Apple Watch Doing? ★

Ben Evans:

But luxuries are good. If we only bought things that we need, and that have clear use cases, then we’d all wear nothing but overalls and have a single bare lightbulb in each room of our homes.

This is also the source of the confusion, I think. Reading the Watch’s launch reviews, I sometimes got the sense that the tech press was writing about it as though the luxury goods industry didn’t exist and that the luxury press was writing as though technology didn’t exist: no-one spends money on things because they’re just nice and no-one buys things that don’t last forever. The gold version brought this out best - a tech product that’s $10,000 but has the same spec as the $350 one - heresy! And a gold watch that probably doesn’t last a lifetime - again, heresy! But all rules can be broken with the right product - that’s how progress happens. Meanwhile, the irony is that it’s not actually the gold that’s the luxury but the software - that tap on the wrist telling you to turn left. In a sense, the gold case is an accessory to the software in the same way that the strap is an accessory to the watch.

Perfectly said.

Ashley Madison Account Data Released by Hackers ★

Brian Krebs:

Many news sites and blogs are reporting that the data stolen last month from 37 million users of AshleyMadison.com — a site that facilitates cheating and extramarital affairs — has finally been posted online for the world to see. In the past 48 hours, several huge dumps of data claiming to be the actual AshleyMadison database have turned up online. […]

I’ve now spoken with three vouched sources who all have reported finding their information and last four digits of their credit card numbers in the leaked database.

John Herrman, writing for The Awl:

We associate the cost of hacks mostly with identity theft and financial loss, from which most victims are pretty well insulated. Target assessed the cost of that hack at $148 million; outside financial institutions added another $200 million to that figure. You may know someone affected by that hack, but the resulting damages were likely mostly absorbed by their bank or credit card company. It was unsettling, yes, but it wasn’t widely ruinous.

This, on the other hand, is basically unprecedented? Most leaks of this size don’t implicate people in anything aside from patronizing major companies. This is new territory in terms of personal cost. The Ashley Madison hack is in some ways the first large scale real hack, in the popular, your-secrets-are-now-public sense of the word. It is plausible — likely? — that you will know someone in or affected by this dump.

This feels like the plot from a movie — it’s hard to imagine a large scale hack that would create more schadenfreude than this.

Tuesday, 18 August 2015

Google’s Modular Project Ara Phone Delayed ★

These phones are going to look so great while you’re wearing your Google Glasses.

Monday, 17 August 2015

Google, HTC Vets Prep ‘Friggin’ Awesome’ Smartphone for September 1 Launch ★

Roger Cheng, reporting for CNet:

Nextbit, which began life as a secretive software startup focused on a cloud-based tool that allowed you to move files and settings between Android devices, has shifted gears into hardware and intends to launch its own smartphone. The company, which boasts Google Ventures as a backer, Android veterans Tom Moss and Mike Chan and former HTC design chief Scott Croyle, plans to unveil its smartphone on September 1, Moss said in an interview.

“It’s going to be friggin’ awesome,” said Moss, the chief executive of Nextbit.

Good luck with that.

I toss that line out sarcastically every few weeks, but this time I mean it both ways. I really do hope they shake up the phone market and succeed. But I think their chances are between slim and none.

Sunday, 16 August 2015

‘Star Wars’ Themed Lands Coming to Disneyland, Disney World Parks ★

Big Toy Story addition at Hollywood Studios in Orlando, too.

Friday, 14 August 2015

Comcast Launching YouTube Competitor Named Watchable ★

“Hot damn, let’s do a shittier version of it and put it in our terrible set top boxes.”

Bold Poker ★

I love all my sponsors, but this week’s DF RSS feed sponsor is really cool. Bold Poker isn’t online poker, or a poker game you play solo — it’s a way to play real Hold’em poker with your friends using your devices instead of an actual deck of cards. An iPad serves as the board. Each player holds their own hand on their iPhone or Android device. Host or join a table with a single tap. It could not be simpler or easier.

You save time on shuffling and thus play more hands. It’s like having a personal dealer right at the table. Bold Poker is my favorite type of app: a simple, original, useful idea, implemented with exquisite taste and attention to detail. The artwork and animation are drop-dead gorgeous. They even pay attention to the math behind the shuffling algorithm.

The latest version even includes VoiceOver support:

Starting today, VoiceOver users can connect their headphones at the table and have their cards read out to them. There will still be rough edges as we weren’t always sure how verbose we want VoiceOver to be but we consider this to be a solid start of a larger effort in being more inclusive. We would love to hear your feedback (especially if you’re visually impaired).

That is just so great. If you play poker and haven’t tried Bold Poker yet, do yourself and your friends a favor and check it out.

The Guardian: ‘Documents Confirm Apple Is Building Self-Driving Car’ ★

Mark Harris, writing for The Guardian:

Apple is building a self-driving car in Silicon Valley, and is scouting for secure locations in the Bay Area to test it, the Guardian has learned. Documents obtained by the Guardian show the oft-rumoured Apple car project appears to be further along than many suspected.

It sure looks like Apple is getting ready to test drive a car, but I didn’t see anything in this report that justifies the assumption that it’s a self-driving car. Did I miss something?

Finding iPad’s Future ★

Neil Cybart, writing at Above Avalon:

The tablet market is in complete disarray. Only five short years ago, the iPad helped jumpstart the category, ushering in multi-touch computing and the modern-day app revolution to large-screen devices. Today, there has never been a time when the tablet market faces so much unknown.

A quick look at iPad and tablet shipment data would show that things have gotten bad in recent quarters. However, in reality, things are much worse than quarterly shipment data would suggest. The seasonality found in the tablet segment makes it difficult to see these long-term problems. A much better way at understanding what has been taking place is to look at the year-over-year change in shipments on a trailing 12-month (TTM) basis, highlighted in Exhibit 1. This smoothing effect highlights that the iPad and tablet have been on the decline for years and things continue to worsen with the overall tablet market hitting negative territory for the first time. All momentum has been lost.

Periscope, by the Numbers ★

Periscope, on why their primary metric for growth is “time watched”, not daily or monthly “active users”:

Optimizing for DAU/MAU doesn’t properly motivate our team to create a product that people love. Here’s why: if we were motivated to grow DAU, we’d be incentivized to invest in a host of conventional growth hacks, viral mechanics, and marketing to drive up downloads. This direction doesn’t necessarily lead to a better product, or lead to success for Periscopers. We hold ourselves accountable to Time Watched as an organizational measure because it reflects the kernel of our product, and our core values.

See also: Ev Williams on monthly active users back in April.

Thursday, 13 August 2015

Apple’s 2015 Diversity Report ★

Tim Cook:

Some people will read this page and see our progress. Others will recognize how much farther we have to go. We see both.

2007 Called… ★

Dan Seifert, writing for The Verge:

It’s definitely a novel and different idea, unlike anything I’ve seen before. Unfortunately, in the few minutes I spent demoing the keyboard, I didn’t find it particularly easy to type on. The keys are not very well separated, and they kind of all blend together under my thumbs (the skeptic in me thinks that it was specifically designed to avoid looking like a BlackBerry keyboard and the inevitable lawsuits that would come with that), and I missed the conveniences of a virtual keyboard like tracing.

If it doesn’t feel like a BlackBerry keyboard, who is supposed to buy this?

Wednesday, 12 August 2015

Philadelphia Asks Comcast Why It’s Not Treating Its Hometown as Well as Other Cities ★

Chris Morran, writing for The Consumerist:

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Philly City Council has drafted a pair of letters to Comcast addressing the shortcomings of service in the city and what the company plans to do if it wants to keep operating here.

In April, the city released the results of a long-delayed customer service survey undertaken as part of the franchise-renewal process. For the most part, the results were not flattering for Comcast.

Not only did customers complaint about bad service, long wait times, and questionable billing practices, but the report found that Philadelphians were paying more for their service than customers in other markets.

My internet service was out all afternoon today. Comcastic.

Apple Pay, Google Wallet Now Accepted at Rite Aid ★

Speaking of CurrentC, one of their members has changed course:

Apple Pay and Google Wallet are once again welcome at Rite Aid stores.

The pharmacy chain announced on Tuesday that all of its almost 4,600 stores in the US will start accepting mobile payments as of August 15, including Apple Pay and Google Wallet. Further, the company will also accept Google’s upcoming Android Pay. Rite Aid added that its stores will also support tap and pay credit and debit cards.

I saw a bunch of headlines today describing CurrentC as a rival to Apple Pay, but that’s not right. Apple Pay isn’t exclusive — part of its appeal to retailers is that it works with the same NFC terminals that work with Google Wallet and whatever else. Retailers that work with Apple Pay aren’t locking out other platforms.

CurrentC May Not Launch Until Next Year ★

Jason Del Rey, reporting for Recode:

CurrentC, the payments app being created by a consortium of big retailers known as MCX, may not launch widely this year as originally planned, MCX CEO Brian Mooney told Re/code in an interview on Tuesday. The company will begin a public pilot of its app in Columbus, Ohio, in a few weeks and will not rush a wider rollout if the product is not ready, he said.

“This is a long game,” Mooney said. “Certainly going faster is always better — that’s not necessarily a debatable point. But we’re going to do it right.”

Where by “we’re going to do it right”, he means “we are doing it all wrong”.

Bubble Cloud Widget Plus ★

Jen Karner, writing for Android Central:

Convenience is the name of the game when it comes to smartwatches, but at times getting to the app you need quickly can be a hassle in Android Wear. Bubble Cloud Widgets Plus Wear is a launcher that brings you gorgeous icons for all of your apps within swiping range. You’ve also got tons of options, and choices to personalize how everything looks and behaves.

If you haven’t seen it yet, check it out below.

I feel like I have seen this before. Can’t quite put my finger on it.

Tuesday, 11 August 2015

Conglomeration ★

Ben Thompson:

That, though, begs a bigger question: why should all of these disparate ventures be a part of the same company at all? While conglomerates were in vogue in the late 60s and early 70s, over the last thirty years the accepted wisdom has been it is better for companies to specialize and for investors to diversify on their own, a viewpoint I agree with: one need only look at Microsoft’s litany of failed acquisitions to appreciate how wasteful many companies can be, and how justified investors usually are in demanding a return of their money. What right does Alphabet have to buck this trend?

That is actually an easy one to answer: Page and Brin can do whatever they want because of Google’s dual-class structure.

On Alphabet’s Simple Logo ★

Liz Stinson and Margaret Rhodes, writing for Wired:

Whereas Google’s goofy logo reflected a not-quite-mature web, Alphabet’s rational, bright red wordmark signals a growing-up phase. If Google’s logo reflects a campus with multi-story slides and themed conference rooms, Alphabet’s says, “I have a lobby full of Knoll furniture.”

It’s a good, simple mark.

The Ethics of Modern Web Ad-Blocking ★

Marco Arment:

All of that tracking and data collection is done without your knowledge, and — critically — without your consent. Because of how the web and web browsers work, the involuntary data collection starts if you simply follow a link. There’s no opportunity for disclosure, negotiation, or reconsideration. By following any link, you unwittingly opt into whatever the target site, and any number of embedded scripts from other sites and tracking networks, wants to collect, track, analyze, and sell about you.

That’s why the implied-contract theory is invalid: people aren’t agreeing to write a blank check and give up reasonable expectations of privacy by clicking a link. They can’t even know what the cost of visiting a page will be until they’ve already visited it and paid the price.

And it’s all getting so much worse, so quickly.

It’s not just about privacy. There are other costs: network bandwidth (which for many of us is metered on cellular), page load times, and increased CPU usage, are real costs — paid entirely by the visitors to websites.

I don’t want to block “ads”. I want to block garbage JavaScript. I’ve been using Ghostery on my Macs for a few months now, and the results are impressive. I expect the results to be even more significant on the phone with content blockers in iOS 9.

The Big AlphaBet ★

Om Malik:

The new company is called Alphabet. We should think of its as the Berkshire Hathaway for the Burning Man crowd — where instead of good, old fashioned value investments, the management is betting big on the future possibilities. And every single one of those efforts if done right could be Google sized companies in their own right. […]

Just like Berkshire Hathaway, Alphabet can contemplate betting for the long term, either by controlling the companies or having substantial stakes, that allow them to also skirt the regulatory limitations. In his blog post, Page said Alphabet is about “businesses prospering through strong leaders and independence. In general, our model is to have a strong CEO who runs each business, with Sergey and me in service to them as needed.”

Berkshire Hathaway is a good comparison. But Berkshire Hathaway has only 24 employees. I think staying that lean and mean at the top is central to Berkshire Hathaway’s success. Is Alphabet going to be that lean?

Google Shakeup Theory: Sundar Pichai Offered Twitter CEO Job ★

Matt Rosoff, writing for Business Insider:

There’s an interesting theory making the rounds among some Silicon Valley insiders today.

Twitter is looking for a new CEO. Perhaps it made an offer to Sundar Pichai, who’s been leading Google’s core businesses since last October. To keep Pichai, Google decided to pull the trigger on an organizational change it’s been considering for some time, giving Pichai the CEO title while keeping the same set of duties.

I’ve gotten at least a dozen emails and tweets from DF readers suggesting this same theory, but I don’t buy it. Twitter may well have been looking at Pichai, but I don’t buy it that Page and Brin would radically change the structure of Google just to keep Pichai. Pichai is obviously very smart, and very talented. He’s kicking ass. But I don’t see him as irreplaceable. And even if he is that important to Google, would co-founders Page and Brin see him that way? And why the hell would Pichai be tempted to go to Twitter? The company is a mess and its executive history is a mess.

I think this Alphabet move is about what Page and Brin want for themselves and want for the company, not about making Sundar Pichai happy. But I think Page was being straightforwardly honest in his praise for Pichai in today’s announcement.

Monday, 10 August 2015

Google Does Not Own @alphabet or alphabet.com ★

They don’t need either of these things, especially if Alphabet is not a consumer-facing brand. But Chris Andrikanich might be in for a bit of a windfall if he’s willing to change Twitter handles.

YouTube and Android Stay With Google; Nest and Fiber go to Alphabet ★

Google’s SEC filing on the big shake-up:

On August 10, 2015, Google Inc. (“Google”) announced plans to create a new public holding company, Alphabet Inc. (“Alphabet”), and a new operating structure to increase management scale and focus on its consolidated businesses. Under the new operating structure, its main Google business will include search, ads, maps, apps, YouTube and Android and the related technical infrastructure (the “Google business”). Businesses such as Calico, Nest, and Fiber, as well as its investing arms, such as Google Ventures and Google Capital, and incubator projects, such as Google X, will be managed separately from the Google business.

Here are the legal nuts and bolts:

Later this year, Google intends to implement a holding company reorganization (the “Alphabet Merger”), which will result in Alphabet owning all of the capital stock of Google. Alphabet will initially be a direct, wholly owned subsidiary of Google. Pursuant to the Alphabet Merger, a newly formed entity (“Merger Sub”), a direct, wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet and an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Google, will merge with and into Google, with Google surviving as a direct, wholly owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Each share of each class of Google stock issued and outstanding immediately prior to the Alphabet Merger will automatically convert into an equivalent corresponding share of Alphabet stock, having the same designations, rights, powers and preferences and the qualifications, limitations and restrictions as the corresponding share of Google stock being converted. Accordingly, upon consummation of the Alphabet Merger, Google’s current stockholders will become stockholders of Alphabet. The stockholders of Google will not recognize gain or loss for U.S. federal income tax purposes upon the conversion of their shares in the Alphabet Merger.

So Alphabet starts as a Google subsidiary, then they make a subsidiary of Alphabet, then that subsidiary of Alphabet will “merge with and into Google”, and then Google will be an Alphabet subsidiary.

In the end, what are now shares of Google will be shares of Alphabet, so I think it’s fair to say they’re changing the name of the parent company and refocusing what “Google” means and does. But the logic of a subsidiary of a subsidiary “merging with and into” the parent company, leaving the first subsidiary the new parent, somehow reminds me of the deals I made as a kid playing Monopoly.

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